Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 80 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
‘Secret’ Video Dimensions in GA4
The most compatible video player with Google Analytics 4 is YouTube.
Since Alphabet owns both Google (Analytics 4) and YouTube, the company has made it really easy to capture GA4 data for YouTube videos on your site.
(They’re also easy to embed.)
Just because you have YouTube videos on your site, though, doesn’t mean you’re automatically capturing all the data you need in your Google Analytics 4 dashboard.
(If you’re using other video players like Vimeo, or something built in-house, it’s still possible to capture video metrics, but it requires more work. We won’t be discussing data-capture for other video players in this post.)
I’m going to show you how to capture both the events as well as the custom dimensions related to videos on your site.
YouTube Events in GA4
The first, and easier, of the two steps is to make sure video events are being captured. We’re going to do this by activating “Video engagement” under Enhanced measurement events.
1. Go to the Admin section of your dashboard and click “Data streams” under Data collection and modification.
2. Click the data stream where you embed the videos. (Many of you will only have one data stream.)
3. Scroll down a bit and click the settings cog under Enhanced measurement.
Hopefully your enhanced measurement events are already turned on, indicated by the checkmark within blue circle. If they’re not turned on, which you would only do under highly unusual circumstances – if you don’t know of any, this probably doesn’t apply to you – the circle will be gray and to the left.
4. Activate the Video engagement events by clicking the switch so that it’s blue and to the right.
Within 24 hours, you should see these events appear in your events tab.
It’s great to know when someone starts, progresses in or finishes your video, but you probably want more details than that.
Enter: video event custom dimensions.
(Secret) YouTube Dimensions in GA4
Why do I call these “secret” dimensions? Because they’re there for you to use and many people don’t realize they exist.
Here’s how to activate them.
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