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Identify a Known Viewer (Contact)
Identify a Known Viewer (Contact)

Track all video viewing activity of your leads, students and customers across all of the videos they watch.

Updated over 6 months ago

Overview

If your viewers have to log in to access your website and watch videos, or you have returning visitors or leads which you are able to identify from previous interactions, Spotlightr offers several methods by which you can associate their different videos views in one profile inside of Spotlightr.

Here's what that means...

If you have student named Tim with email tim@gmail.com and he logs into to access his lessons, you can track every video he watched, how much he watched, when he watched, etc. And you can run reports on all of that as well. More info on student/viewer profiles here.

Or if you send emails to your leads via your CRM or ESP, you can track what videos they watch and how much they watched. More info on video reporting here.

Some of these methods do require some code/development knowledge. If you have questions or need clarification please contact support.

The following are the methods available.

Method 1: Tracking Students on Wordpress

If you use Wordpress and your students/customers/members log into your site to access videos then you are in luck. Our Wordpress plugin will install a script automatically that tracks all views by anyone that logs in.

**IMPORTANT** Just be sure you are using the plugin features to add videos to your Wordpress posts, pages or lessons if you want to track logged in user IDs. Do NOT manually copy/paste embed code from the Spotlightr app to add videos. If you use embed code it will not track the user ID and you will need to use another method discussed on this page.

You MUST add videos via the Custom Gutenberg Spotlightr Block or custom short-code. And if you use LearnDash, it will also work when you use the plugin to add videos via Video Progression.

More information and instructions on the plugin can be found in this article.

Method 2: Add a Form to Your Video

One of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is to simply add a form to the beginning of your video asking for the viewers name and/or email address before they continue with the video.

This does require action from your viewer so it is not as reliable as the methods below, but if you don't already have a way to use the options below, or your viewers are motivated to make sure they are tracked (i.e. mandatory training), then this is a good option for you.

You can do this using our overlay feature. When editing your video just head to our Overlays and click on New Overlay >> Lead Capture and then select the Identify Contact template:

Once you customize the overlay it will look something like this:

Method 3: Use URL '?contact=' Query String

This method is great for use cases where, for example, you have the visitor submitting an opt-in form on the first step and then viewing the video on the next page. There are many different ways to configure this, but usually if you are using a form provided by your email service provider, you are able to configure the redirect value by including the submitted values.

This method can also be used when sending leads or students emails from your email service provider software or customer relationship management software. Your ESP provides a way to add variables to the URL's in the email being sent out.

You can simply forward the id value (in this case their email address) in the contact query string parameter. It would look something like this:

https://mysite.com/videopage?contact=%EMAIL%

Using this method, when your contact's email is johnsmith@gmail.com, then the link they would get and click on would look like this:

When they get to the /videopage with your Spotlightr video, then the analytics would associate his email with his view behavior.


Method 4: vooPlayerContact Cookie

**IMPORTANT** Please note the following solution requires the Advanced Embed Code. If you want to track any of your viewers/contact with the following methods, you must use the Advanced Embed Code.

The Advanced Embed code includes the spotlightr.js script, which is necessary for this to work.

If you are able to drop a cookie on the domain where Spotlightr videos are embedded that may be the simplest way to identify a contact. Cookie must be set before the viewer hits the play button for that view to be attributed. Here's an example of setting the cookie: 

<script>
var cookie = 'mymember' // this is your viewer id
document.cookie = "vooPlayerContact="+cookie+"; expires=Thu, 18 Dec 2020 12:00:00 UTC; path=/";
</script>

Method 5: vooAPI setCustomViewerID Method

**IMPORTANT** Please note the following solution requires the Advanced Embed Code. If you want to track any of your viewers/contact with the following methods, you must use the Advanced Embed Code.

The Advanced Embed code includes the spotlightr.js script, which is necessary for this to work.

Using our JavaScript API you are able to accomplish some pretty cool things with interactions between the Spotlightr video and your page, and one of these is the ability to set the custom contact identifier on the fly in any use case.

This would for example be executed as

<script>
function setCustomViewerID(){
  vooAPI('MjA1NDE=', 'setCustomViewerID', ["member_123"]);
}
</script>

Where you would replace MjA1NDE= with your video id, and member_123 with the unique identifier for your viewer.


Tracking Students on Thinkific

If you use Spotlightr with Thinkific, you can easily track all video activity of your students. We show you how to do this in the article dedicated for Thinkific and Spotlightr.


Check Video Analytics and Review Your Audience

OK so you set that up and you've begun collecting data. Now what?

Individual Video Analytics

You can check the analytics of individual videos right from the list of video in your Project. Just click on the number of Plays:

That will bring you to the analytics for that page where you will see the overall statistics and individual views, along with the identifying information like email address:

Review Overall Performance via My Audience and My Videos modules

You can also run reports on individuals or on videos.

The My Audience module will display all known viewers/contacts and their views across all Spotlightr videos. You can search by email/custom ID or by specific videos and export any of that data:

And in My Videos module you can see the performance of all of your videos. You can filter by date, video, or domain your videos are on and create automated reports:

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