YouTube Tracking In Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

YouTube Tracking In Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager
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My colleague Sayf Sharif has long been an advocate of tracking YouTube videos with Google Analytics. Our LunaMetrics YouTube tracking script has been copied, cloned, forked, and borrowed more than a few times. It’s time to bring our script up to date with the latest changes in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Also, Google recently finished the process of deprecating version two of their data API, which our script has depended on for fetching video titles. If you are using an old version of the script, you’ll see all of your videos titles set to https://youtube.com/devicesupport as of a few days ago.

After a little tinkering, we’ve updated the GitHub repo with version 7 of the illustrious LunaMetrics YouTube Google Analytics tracking code. Let’s take a look at what’s inside.

What’s New

This latest version is a plug-and-play tracking solution for tracking user interaction with YouTube videos in Google Analytics. It will detect if Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics (Universal), or Google Analytics (Classic) is installed on the page, in that order, and fire events when users interact with the video.

It includes support for delivering hits directly to Universal or Classic Google Analytics, or for pushing Data Layer events to be used by Google Tag Manager. You can find the code on our GitHub repo.

Installation

Note: This plugin relies on the window.onYouTubeIframeAPIReady namespace and will throw an error if it is currently in use by another script. Check the console for an error if it appears to not be working, and ensure you aren’t already trying to track YouTube videos with other code.

Universal or Classic Google Analytics Installation:

The plugin is designed to be plug-and-play. By default, the plugin will try and detect if you have Google Tag Manager, Universal Analytics, or Classic Google Analytics, and use the appropriate syntax for the event. If you are not using Google Tag Manager to fire your Google Analytics code, store the plugin on your server and include the lunametrics-youtube-v7.gtm.js script file somewhere on the page.

<script src="/SOMEWHERE-ON-YOUR-SERVER/lunametrics-youtube-v7.gtm.js"></script>

Google Tag Manager Installation

Create a new Custom HTML tag and paste in the below:

<script type="text/javascript" id="gtm-youtube-tracking"> // script file contents go here </script>

In the space between the <script> and </script> tags, paste in the contents of the lunametrics-youtube-v7.gtm.js script, found here.

Configuration

Universal or Classic Google Analytics Configuration

Once everything installed on your own site, this script will fire a Google Analytics event with the following settings:

1. Event Category: Videos
2. Event Action: (Action, e.g. Play, Pause)
3. Event Label: (URL of the video)

Configuring Which Events Fire

If you are not using Google Tag Manager to fire your Google Analytics code, you might want to configure the script to fire or not fire certain events. By default, it will fire:

• Play events
• Pause events
• Watch to End events

To change which events are fired, edit the configuration at the end of the script. For example, if you’d like to fire Buffering events and not fire Pause events:

( function( document, window, config ) { // ... the tracking code } )( document, window, { 'events': { 'Pause' : false, 'Buffering': true } } );

The available events are Play, Pause, Watch to End, Buffering, Unstarted, and Cueing. An example configuration object is at the bottom of the script file.

Forcing Universal or Classic Analytics

By default, the plugin will try and fire Data Layer events, then fallback to Univeral Analytics events, then fallback to Classic Analytics events. If you want to force the script to use a particular syntax for your events, you can set the ‘forceSyntax’ property of the configuration object to an integer:

( function( document, window, config ) { // ... the tracking code } )( document, window, { 'forceSyntax': 1 } } );

Setting this value to one of the following numbers:

• 0 will force the script to use Google Tag Manager events
• 1 will force it to use Universal Google Analytics events
• 2 will force it to use Classic Google Analytics events

Google Tag Manager Configuration

Once you’ve added the script to your container (see Google Tag Manager Installation), Data Layer events will occur for all of the following:

• Play
• Pause
• Watch to End
• Cueing
• Buffering
• Unstarted

Create the following Variables:

• Variable Name: videoUrl
  • Variable Type: Data Layer Variable
  • Data Layer Variable Name: attributes.videoUrl
  • This is the URL of the video on YouTube
• Variable Name: videoAction
  • Variable Type: Data Layer Variable
  • Data Layer Variable Name: attributes.videoAction
  • This will be the action the user has taken, e.g. Play, Pause, or Watch to End

Create the following Trigger:

• Trigger Name: YouTube Video Event
  • Trigger Type: Custom Event
  • Event Name: youTubeTrack
  • Add Filters:
    • videoAction MATCHES REGEX Play|Pause|Watched To End
      enter a pipe (‘|’) separated list of the actions you want to track

Create your Google Analytics Event tag

• Tag Type: Google Analytics
  • Choose a Tag Type: Universal Analytics (or Classic Analytics, if you are still using that)
  • Tracking ID: <Enter in your Google Analytics tracking ID>
  • Track Type: Event
  • Category: Videos
  • Action: {{videoAction}}
  • Label: {{videoUrl}}
  • Fire On: More
    • Choose from existing Triggers: YouTube Video Event

Configuring Which Events Fire

You can reconfigure the YouTube Video Event trigger anytime you’d like to track more of the events included, such as Cueing or Buffering. Remember that GTM events are not Google Analytics Events, and whether a GTM event sends data to Google Analytics is entirely up to how your Triggers are configured.

Getting Video Titles

Because of the deprecated YouTube API, this script no longer provides the titles of the videos. We chose to go with the most consistent method, which means that instead of the human-readable titles you would have gotten as your Event Label before, you’ll now see the URL of the video itself, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.

Once you have the video URL, you can use something like Excel or Google Spreadsheets to help convert those into readable titles. Another option would be to use a Google Tag Manager Lookup Table to translate the URLs into titles before sending the information to Google Analytics. We have a spreadsheet to help convert URLs to Titles, as well as blog about quickly creating lookup tables.

Coming Soon

We have plans to add percentage completion tracking at some point in the near future. Do you have another feature request for the plugin? Drop us a line in the comments, or better still, submit a pull request and we’ll see if we can get it in.

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