Tracking Video Plays

[ksegedi]

Hello -
I've setup some ads on my server that are Using Google Analytics to track when
a video is played and clickthroughs to the adverstiser's site, but can not
provide any data on how many times a video has been played and really need
those metrics. Here's my current setup:

SWF has an FLV and a basic player component
SWF is iframed into a client's site where the ad is being displayed
Clicks on the video open a new window and go to an html page on my server that
then redirects users out to the destination URL
Google Analytics code is on the html file where the movie plays and on the
outbound html page so I can track impressions and clickthrough.

Is there any way to ad something into the FLV or track play button pushes
using AS2/3 or any other method? I know some of the Ad providers like
doubleclick provide this functionality but i'd rather not go that route.

[aniebel]

You could set up a counter variable that increments with each button press but I'm not sure how you'd report that back unless you use something like PHP or CF.

[Dinghus]

One way is to do the same as regular banner ads. Load an invisible image and
keep count of how many times it is hit. If you want to get fancy, the image
would be a php or cf page that you can actually pass data to that you want
stored in the database.