Wistia allows you to check out how your audience interacts with your content, second by second.
You can check out your viewer analytics in a few different ways. At a high level, you can view play rate, play count, and average engagement for your whole account or individual projects on the Trends page in your account. You can drill down a bit more and check out data for individual medias. On the media analytics page you can see the total audience engagement graph, and summary details for your videos. On the individual level we’ve got heatmaps, the View Stream, your Audience page, and viewer pages. Let’s dive into those last three.
View Stream
The View Stream is one of the ways you can access Wistia analytics for your account. The View Stream is a live feed of all of your public medias views (your logged in views won’t show up in there). If you refresh the View Stream page and your content is super popular 🔥 , you should see the stream update with more views.
To open the view stream page, select “View Stream” from under the “Analytics” drop-down menu in the header inside your account. Or click this handy link.
Within the view stream you’ll see a bunch of heatmaps. These will give you a quick view of your popular content (full heatmaps), and which viewers are identified (indicated by the blue box next to the heatmap).
Clicking on any of the heatmaps in the View Stream will take you to the viewer’s page, which shows a full list of all of the medias in your account that that viewer has watched or listened to.
The View Stream is a great place to check out popular content, and look for recently viewed or listened to medias. Next we’ll head to the Audience page to see identified leads.
Audience
Note
Email Campaign Links and Turnstiles are not currently compatible with audio episodes.
Your audience isn’t just a mass of numbers — it’s made of up individual people and potential leads. That’s why Wistia created a section entirely devoted to them: your Audience.
The Audience page is all about leads. Here you can track viewers and listeners through names and email addresses, check out Turnstile leads, and see all untracked views.
To get to the Audience page, choose “Audience” from the “Analytics” menu from the header at the top of your account. Or click this handy link.
You can check out your Audience in two ways: those tracked with an email address (as with Turnstile or email merge tags) or look at the total audience.
If you want to drill down further and just see Turnstile entries click “Turnstile” in the description.
Each audience member has their own summary line.
In the grey or blue box on the left you’ll see a number which represents the total number of viewing sessions for that specific visitor. A grey box represents an unidentified viewer (no personal information yet collected), and a blue box is for viewers who have been identified by email and/or name (via Turnstile submission or dynamic link).
If the viewer is unidentified, you’ll see the network on which the viewer watched your media and their location. If they have been tagged via email or name, you will see their identifying information instead of their network.
Still more goodies you might see:
Information about where the lead came from (Turnstile? Tagged with a merge tag?)
Their smiling face (if available)
The media that identified the lead
Each member of your audience has their own Viewer page. Clicking anywhere on the summary line will bring you there!
Viewer Page
From the Viewer Page, you can track activity for a specific viewer. Want to identify this viewer for future tracking? Edit their name as you would a Wistia media title, by clicking the “Edit” button that will appear on hover. Then type your changes. This will change them from unidentified to identified in your heatmaps.
Under the viewer’s information you’ll see a quick summary of their interactions with your medias. This information will tell you:
When they watched or listened to the first media from you
The total number of medias they’ve watched or listened to
Total time spent watching or listening to your content
And average engagement on your medias
You’ll also see all of the heatmaps from this viewer. And, if they’ve been identified via Turnstile, you can see the heatmap which captured the lead.
Tagging Viewers by Name
Sometimes, you know who is viewing your videos or listening to your audio. Maybe you sent a client a link through an email, or you spoke to a prospective customer by phone and recommend they review a video or listen to an episode of your podcast. Opening the analytics for that video, you can see an IP address, location, and time that might make sense for someone you recognize.
Clicking through the name (currently “Comcast Cable”) will bring you to this viewer’s page. Once they are named, this page will accumulate their future video views and list.
Hovering over the current name will reveal an “Edit” option. Selecting that (or clicking anywhere in the name) will allow you to re-name the viewer. Enter their name, and press enter.
Tagging Viewers by Email
Using email merge tags, your viewers can be automatically tagged with their email address in your account. Email merge tags allow you to track viewers who clicked through the Wistia thumbnail in your email to watch your video. This email address will follow the viewer into the future too!
Check out the email marketing guide for more information.
For Wistia customers with advanced web design know-how and resources, there are also programatic options for tagging viewers by email. Refer to the ID tagging player API documentation for more help on that.
Viewers tagged with an email will appear blue in the View Stream.