In Kaltura, analytics are provided for both an individual media item and for a bCourses site Media Gallery. This data includes overall viewership numbers, who has viewed your media, geographical and device data and more. Analytics can be very useful for understanding how your media is being used and whether the media has achieved the desired goals. (A Kaltura media item may be a video, image or audio file. For the rest of this article, we will refer to all media as video.)
Best Practices
Analytics can be a powerful tool for insight into the performance and usage of your media but it is important to keep in mind that they are not 100% accurate. There are many factors that can interfere with analytics being accurate (especially at a single viewer level) including ad blockers, virtual private networks (VPNs), collective viewing habits (e.g.: watching a course video with a roommate) and other issues. Analytics are very good at showing that a video has been played but they are not reliable for proving that a video has not been played. For these reasons, RTL does not recommend using Kaltura analytics for attendance, evaluation, academic integrity or grading purposes.
Access and Range
In order to view these analytics, you must have ownership or Co-Editor status* to the media (for an individual item) or be a Media Gallery Manager** (for a Media Gallery) to be able to view the data. (Media Gallery Managers can only see the aggregate analytics for the Media Gallery in question. They cannot see the data for the individual items published to the Media Gallery unless they are also the owner or a Co-Editor on that item.)
* Only Owners and Co-Editors can see the analytics data for an individual item. Co-Publishers and Co-Viewers cannot. (Please see How do I add collaborators in bCourses and MediaSpace? for more info.)
** These bCourses roles are recognized by Kaltura as “Media Gallery Manager” roles for that site’s Media Gallery: Teacher, Lead TA, TA, Designer, Owner, Maintainer. (For more info on bCourses roles, see What roles can I assign to users in my bCourses site, and what do each of them do?)
Important - The default range of the analytics displayed is the 30 days previous to the day that you are looking at the analytics page, i.e. it does not include today. This can be changed by clicking on the date range and modifying the range to suit your desired time period. Make sure you change this setting if any of the data you are looking for occurred today or prior to 30 days ago!
Kaltura Technical Resources
For a deep dive into the time/date, filtering and data export capabilities, visit Kaltura’s Working with the Entry Level Analytics Dashboard article.
Viewing Analytics for a Single Video
To access the analytics for a specific video, go to My Media (through a bCourses site or MediaSpace) and click on the small bar graph icon to the right of the video (next to the Edit pencil and Delete trash can).
- Note: If you are an instructor or staff of a bCourses site that does not have My Media in the site navigation, see How do I add My Media or Media Gallery to my bCourses site?
Alternatively, you can click Actions under the player when in the media’s player window and choose Analytics from the dropdown menu.
At the top of the Analytics page for the video, you will see an overview of the most important data points.
(A quick definition of terms: “Player Impressions” means that a video was loaded into a page that was viewed. “Plays” means that the viewer pressed Play on the video. Keep in mind that a video placed on your site’s Home page (or any other high traffic page) will have many more Impressions than Views, since every time the page is loaded for whatever purpose, it will also be logged as an Impression.)
Beneath the video, you can see the number of views over the duration of the entry. This can give you an understanding of which sections of the video generated interest and when viewing may have dropped off. This can be very useful to identify points where your viewers may have been confused by a topic if you see a large spike at a particular point indicating repeated views.
To view more granular data, if you click the Engagement Per User drop down, you can see how an individual may have interacted with the video. Please keep in mind the caveats presented above in the Best Practices section in regards to the reliability of the data at this level.
By clicking the arrow next to their name, you can view a heatmap indicating which parts of the video they watched.
For each user, 4 tiers are available to analyze their engagement on the duration of the entry:
- Not viewed - this section wasn't viewed by the user
- Viewed once - this section was viewed once by the user
- Viewed twice - this section was viewed twice by the user
- Viewed more than 2 times - this section was viewed more than two times by the user
Scroll down further to view a video’s overall performance over time. Click on the tabs across the top to see different metrics. Click on View Details to expand a more granular view at the date level. Use the drop down menu underneath Hide Details to switch between Date and User level data. Please keep the best practices at the start of this article in mind when viewing data at the individual user level.
Next is the Engagement Funnel, where you can see proportions on viewership.
This is followed by Location and Device information.
You can see more detailed information about single entry level analytics at this Kaltura article. If you do visit this page, please ignore the access instruction section and refer to the instructions in Kaltura's Entry Level Analytics instead.
Viewing Analytics for a Media Gallery
To access the Media Gallery analytics, click on the “hamburger”/Channel Actions icon at the top right of the Media Gallery page and choose Analytics from the drop down menu.
Similar to the single entry analytics, the first section is a broader highlight view. Click the relevant See Details link to jump to the expanded data on each topic or scroll down.
(Note that the 30 day Time/Date range is still the default. Click on the range to modify it if needed.)
You can view the site’s overall performance over time in the next section. Click the tabs to see the different data sets.
Click the View Details to see User level data.
You can dive deeper into a specific user’s viewing data by clicking on their name. Please keep the best practices at the start of this article in mind when viewing data at the individual user level.
Next is a breakdown of the Media Gallery videos by performance.
Followed by Location and Device information.
You can see more detailed information about category level analytics at Kaltura's Category Analytics article. If you do visit this page, please ignore the access instruction section and refer to this article’s instructions instead. Also note that several user interface aspects will look different to what you see; however, the data portions are the same.