In this topic you will learn how to monitor the performance of your videos using the Analytics module.
The Video Cloud Analytics Platform is a state-of-the-art, real-time analytics platform built from the ground up by Brightcove using the latest innovations in Big Data technology and architected for massive scale. The analytics platform offers fast, real-time access to analytics data and includes a powerful open API to allow developers to create custom analytics solutions and reports in addition to those included within Video Cloud Studio.
Regardless of your specific goals for online video, understanding your audience is a key to developing a successful video strategy. The better you understand your viewers, the easier it is to create content that will engage them in formats they can easily consume. The Analytics module provides different views that provide different types of information about your videos and players:
- Account Overview - Provides a high level overview of some key metrics for your videos
- Performance - Provides details on the number of video views, traffic sources, device types and device operating systems
- Engagement - Provides details on how users are engaging with your videos; what percentage of a video viewers are watching
- Utilization - Provides details on video views and bandwidth consumed
- Custom - Provides the ability to create custom analytics reports
Using these views, you can generate up-to-date reports about how many viewers you have, how much content your viewers are watching, when they stop watching videos, and even the traffic sources for your content.
This topic includes the following sections that describe how to use the Analytics module:
Note that all data displayed in the Analytics module is also available through the Analytics API. For more information, see the Video Cloud Analytics API documentation.
Launching the Analytics module
To launch the Analytics module:
- Log into Video Cloud Studio at https://studio.brightcove.com.
- Open the Analytics module by clicking Analytics in the navigation header.
Selecting a time span
You can specify the time period that you want the analytics data to cover by selecting start and end dates using the calendar controls. You can also select one of the predefined "Quick Dates":
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last 7 days
- Last 30 days
- This month - the calendar month to date - for example, if today is March 17, this report will display March 1 - March 17
- Last month. the previous calendar month - for example, if today is February 14, this report will display January 1 - January 31.
Reporting time zone
Data in the Analytics module is shown using the account's reporting time zone offset. The reporting time zone can be configured from the Video Cloud Studio home page by going to Account Settings > Analytics > Default Reporting Time Zone. Note that only account Administrators have access to the Account Settings.
The reporting time zone is used to calculate day boundaries for reporting data. Changing the reporting time zone setting only affects data going forward, and changes are not applied retroactively. If you change this setting, you may see a flat spot or a spike in your data when looking at day boundaries where the change was applied. Updates to this setting may not take effect immediately, and analytics data may continue to refer to the old setting until the system processes the changes.
Using Quick Find
The Quick Find feature can be used to search for a specific video. After entering the search criteria, Quick Find will search the video name, short description, long description, tags, video ID and any custom text fields you may have. A list of matches will be displayed below the search field.
Clicking the link to a match will open the report that is "in context". For example, if you are looking at the engagement for your account and then use Quick Find to locate a specific video, clicking the link to the video will open the Engagement Report. If you are looking at the Performance reports, searching and clicking a link will open the Performance Report.
For a complete list of options that are available when searching for videos in the Analytics module, see Searching for Videos in the Analytics Module.
Note: the Analytics reports do include analytics for videos that have been deleted from your account. However, you cannot search for deleted videos in the Analytics module to see a report on a particular deleted video. To get such a report, you will need to know the video id for the deleted video and use the Analytics API to generate the report.
Analytics views
The Analytics module provides different views that provide different types of analytics.
- Account Overview - Provides a high level overview of some key metrics for your videos
- Performance - Provides details on the number of video views, traffic sources and the device types and device operating systems used to view videos
- Engagement - Provides details on how users are engaging with your videos; what percentage of a video your viewers are watching
- Utilization - Provides details on video views and bandwidth consumed
- Custom - Provides the ability to create custom reports
When rolling over the Performance, Engagement and Utilization links, you also have the ability to select how the data is segmented in that view.