Question: I’m getting a little fed up with unreliable 3rd party applications not tracking usage data properly. I know these services are free and I don’t expect much but I’m ready to move up to a higher level with robust tracking and more dependability. I’m wondering if I could send tracking data from my flash based web video player to Google Analytics instead? Can I do this myself? are there some players that do this already? I have website stats but would like to get all stats in one place – if at all possible.

Answer: I hear this all the time: “Tubemogul, Vidmetrix (and dozens of other free services) are the only authority who can track video views, downloads, etc.” and my response is always – NOT!

The old saying you get what you pay for is true for all 3rd party services who can make the sudden choice to boot you without explanation. Free services should not be relied on, obviously.

Video hits, views, downloads, etc can be measured using a more dependable service called Google Analytics- yes, it’s in the free category but it’s been around for a while, is much more robust and has a track record for being very dependable. I’m going to show you how to set this up yourself or use one of the many web video players we found that you can embed on your own server along with analytics and tracking built right in!

First, let’s talk about how to do this yourself with a little known feature in Google Analytics that is somewhat simple to implement….

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