Video analytics

Overview

Cloudinary Video Analytics helps you understand and optimize your video content served by Cloudinary. The metrics are automatically collected for all videos delivered through the Cloudinary Video Player and you can also manually collect this data for your own video players using our JavaScript library.

You can access the analytics by opening the Video sub-menu in your Cloudinary Console and selecting Analytics. Here, you can view a set of metrics and graphs that show how Cloudinary delivers your video content, including:

• Plays: The total number of video plays during the specified time period. This show the popularity of your video content.
• Unique Viewers: The total number of individual users who have watched a video during the specified time period. This offers insights into the reach of your video content.
• Watch Time: The total duration viewers have spent watching all of your videos. This is another indicator of video content reach.
• Watch Rate: The percentage of total time videos have been watched in relation to the total duration. This can be used to identify which videos are the most engaging.
• Play Rate: The percentage of video plays in relation to the number of times the video player was loaded. This can be used to highlight any issues with discoverability of videos.

Other more specific metrics include:

• Top Videos: The most popular videos based on the number of views. This helps identify your best-performing content.
• Top Devices / OS / Browsers / Countries: A set of graphs showing how your video content is consumed. This offers insights into the demographics of your users, and can be used to optimize the formats and sizes you use to deliver your videos.

The analytics dashboard includes search functionality within filter lists, making it easy to quickly locate and apply specific filters to your data.

You can also export all of the data as a CSV from the UI or programmatically retrieve video analytics data using our Video Analytics API.

Video analytics for other players

To collect analytics for video players other than the Cloudinary Video Player, install our JavaScript library and configure it on any pages that include a video player. The library targets the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags and works with any other video or audio players that use these tags.

Usage

1. Install the package:

2. Import the library:

3. Connect the analytics:

Connect the analytics by calling the connectCloudinaryAnalytics method and provide the video or audio element as a parameter. For example, if your video element has the id video-player:

Or for an audio player:

4. Start tracking:

Start tracking analytics for any Cloudinary video or audio by calling the startAutoTracking method:

Alternatively, to track each video/audio manually, call the startManualTracking method, providing your Cloudinary cloud name and the public ID of the media you want to manually track:

5. Stop tracking (when needed):

When you need to stop tracking and end the current analytics session (for example, before swapping the media source dynamically), call the stopManualTracking method:

This method ends the current tracking session and sends any pending analytics data. Call this before changing the source to ensure:

• The analytics session for the previous media closes properly
• The library sends all analytics events before the new session begins
• You avoid race conditions when re-initializing tracking on the same element

Dynamic source swapping example

For scenarios where you need to dynamically change the media source (common in video or audio playlist implementations), follow this pattern to ensure proper analytics tracking:

This pattern ensures:

• Each video gets its own complete analytics session
• Analytics data from the previous video sends properly before the new video starts
• You avoid race conditions between stopping and starting tracking
• Custom data fields are correctly associated with each video

Custom fields

Alongside the fields captured automatically with video analytics, you can also capture up to 5 additional custom fields of your own choosing. This allows you to define, submit, and report on data points specific to your use case. This could be data such as page title, category, SKU, or subscription plan type.

Once you capture these metrics, they appear in your Video Analytics dashboard, allowing you to filter your data based on these metrics.

To capture custom fields, use the cloudinaryAnalytics constructor parameter of the Cloudinary Video Player or when initiating analytics tracking using the cloudinary-video-analytics JavaScript library.

Both methods take a customData object with up to five customData keys each named customData with a number suffix (customData1,customData2,customData3,customData4,customData5).

Below is an example of a custom data structure with 5 ecommerce related metrics:

Video player example

Here is an example for sending custom fields with the video player:

Video analytics library example

Here is an example for sending custom fields using the video analytics library with auto tracking:

And here is an example with manual tracking:

Access video views data programmatically

To retrieve analytics data for your video views programmatically, make use of our Video Analytics API. Get detailed information about all of the views your videos have received, and use expressions to limit the results based on certain conditions such as public ID and when the view ended. You can use the returned data as part of your own analytics systems or dashboards.

Authentication

The API uses Basic Authentication, and your Cloudinary API Key and API Secret (which you can find on the API Keys page of your Console Settings) to authenticate your requests. Send your credentials as part of the request header, for example:

Authorization: Basic <your basic auth token>

Where your basic auth token is a base64-encoded <api_key>:<api_secret> string.

Endpoint

The base URL to access video analytics data is:

https://api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/<cloud_name>/video/analytics

Syntax

GET views?<expression>&<max_results>&<sort_by>&<next_cursor>

Parameters

Query Parameters

Examples

1. Retrieve video views data for the video with the public id skate:

1. Retrieve video views data for videos with a duration greater than 10 seconds and view ended date less than (older than) the UNIX timestamp 1695039446:

Response

The response includes a data array, where each entry is an object containing information about a specific video view, along with a request ID and the next cursor value.

Here's an example response:

Expressions

Use the expressions parameter to limit the results based on a set of provided conditions.

Fields

The available fields for refining your queries. You can query all except video_public_id and view_ended_at for null values.

Operators

Operators allow you to both define the relationship between the field and the value and combine expressions using the boolean AND operator.

The field operators you can use vary depending on the field type, with the following operators available:

• = - finds results where the value is an exact match; works with all fields
• < - finds results where the value is less than the given condition
• > - finds results where the value is greater than the given condition

Use the boolean AND operator to combine expressions, for example:

video_public_id=skate AND view_ended_at<1695037024

Custom Cloudinary Video Player analytics providers

If you'd like to capture custom analytics to pass to your Google Analytics account or other analytics trackers, you can manually push any events exposed by the Video Player.

You can either set the analytics parameter to true, which monitors all available events except timeplayed (the library monitors percentplayed), or you can specify the specific events you want to monitor, including additional event sub-settings where relevant ('percentsplayed', percents and 'timesplayed', times. See example below).

Or

You then need to send the analytics to your chosen service, for example Google Analytics. See the relevant analytics provider documentation for more information on how to send the chosen metrics.