Hello all,
I’m working on a project that involves Insights, and getting into the logic of how video statistics are generated. Ran into something I wanted to ask to the community.
When determining how long a user watched a video for, Insights basically creates pairs of start/stop events from the tracking logs. User pushes play and the timestamp is 0. User pushes pause and the timestamp is 30.00, so the watch event is 30 seconds. User skips forward to the 45 second mark and watches until the 60 second mark, that’s another viewing that is 15 seconds long. All very good.
But it also looks like Insights discards “orphan” play records when it can’t find an explicit seek/pause/stop event. From my research, this could happen a number of ways if a user starts playing a video and then:
- Exits the page by clicking on another part of the site or closing the tab entirely
- Navigates to the next tab without an explicit pause event, or watching the entire video which creates a “stop” event.
Especially for users that navigate to the next tab without pausing the video, this seems to toss out quite a few records.
Am I understanding this right? Is it a known issue? Perhaps it is being dealt with in some other way or in future versions? I tested as high as Ironwood, I think.
Thanks in advance!