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About

This project provides a Flash plug-in for measuring analytics within Brightcove video players. It can be used out-of-the-box for simple analytics or as a framework to customize data.

Setup

If you don't want to modify the code, follow these steps:

  1. Grab the latest GoogleAnalytics.swf file from the bin-release folder.

  2. Upload the file to a server that's URL addressable; make note of that URL

  3. Add ?accountNumber=UA-123456789-0 to the URL (UA-123456789-0 will be replaced with your Google Analytics Account Number)

    • By default, all of these events will be tracked under the Google Analytics Category of "Brightcove Player". If you'd like to change that, you can specify playerType as another parameter, e.g. ?accountNumber=UA-123456789-0&playerType=Open%20Source%20Testing

      Also, you can specify the playerType as {playername} to have it dynamically use the name you specified for the player in the Brightcove Studio. e.g. ?accountNumber=UA-123456789-0&playerType={playername}

      • Note that the playerType must be URL-encoded

    • Alternatively, these parameters can be added to the publishing code as below (playerType is optional):

      <param name="accountNumber" value="UA-123456789-0" /><param name="playerType" value="Open%20Source%20Testing" />

  4. Log in to your Brightcove account

  5. Edit your Brightcove player and add the URL under the "plugins" tab

  6. Save your player changes

If you want to make modifications to the SWF / codebase, follow these steps:

  1. Import the project into either FlexBuilder or FlashBuilder

  2. Add the .swc files in the lib folder under the project's properties setting

  3. To get a SWF of an optimized size, make sure to do a release build

Usage

To understand how Google Analytics treats Categories, Actions and Labels, please refer to the Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide.

Google Analytics doesn't track data in real time, but after approximately one to two hours you should see events appearing in your account. Make sure you're viewing the current day - by default Google Analytics will show a different timeframe that doesn't include the current day. In the left-hand navigation, you'll see a "Content" section, and underneath is "Event Tracking". Click that to see the overview, categories, actions and labels from your player(s).

When the media complete event fires, the plug-in is also sending along the amount of time that a user watched that video. If a user skips around in a video, you can expect to see a time that's less than the video's duration. If a user watches a section more than once it is possible that the time watched for that video will be longer than the video's duration. This shows up in the "Event Value" column for the event, and appears as the length of time in seconds.

The video's "name" is sent through as a customized string. You'll see it appear as [Video ID] | [Video Name]. Including the video ID will allow you to programmatically use this data at a later time, as well as provide you an easy method to look up the video up in your Brightcove account.

Current Supported Events

To view a list of supported events, and to see what can potentially be tracked, you can view Action.as in src > com > brightcoveos > Action.as.gle-Analytics-SWF/blob/master/src/com/brightcoveos/Action.as).