Our Google Analytics Integration allows you to bring all the in-depth information on video playback provided by Wistia into Google Analytics. This support doc explains how you can take advantage of the two data sources together to get a full picture of how video is contributing to engagement and conversions.

Make sure you have installed the Google Analytics tracking scripts. These are necessary for any custom tracking we do below.

If you currently have the pre-Universal Analytics version of Google Analytics setup, we recommend checking out the Universal Analytics Upgrade Center to get all the info you need to know about converting to the shiny new Universal Analytics style of things.

Once your tracking scripts are in place, you’ll need to enable the Google Analytics integration in your Wistia account.

You can do this by visiting the integrations page of your Wistia account settings and selecting the Google Analytics Integration: Account > Settings > Integrations. (Keep in mind, only the Account Owner can get into Account Settings.)

Enabling the integration is as easy as clicking the Connect button, with no additional login required.

Connecting the integration tells our player to look for any GA trackers on pages where its embedded, and to start relaying playback data.

Wistia automatically publishes the basic video metrics listed below to your Google Analytics account. If you have multiple Wistia videos on the page, each video will have its own set of metrics in Google Analytics. If you have multiple GA trackers on your website, each tracker will have its own set of metrics.

If you changed the analytics variable to something other than ga, __gaTracker or gaTracker, you need to add the following snippet after your custom analytics variable is created. In this example, the custom analytics variable is __ga. Thank you @lkraav for pointing this out.

If you’re also using Google Tag Manager along with Google Analytics, this integration will work automatically as long as you’re using version 2 of Tag Manager. We recommend you migrate your Tag Manager account to version 2 as soon as possible if you have not done so already.

Now that we have all the back-end coding out of the way, it’s time to monitor how the videos are performing on your Analytics Dashboard.

The first step is to navigate to the Event Tracking section. Click the “Behavior” area of the left hand nav bar, and then select “Events” from the list. The Events section will show the total number of events, the average number of events per visit, and the Top Events. The easiest way to get to the specific stuff is by the “Top Events” view, pictured below.

Depending on how many types of events you have in your installation, you may see a lot of things here. By default all ours use the “Video” type, so let’s look into that category of events.

In here, you’ll see a list of the events available to you, which are the things that we push using the stuff we covered earlier. There are some defaults included, but here’s where your custom events would also appear if you configured any. The default events are: played, 25% watched, 50% watched, 75% watched, 100% watched, and conversion.

Let’s take a look at the data for the “play event” for this case. You’ll see here that this data comes in the form of video titles, which is a way to see in your analytics dash which of your videos got events for being played (the same is true for the other events). Below is an example of what that looks like.

Using Wistia and Google Analytics is a good way to get all your top-level video analytics data in the same place you already get your other website tracking information. The screenshots above may not be exactly like you see, since there are a few different versions of Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, etc.

Want to prevent a video from generating events in your Google Analytics account? There’s an embed option for that. Set googleAnalytics to false, and your video will go about its business without bothering Google Analytics. It will continue to generate stats in your Wistia account as usual.