Woven Interactive » Video Player Tracking http://woveninteractive.net Flash, Flex, Papervision, Interactive Agency Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:36:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Tracking Time : Brightcove with GAForFlash Event Tracking http://woveninteractive.net/2009/04/tracking-time-brightcove-with-gaforflash-event-tracking/ http://woveninteractive.net/2009/04/tracking-time-brightcove-with-gaforflash-event-tracking/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:49:56 +0000 admin http://woveninteractive.net/?p=115 brightcove-and-google

When your business is making money based on time then tracking time is of obvious importance. With a little Flash wizardry and the GAforFlash tracking classes you can easily accomplish this task.

In our tests the 3 important metrics to test against were:

1) Player load time
2) Amount of time it takes for the first video to play
3) Duration player was being viewed (5 and then 10 second interval )

To get the player load time and then the video playing time we first grab the current time when the swf initially loads:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. startTime = new Date().time;

When brightcove loads the player we listen for the template loaded event

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. _player.addEventListener(ExperienceEvent.TEMPLATE_LOADED, onTemplateLoaded);

Now that we have our first metric to work with we send that information to google and start working on our next metric:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. protected function onTemplateLoaded(evt:ExperienceEvent):void
  2. {
  3.     //Time to load tracking
  4.     timeToLoad = (new Date().time - startTime);
  5.         tracker.trackEvent(String(playerID),  String(playlistID),"Player Load Time", timeToLoad);
  6.  
  7.         //Get the Experience Module
  8.     expModule   = _player.getModule(APIModules.EXPERIENCE) as ExperienceModule;
  9.  
  10.     //Get Modules from BEML
  11.     _videoItem  = expModule.getElementByID("videoPlayer") as VideoPlayerModule
  12.        
  13.         //Now that the template is ready we can start tracking media events
  14.         _videoItem.addEventListener(MediaEvent.BEGIN, onBegin);
  15.  
  16. }

Next is to track when the user sees the first video playing:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. protected function onBegin(evt:MediaEvent):void
  2. {   
  3.         //This is fired each time a new video begins. One way around this is to
  4.         //set a Boolean as to if any video has started - or remove the event listener
  5.         //since we were tracking other items we chose to leave the listener alone
  6.     if (videoStarted == false)
  7.     {
  8.         timeToLoad = (new Date().time - startTime)
  9.         tracker.trackEvent(String(playerID),  String(currPlaylistID),"First Video Playing", timeToLoad);
  10.     }
  11.     videoStarted = true;
  12. }

Our final metric was one that we were most interested in. This tracks the time spent actually viewing the entire video player.

The solution to this is very simple. Our solution was to use a timer based solution as follows. You can download the foomonger later classes here. Or just use a the built in Flash Timer.

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. Later.call(this, sendEvery10, 5000, true);
  2.  
  3. protected function sendEvery10():void
  4. {
  5.     Later.call(this, sendEvery10, 10000, true);
  6.  
  7.     if (firstTimeRecord)
  8.     {
  9.         tracker.trackEvent(String(playerID),  String(currPlaylistID),"Amount Spent Viewing", 5);
  10.         firstTimeRecord = false;
  11.     }
  12.     else
  13.     {
  14.             tracker.trackEvent(String(playerID),  String(currPlaylistID),"Amount Spent Viewing", 10);
  15.     }
  16.            
  17. }

This report will now show you how long your video player is live on a persons computer. If you want to track this on a per session basis you would just want to add a random variable as follows:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. tracker.trackEvent(String(playerID),  String(currPlaylistID + "-" +myRandomVar ,"Amount Spent Viewing", 10);

Hopefully this saves some of you a lot of time with implementation into your own video players.

If you or your clients need any help, feel free to contact our interactive agency. We will be happy to assist.

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