Google Tag Manager Video Tracking

Key Takeaways

if you are a video marketing nerd like I am you want to capture as much information of how users are engaging with your video content yes we have YouTube studio which offers a ton of great data but we also have another free tool which and give us an additional layer of information of how users are engaging with videos on your website and Google tag manager there is a video views' trigger that we can capture some of this information and pass it on as events in your event reports within Google Analytics in this video I'm gonna walk you through the steps of how you can set up the tag the trigger and the custom built in variables that allow you to capture this information so let's begin before we begin even setting up a tag or a trigger the first thing that we want to do is click on variables and then we want to configure our built-in variables when you scroll down just go ahead and check every single video variable you're most likely not gonna use every single variable for any single video tag that you create but at least you'll have the option to select any one of these in the future by selecting all the video built-in variables now it's gonna save you from having any headaches later on by having to keep coming back and selecting all the different options once the variables are selected there's no need to save because you've already chosen them so you can just X out and now we can go and start creating our tag and of course we want to name our tag and when we configure the tag we want to choose the Google Analytics Universal analytics tag the track type is going to be an event tag I'm just gonna go down really quick and add my Google Analytics variable to my tag now I'm gonna go back up to the important part which is the event tracking parameters here's why checking all of the video variables is really important because it gives you the option to start recording whatever categories actions and labels you want to track within the event section within Google Analytics so within my category I typically like to choose the video title so whatever the YouTube video title is it's gonna pull in as my category for this particular example as the action I want to know to what percentage of the video did the user watch and then under the label maybe I want to see the video status whether the user was playing it whether it was paused or possibly was the video buffering you can make any of these categories actions or labels almost whatever you want maybe instead of the video status you may want to see a page where the user was watching the video if you have a lot different videos on a lot of different pages of your website so take a look at all the variables that you have set up either by the default built-in ones within tag manager or any other custom ones that you may have created on your own you will be able to implement that into this video tag to view whatever data that you want passed within Google Analytics but for now I'm just gonna stick to these categories actions and labels now when creating this video views tag we will have to use the built-in video views trigger I want to create a new one we also have to name our trigger I personally like to keep my trigger names is consistent with the tag names just so I know which one they're attributed to and now let's configure the video trigger the option is pretty straightforward we want the user engagement YouTube video trigger now here is where the advertiser has the ability to capture whatever element they want that they can push in as a either category action label within Google Analytics by default your start and complete capture options will be selected but I also might want to see when they use their pause the video and I definitely want to track the progress in this tag that I'm setting up if you want to track the progress by percentage you can break it out however you want to i commonly like to do it by every 25% you can see i did 25 comma 50 comma 75 if the user watches 100% of it we don't have to add the hundred to our percentages because that'll automatically be applied within the trigger if you have really short videos you may want to change up that percentage to go by every 10 percent again it all comes back to user preference and what information you want to see pass back into Google Analytics if you don't want to do percentages and you rather choose time thresholds keep in mind and I'm gonna highlight it right here it is broken out within seconds so any video marketer or video advertiser who is running video campaigns within Google Ads we're used to this watch time within Google ads is broken out by seconds so the way that we can track these events and the video views is also going to be broken up by seconds so Google actually has a pretty good example built in or if you want to look at by every 10 60 120 most likely the length of your videos is gonna dictate how you want to break out those time thresholds again it's gonna be completely up to you and most likely the video content that you want to promote or track and then last you want to choose when this trigger will fire I always like to set up a first video views' trigger for all video views on the website where my Google tag manager code is being applied so this will capture any video on any page and in the record whatever category action label that we have already defined within the tag itself now there could be certain situations where you only want to track some of use for one example I may only want to track video views on my about Us page this is how I choose to set up my trigger no matter how many videos I may have on my website we are only gonna record video views on the about Us page within Google Analytics another possible option that is pretty common if you have a ton of videos you may only want to capture certain categories so if you title your video anything specific in our case in the