Missing some expected views in your analytics or trying to understand the data? We'll walk through some common analytics questions and explanations below.
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Can't see heatmaps
Have you played your media in Wistia and noticed that your plays don’t appear in your engagement graph or the View Stream?
This is because Wistia separates logged-in plays (e.g., Account Owner, Manager, Standard User) from audience plays. If you’re logged into your Wistia account (and playing your media within your Wistia account), your plays will be logged in Private User Sessions.
Note
Heads up—Private User Sessions differ from IP Filtering. IP Filtering will ignore any plays from designated IP addresses, and these will not be logged as Private User Sessions.
Another reason you might not see heatmaps is that podcast episodes played in podcasting apps (like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) don’t generate them. We can only generate heatmaps for plays initiated from the Wistia player.
Still can’t see your heatmaps? They should show up pretty immediately. First, check out our status page for any analytics outages. If everything looks good, reach out to us. We’ll get to the bottom of it!
Where can I find unique plays?
To locate the unique plays for an individual media, navigate to the media page and open the "Analytics" menu. In the “Engagement” tab, click “Show details.” Unique plays are included in the "Play Rate" calculation.
To find unique plays for an entire folder, click “Analytics,” then hover over the "Play Rate" tool tip.
Similarly, to find unique plays from the account level, navigate to Analytics > Overview, then hover over the Play Rate tool tip.
Tip
Unique plays are also included in the Top Media by Plays export from the folder or account-level analytics.
What is the difference between total plays and play rate?
On your media analytics page, you might see some variation between Total Plays and the number of people who played the media as calculated in Play Rate.
This is because the first number includes the true total number of plays, while the second number only includes individual or unique plays. This difference may indicate that a few people played your media more than once without clearing their cookies or using a different browser.
Anti-tracking software
If someone you know has played your media but did not show up in your analytics, they could be using anti-tracking software. Let’s cover some of the most commonly used applications:
Ad blockers: Although the original intent of these extensions is to block advertisements, they can often block browser tracking as well. The Wistia player relies on certain tracking to measure play events and record analytics. If the user disables this, we would have no way to record that information.
Virtual Private Networks (VPN): A VPN is essentially a server that acts as an intermediary between the user and the website they wish to connect to. So, rather than your viewer or listener playing your media directly, they connect to the VPN first, and the VPN then streams your media from its location. Using this method, we may be able to record a play event for the media that this person played, but their audience information may be misdirected or inaccurate.
Security Browsers: There are browsers designed for maximum privacy that disable cookies and cache storage by default. Oftentimes, they double down by including a built-in ad blocker (e.g., Chromium-based browsers like Brave or Epic). These browsers account for only a small portion of internet users, but it never hurts to cover all your bases.
Analytics tracking test
Now that you know the common factors that can prevent a play session from being recorded, you can run a test to make sure your media is tracking analytics as expected.
First, open an incognito window. Why, you ask? An incognito window opens a new window with no cache or cookies saved, and its default settings disable third-party extensions.
Next, navigate to the public media page without logging in to Wistia. The media URL should look something like this: https://home.wistia.com/medias/30q7n48g4f.
Play your media, even if just for a few seconds. Now that you’ve played your media, return to your media analytics page and see if your play was tracked. Your plays are tracked in real time, but if you don’t see them right away, wait a minute and refresh the page.
Note
Make sure you’re not filtering out your own IP address, as this can block your own tracking, even if you're using an incognito window.
If you still don’t see your play session populate, let us know. We’ll be happy to help!