Best practice for video view tracking?

General questions
1

I would like to use Piwik to track the user behavior on some videos. Most of the events are video-time related, for example

  1. Plain playtime tracking with video-id (something like ‘ping’ every 10 seconds)
  2. Play/pause events with video-id and video-second
  3. Video-format with video-id (normal/fullscreen)
  4. One-time information like browser agent and browser size

Would I do this with “Custom Dimensions” or “Custom Variables”?

Thanks
bluepuma

2

Or am I totally on the wrong track and need “Event Tracking”?

For example video format (normal/fullscreen) may change over time, so should this be tracked as an event?

3

Are these videoes served from the HTML5 video tag ?

Events are a good approach. Note that you can use most instructions in blog posts etc. that are made for Google Analytics in Piwik since events are pretty similar, just slightly different API calls.

4

We now have a Media Analytics plugin that tracks Videos & Audio!

More information is available here: http://www.media-analytics.net/ The plugin gives useful insights into media / video / audio analytics and adds many new reports, widgets and segments to Piwik.

Works with HTML5 video & audio, Vimeo and YouTube out of the box. Support for other players can be added easily and is documented in the developer docs. We are also happy to add support for more players upon request, please ping us. After installation the plugin will in most cases directly start tracking data see the setup guide

For a full list of features check out https://plugins.piwik.org/MediaAnalytics . Docs are available at FAQ, User Guide, Developer docs