How to Track Video Views in Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager?

If you’re considering using video on landing pages, you may wonder how to track video views in Google Analytics.

It’s no coincidence that video is the most engaging media format. People are visual creatures, and they retain 95% of video information as opposed to 5% for image and text.

This gives you a face-to-face selling opportunity, where you can convey passion and promise to your prospects. It’s little wonder that videos dramatically increase landing page conversions.

Read this simple guide to tracking video performance on your landing page, so you can boost audience engagement, and increase sales.

Benefits of Learning How to Track Video Views in Google Analytics

When you drive traffic to your landing page, videos help you capture the attention of your prospects.

You have body language, tone of voice, visual effects, and music to put prospective buyers in the mood to listen to your pitch. This is how you get them to buy from you and even share your pitch/landing page with family and friends.

Videos are the easiest way to create brand authenticity, likeability, and memorable moments. It stays fresh in the minds of your prospects, which leads to more convinced leads who end up buying from you.

Using videos, correctly, in your landing page is such an effective way of communication that it puts your business ahead of the competition. Few businesses have videos on their landing pages, and even fewer businesses track video performance to ensure they’re using the most persuasive video content possible. By learning to track video performance on your landing page, you’re snagging customers away from your competition.

Tracking Video Performance With Google Tag Manager

To track video performance, you’ll have to record user interactions with your landing page video. These interactions are known as events, and they include:

• How many played the video?
• How much of the video was watched?
• What actions did watchers take compared to non-watchers?

Armed with answers to these questions, you can test different video content to find the most persuasive of them all. So, to start, head over to Google Tag Manager and set up your account.

Configure variables

Once you’ve set up your Google Tag Manager account, you’ll have to configure inbuilt variables.

• Click on “Variables” in the menu on the left.
• Click on “Configure” in the top right.

At this point, you’ve got a list of the built-in variables. Check the box for all variables in the “Videos” section.

Let’s look at the exact functions of these variables in Google Tag Manager.

• Video Provider – This takes note of your video hosting platforms like YouTube etc.
• Video Status – This records when a video plays, pauses or stops.
• Video URL – This variable tracks the URL where you host the video.
• Video Title – It tracks the meta title of your video.
• Video Duration – Tracks the full length of your video in seconds.
• Video Current Time – It takes note of the particular timestamp in the video where a trigger fires.
• Video Percent – Allows you to set a certain percentage for when your trigger fires.
• Video Visible – This will be set to true if the video is visible in the viewport, and false if it is not.

Now that we have an idea of what each of these variables does let’s set triggers.

Make the trigger

Click on “Triggers” in the menu on the left.

Click on “New” in the top-right corner to create a new trigger.

Now, give your new trigger an appropriate name. This name should be easy to understand to make for an efficient workflow. In this case, let’s give it the name ‘YouTube Video’

Now, select  ‘Choose a trigger type’ and choose ‘YouTube Video’ from the pop-up menu under ‘User Engagement’ section.

Here’s where you decide when the trigger fires. Whatever data you’re tracking will be recorded and sent over to Google Analytics for further study.

You’ll want to track when someone starts, complete a video and pause it, You can even track the percentage of the progress of the video. So you can put 10, 25, 50, 75, 90 so whenever video reaches that percent it will trigger to be tracked.

Next, you can leave the checkbox empty it is only required if JS library is used for Youtube videos to add the parameter in the video.

Next is to select from the drop-down list when the trigger should start listening for relevant interaction.

Container Load (gtm.js): It will occur as soon as possible on page load.

DOM Ready (gtm.dom): By default, it is selected. It means an event will fire when complete HTML objects are parsed. We will go with this option.

Window Load (gtm.load): It occurs after all the content on the page is loaded.

As we will go with for all videos this trigger should be fired, we will go with radio button selection “All Videos”

Next, save the trigger by clicking on the right top and then move to make the tag.

Make the tag

Here, you’re to make Google Analytics tags that track video views. This won’t be a problem since Google Analytics tag for YouTube is inbuilt in Google Tag Manager.

All you need do is select “Tags” in the menu on the left, then click on “New” in the top right.

Now, just like you did with your trigger, give your tag a name. Make it easy to understand for the sake of an efficient workflow. For this, we’ll go with ‘TM-YouTube.’

Next, you select the “Choose a tag type” in the middle of the big white Tag Configuration box.

From the menu, choose ‘Google Analytics: Universal Analytics.’

Then, set up the event by following the simple steps below.

• From the Track Type drop-down, choose ‘Event.’
• Input ‘Video View’ in the category field.
• To the right of the Action field, select the icon to choose a variable. Then click on “Video Title” from the list.
• To the right of the Label field, select the icon and click on “Video Status” from the variable list.
• To the right of the Value field, select the little icon to choose a variable. Select “Video Percent” from the list. It shows you how much of each video your traffic is watching.
• Change “Non-Interaction Hit” to True. This keeps the event from influencing your bounce rate.
• Click anywhere in the big white Triggering box to select a trigger for your new tag. Click on the “YouTube Video” trigger you created in the previous step from the list.
• Before saving your tag you have to select the “Google Analytics Settings” from the dropdown menu you have to select a Google Analytics Account that helps you to track the videos.
• Provide the name for this tag like GA-Event YouTube and Save the tag

Submit your container.

At this point, you’re almost done learning how to track video views in Google Tag Manager. You now have a new tag and a new trigger in your Workspace. Just submit the new container to your site. You do this by clicking the blue button in the top right corner of your screen.

Once you click on submit you will get another screen where you will provide a version name and its description for your submission. After that, you can publish it.

Segment and analyze in Google Analytics

Now it’s time to see how to track video views in Google Analytics. Once you reach this point, you need to generate enough traffic through your video landing page before you analyze your data. Typically, this will take at least a month of regular activity on your video pages before your data is dependable enough to base critical decisions on in regards to your advertising campaigns.

Create a segment for viewers and non-viewers in Google analytics:

To do this, go to Google Analytics > Acquisition > All traffic > Channels.

Then create two different segments. So you have your data split into that of video watchers and non-watchers. As you browse through analytics, you’ll study differences between video watchers and non-watchers. You can create segment in Google analytics as

Click on “Add Segment” then click on “New Segment”, now under “Advanced” section select “Conditions”

Now from the drop down “Ad Content” as shown in the screenshot, select “Event Category”, rest all selections will remain default.

In the next text box you can put your event name “Video View”. Now you can give the name to your segment “Video Watchers” and save it.

In the same way you will create a segment of “Video No-Watcher”. But this time you will select “Exclude” from the drop down.

Once you saved it now go to under Google analytics> Acquisition > All traffic > Channels

You can also choose to look at the general differences between these segments while analyzing the individual performances of each video page.

It won’t be long before you begin to get data about:

• The percentage of people watching the video.
• Video watchers who are less likely to bounce and how much less.
• Video watchers who spend more time on the page and how much more.
• Video watchers that are more likely to take an intended action like buy subscribe, become a lead, etc.

You can further analyze your events performance in Google Analytics -> Behavior->Events -> Pages

Wrap Up

As you can see, video landing pages help you grow brand awareness, generate leads, and sell your product/service. Its results are much better than landing pages with just sales letters.

This is why it’s worth the time and effort to embed and track video views. When you know how to track video views in Google Analytics, you can make informed decisions to ensure your videos are as persuasive as possible. And that is great news for your viewers and your profit margins.

You can find out more in our blog, Why Video Marketing is so Powerful in 2022.