How To Get Advanced Video Data For YouTube Embeds With Piano Analytics

Nicolas Hinternesch
2 min readAug 1, 2023

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Piano Analytics comes with a native module for tracking audio and video across all on-site or in-app media players and on all platforms. That means hundreds of built-in in events and event properties, which yield in-depth metrics and analyses around audio and video.

  • Events → Play, start, pause, resume, stop, heartbeat, error, buffer, re-buffer, ad skip, ad play, scrubbing, player interactions etc.
  • Properties → AV content properties (title, show, brand, season, episode, channel, publication date etc.), AV context properties (player version, player position, subtitles, full-screen, auto-play, VOD vs. live stream), traffic sources, geolocation, device detection etc.
  • Metrics → Playback metrics (playbacks, full playbacks, progression rates, time spent, playback time, consumption time), audience and content metrics (concurrent viewers, engaged users, content catalogue breakdown), QoS metrics (buffering, exit before video start, errors), and video ad metrics.
  • Plus unlimited custom events, <1,000 custom properties, and unlimited custom metrics.

This level of in-depth AV analytics allows an organization to truly understand the multimedia consumption and how it drives value for various business objectives across functions: ROI of marketing campaigns and traffic acquisition, impact of product features, content creation optimization, ad sales etc. When you’re a broadcaster offering video on demand content or livestreams, this is obviously crucial. But even if you just embed single videos on specific pages, these might still be important for your site objectives and video playback could be an important micro conversion.

Implementation And Debugging For YouTube Players — A Technical Video Tutorial

This guide focuses on the implementation for YouTube video embeds with the official Piano Analytics YouTube plugin, which can be deployed in minutes. However, the full AV-tracking can also be deployed for all other media players across all platforms.

Piano Analytics Analysis Examples

Like all other data in Piano Analytics, the resulting audio- and video-data is always real-time, unsampled, and consistent in all interfaces and APIs. It is also unified with the rest of the event-data and can seamlessly be connected to marketing data, product data, page data, or ecommerce data. The types of available analyses are endless — but they can include high-level dashboarding, interactive report building, advanced segmentation and user cohort creation, machine learning based anomaly detection, alerting, and contribution analysis, as well as drag & drop data mining and raw data access.

— If you have questions, clever suggestions, or if you’re simply up for talking analytics: Feel free to reach out.

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