Video Analytics Events

Reference for the video_start, video_progress, and video_complete events the Ours Privacy video player reports, including every property and when each event fires.

The events the video player reports, their properties, and the conditions under which each fires. For reading the report built on them, see Video Analytics.

Event names and property names follow the GA4 video conventions, so they line up with video reporting you may already have elsewhere.


Events

EventFires when
video_startPlayback begins for the first time in the player's current cycle
video_progressPlayback crosses 10%, 25%, 50%, or 75%
video_completePlayback reaches the end

Properties

Every video event carries the same property set.

PropertyTypeDescription
video_idstringIdentifier of the video in your Ours Privacy account
video_titlestringThe video's title as set in the dashboard
video_urlstringURL of the video file being played
video_providerstringAlways oursprivacy
video_durationnumberTotal length in whole seconds
video_current_timenumberPlayback position in whole seconds when the event fired
video_percentnumberPlayback position as a whole-number percentage
visiblebooleanWhether the page was in the foreground when the event fired. false means the visitor had the tab in the background, which separates real watching from playback nobody was looking at

video_start

Fires on the first play of a cycle. Pausing and resuming does not fire another one, so starts count views rather than play button presses. A replay of a non-looping video does fire a new video_start.

With autoplay on, the start fires as soon as the browser permits playback, which means starts count muted autoplayed impressions alongside deliberate plays. Start volume on an autoplaying video is closer to page views than to interest, so judge it by how far viewers get rather than by how many started.


video_progress

Fires at 10%, 25%, 50%, and 75%, once each per cycle.

Two behaviors to know:

  • Skipping ahead skips the milestones in between. Jumping from 5% to 80% does not fill in 10%, 25%, and 50%. Progress reflects positions actually played through, not the furthest point reached. A drop between two milestones can therefore mean viewers skipped forward rather than left.
  • Milestones fire on the whole percentage, so a very short video can miss one if playback jumps past it between position updates.

Read together, the milestones give the drop-off shape Video Analytics does not show: the share of starts still watching at 25% against 75% tells you where a video loses people.


video_complete

Fires when playback reaches the end, reporting video_percent as 100.

On a looping video, the player reports one video_complete on the first full pass and then stays silent for every later loop. A looping background video therefore contributes one view and one completion rather than an event every few seconds. Progress milestones also stop after that first pass.


Where the events go

The player reports playback to the Ours Privacy Web SDK on the page hosting the embed. From there the events behave like any other event you track:

  • They appear in Video Analytics and in Recent Events.
  • They can be allowed and mapped to destinations, which is how you get video engagement into an ad platform, a warehouse, or your own analytics.
  • They pass through the same data governance rules as the rest of your events.

Two prerequisites for the events to arrive at all:

  • The Web SDK must be installed on the page hosting the embed. Without it there is nothing to receive playback events, and the video still plays normally.
  • The embed must be the snippet copied from the dashboard. A player of your own reports nothing; see Building your own player.

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