Third-Party Tracking
Brightcove tracks statistics for videos in active Players. However, you may want to record events that aren’t exposed by Brightcove, like interaction with custom player navigation elements, or gain access to stats that aren’t exposed by the Brightcove service, like lineup loads or title plays per player URL. To read more about the built-in reporting available in the Brightcove service, read this overview of report types.
You may have access to all the data you need in the Brightcove Console reports but may want to have an aggregated view of your web site and video player statistics, in one view. For this reason, you may want to track some, or all, of the same events that are surfaced in the Console reports but send these events to the web analytics tool you have chosen to track your web site statistics.
To help you meet these goals, Brightcove has developed the Web Analytics SWF feature. This feature allows you to build a custom Flash application that is loaded by the player upon initialization, and that can interact with the player using the Brightcove APIs. You can use this feature to build a custom Flash application that loads with the player and traps user interaction and player events to send to any web analytics tool.
The Web Analytics SWF is an open-ended solution for enabling custom reporting in Brightcove players. Through this feature, a SWF can be loaded by a Brightcove player regardless of where the player is delivered. The SWF will listen for events in the player and fire off messages to a recording server.
The Web Analytics SWF is a premium feature that requires familiarity with ActionScript programming and the Brightcove ActionScript Player APIs. To learn more about this feature, read Using Third-Party Web Analytics. We have provided detailed information about developing and using a Web Analytics SWF to integrate with a popular web analytics providers, Google Analytics. You can read more about these integrations here: Third-Party Tracking with Google Analytics.
