Advanced Analytics: See What Keeps People Watching

Our biggest analytics update yet

We rebuilt the entire analytics area. More numbers, and numbers that describe viewing rather than delivery. What is in it:

• Views and sessions. Two separate figures instead of one. A view is a play that got past the first few seconds, every other play counts as a session. The gap between them shows how many people opened the video and decided against it.
• Watch time. The time actually spent watching, as a total and as an average per view. Skipping ahead adds nothing and rewatching the same passage counts once, which keeps the average comparable across videos of different lengths.

• Completions and the completion funnel. How many plays ran to the end, as a share of views. The funnel splits that into stages at a quarter, half, three quarters and the end, so you can see where the audience thins out.
• The retention curve. The drop-off across the full runtime, second by second. Where the funnel gives you four checkpoints, the curve gives you the exact moment people leave, which is usually the one you want.
• A live counter. How many people are watching at this moment, updating while you have the dashboard open. Earns its place on launch day, during a campaign, or while a live event is running.
• Traffic sources and audience breakdown. Where your viewers came from, and how they split by browser and device. Answers whether a campaign actually landed, and whether a video that works on desktop also holds up on mobile.
• Export and REST API. Download straight from the charts and the top-videos table, or pull the full dataset through the API. The figures can live in your own reporting, a BI tool or a dashboard your team already uses.

All of it works on two levels. The library view is the Monday morning check: what got watched last week, which videos are carrying the traffic, whether the trend is going anywhere. The per-video view is where you land once something looks off.

More numbers, same principles

The fair question is how any of this is possible when nothing gets stored on the visitor's device and no personal data is tracked. The answer is that the measurement never needed to know who anybody was. It's just easier and faster to develop.

We needed a different approach. The easy version is: our player reports the events. Stuff like a play began, these many seconds were watched, and the video stopped here. Those events add up on their own, with no identity attached to them at any point.

Nothing is written to the device, no IPs are involved, no advertising trackers are involved, and nothing recognizes a viewer on whatever site they open next. Your videos carry on requiring no consent banner, so the reach stays exactly where it was, and what you end up reading describes an audience rather than a list of people.

One limit worth naming: all of this comes from playback in the Ignite player. Videos played elsewhere still report requests and traffic, which tell you a file went out rather than that somebody sat and watched it. But if you use your player, you can still use our analytics with our SDK. (yes that comes with a bit of development on your side.)

Go and have a look

It is already there, with nothing to switch on and no extra charge on any plan. Data reaches back to July.

The video analytics feature page has the full reference if you want to go deeper on any single metric.

Have fun!