Here is how you can create a ‘Video Tracking‘ report in GA4 BigQuery to track how users engage with videos embedded on your website.
Through video tracking:
- You can measure how users engage with the videos embedded in your website. For example, how many users play, pause, or complete watching a video.
- You can determine the videos which resonated the most with your audience.
- You can correlate the video engagement data with website usage data and conversions.
A GA4 property provides built-in video tracking via its ‘Video engagement’ enhanced measurement feature:
GA4 built-in Video tracking works for embedded YouTube videos that have the JavaScript API enabled (enablejsapi=” true”).
The GA4 built-in Video tracking can track the following video events by default:
video_start – This event is recorded by GA4 when a user starts watching a video.
video_progress – This event is recorded by GA4 when a user has watched/reached a particular threshold of the video (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%).
video_complete – This event is recorded by GA4 when a user has watched/reached the end of the video, i.e. the video progress is 100%
Once you have enabled/setup Video tracking in your GA4 property, whenever a user engages with a video embedded on your website, GA4 fires the video events.
You can see the video events in your GA4 property via the ‘Events’ report:
The following video event parameters are automatically sent along with the default GA4 Video Events:
- video_current_time – The current timestamp of the video where a viewer is at (measured in seconds).
- video_duration – The total duration of the video (measured in seconds).
- video_percent – The percentage of video completion at predefined thresholds (e.g., 10, 25, 50, 75, 90, and 100). The % sign is not reported.
- video_provider – The provider of the video. For embedded YouTube videos, the value is always “youtube”.
- video_title – The title of the video.
- video_url – The URL of the video.
- visible – returns “1” if the player is visible on the screen when the video event was tracked. But it’s not always guaranteed to be reported in all cases.
You can see the various default GA4 video event parameters via the DebugView report.
Important points about the default GA4 Video Event Parameters.
#1 These event parameters are automatically sent only for embedded YouTube videos when Enhanced Measurement for “Video engagement” is enabled in your GA4 property.
#2 For self-hosted videos (e.g. MP4, Vimeo, Wistia, etc.), these parameters are not automatically tracked unless custom video tracking is implemented via GTM.
You should check how the video events are being recorded in the GA4 BigQuery data tables and what event parameters are being passed along with these events.
This knowledge will later help you in building SQL queries.
Follow the steps below to create a video tracking report in GA4 BigQuery:
Step-1: Make sure you have collected at least a few days of video events both in your GA4 property and BigQuery data tables.