pay media prose channel we have a good amount of videos about Facebook we may only want to track video views within Google Analytics if the video title has the word Facebook in it so again look at the video content that you have on your website how you might want to categorize it and record it and see that information it's gonna be completely different depending on your goals but in this case I just want to stick with all videos and then I'm gonna click Save my video views tracking trigger is attached to my tag so I can save my tag now too and before I publish this tag live I'm gonna want to preview it so when you select the preview mode in Google tag manager you'll be able to actually see if the tag and trigger I set up is working on the live website now that I'm in preview mode I can go to my website so I have set up this video tag on my website and I could pull up this preview a little bit more so I can see the tags that are currently fired on this page and the ones that still haven't fired and there's my youtube views tracking tag which hasn't fired yet because I haven't started to watch a video so let's give it a shot you can see once I started to play the video we have the YouTube views tracking as firing now this is a pretty long video so as we get to the point of I moved it a little bit further past the 25% mark as we can see another part of the tag fired so looking at that 25 50 75 100 % that I'm tracking I now gone from 0 which would be part of the element that would be tracked and then also now I passed that 25 element if I move it a little bit further it fired three times now are passed that 50% passed that 75% we can see you have two fired four times and then once the video is complete we'll be able to track the full video view completion within the event part within Google Analytics so if everything looks good we can go back into tag manager and then we could submit our changes now that our tag is published we can now go back into Google Analytics and see what this data would look like ok I've now opened up my Google Analytics and just to save some time I've already to the behavior section on the left hand side and then down to the events report and I'm already on the overview so remember when we set up the actual tag itself we made the event category the video title and that's exactly what we're seeing right now recorded within Google Analytics and we can also within this main overview look at the event actions and labels but I want to see how it looks comparing some of this data together so I'm just gonna click this first one and again we can see the title of the core video as the event category now I can add a secondary to mention to look at some of the other elements and remember when setting up the tag I had the video status set at the event action and we can see that information broken out just for this specific video title since we can't add multiple dimensions at once I have to change my secondary dimension and now we can see the event label which was the video progress now this view might be a little confusing to you compared to what I said earlier in the video you might be thinking wait a minute when you set up the trigger you set it to fire at 25 50 75 % and we're seeing a ton of other numbers here and that's a good question remember the trigger is when the video fires not necessarily the information that we're recording the progress of the YouTube video is going to be tracked when a user passes the chosen percentage milestones you set up in your trigger google also states on their help and support pages that percentage and time thresholds will only fire the trigger the first time they are reached so if a user goes or you're landing a user further in the video and they're not watching from the beginning and they're past a particular percentage or time threshold in the video the event won't fire so let's say for whatever reason your video on your website is starting users at around the 66% mark and we have the same percentage thresholds of 25 50 75 % the trigger is not going to fire and record that first time element until the user hits that 75 percentage point so also remember what I did previously in the video and I was showing you when I was in preview mode and that was testing out how the trigger works I was jumping around the video a little bit so I can see if it was recording a few different times those are the event labels that are being recorded once I've passed certain elements that's how we can get weird numbers like 39 40 666 not the exact percentages because I'm not watching it straight from the beginning all the way through then remember you can see a variety of information within Google Analytics this is just one example that was based on the tag I set up earlier in the demo I'm only recording one type of category action and label look at those variables look at the custom information that you could pull in and you can see a variety of different data within your Google Analytics depending on what information you want to look at the best part about this video trigger is that you can record any views or any video actions that are embedded on your website and then doesn't have to be your own videos so from a content marketing perspective it could be really valuable if you're using other people's videos on your website or your landing pages you're recording those interactions and you're tracking within Google Analytics what type of content your current users like to engage with then use that information to come up with better videos that you can use on your own channels you can come up with better video ads because you know what type of videos your current users already like to engage with so give it a shot it's pretty easy to set up just 3 easy steps within Google tag manager and soon you can start recording all those video interactions within Google Analytics thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos