Analytics FAQ

What is the Difference Between the “Unique Viewers” KPI Card and “Viewers” Chart?

The language around the Unique Viewer KPI card has been made distinct from the Viewers chart in order to highlight the difference between how these two values are measured. For example, let’s say you have two different broadcasts and a viewer watches one on Monday and one on Tuesday. If you look at your analytics and you have your date filters set to include these two days, and if a viewer was to watch the same video from the same device on each day, they would show up as 1 viewer in the KPI card, but they would be counted once each day for a total of 2 times in the viewer chart. Since the viewer chart is based upon the number of events selected, if a viewer was to watch both videos on both days, they would be counted twice each day for a total of 4 times in the chart but only twice in the KPI card. Multiple views will not change the behavior of Viewers in the top chart or the Unique Viewers KPI. Let’s say a viewer was to watch a video each day for 10 days, except on the third day they watch it 3 times. This would still result in the viewer only being counted once for that day in the chart.

Why Does My Event Show Analytics on the Day After It Ran?

All analytic data in Studio is recorded, stored, and displayed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This time standard is the reference point for every time zone in the world. 

You may notice that some event analytics display the day before or after the event’s local air date. This is because while your event may run on a particular day in your local time, analytics data displays from UTC and depending on the difference between your local time and UTC, it may be a different day. When you select your “Events List” menu, the event times in your current timezone are displayed in order to help you correlate the listed events to those in your scheduler.

For example, Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) is equivalent to UTC -6 hours (relative to daylight savings). If you have an event that begins at 7:00pm MDT, analytics will be recorded as 1:00am UTC, which is the following calendar day. The opposite situation will be true for users in time zones ahead of UTC: event analytics will display as taking place the day before the actual event (i.e. yesterday). 

Why Do I See Inflated Views for Certain Days?

There was a bug that affected the data of some users between 4/20/2022 and 4/30/2022. It inflated the unique screens which played videos. We have since been able to fix the issue and you should no longer experience inflated views.  

The bug was caused by an issue in the player that artificially increased the number of on-demand views and, as a result, decreased the average watch time.

Although the bug has been fixed, we can’t correct historical analytics You can still pull accurate information for live and replay viewers around these dates by grouping the event by type (Learn more).  Live and replay statistics were not affected by the player bug. Grouping your viewers by event type can still give you accurate information for live and replay events..

Another workaround that can give you a good understanding of your Live & On Demand viewers is through exporting the CSV for your chosen date range and using the following functions to count unique IP addresses:

• Google Sheets "=COUNTUNIQUE (value1:value2)"
• Excel "=COUNTA(UNIQUE(value1:value2))"

Keep in mind that these results will be different from the total number of “viewers” according to Resi’s definition. Multiple screens in the same household could appear as the same IP address.

Inflated view numbers do not count against your bandwidth. Bandwidth calculations come directly from Cloudflare, our CDN, and are not based on analytics reporting.

Why is a Viewer’s Watch Time Longer Than The Event They Were Viewing?

When you look at the viewer breakdown chart or export your viewer statistics to a CSV, you may notice that the total watch time for a specific viewer is longer than your event runtime. This is most likely because the event you are looking at is a recurring event that shows up more than once in a given time span. 

Our analytics engine reports total time watched as the total amount of time a given user watches one or more of your events. For example, even if your weekly broadcast only runs for one hour, you will see a total watch time of four hours for a viewer who has watched the last four weeks. When you select a wide timespan, you may see longer watch times when that event shows up more than once in your timeline.

Why Does My Timeline Add Extra Days When I Display By Week?

When looking at your event timeline, you have the option to change the reporting period by selecting day, week, or month. If you select the Week option, you may notice that the dates along the horizontal axis of the chart have expanded beyond the dates you originally set with the calendar in the top-right.

Because the reporting period encompasses seven days (Sunday through Saturday), the data points include the nearest Saturday and/or Sunday.

Like selecting Week, if you select the Month option, the timeline will adjust the horizontal axis dates to include the entirety of the month. It is important to remember that these dates only affect the data seen in the timeline chart. Changing the reporting period for this chart will not affect the data in your KPI cards, viewer breakdowns, or heatmap, which are all determined by the global timeframe you set at the top of the Analytics page. If you want to make sure that data across all charts match, update the global timeframe using the calendar in the top-right of the page to start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday for the Week option. For the Month option, set the timeframe for the first to last days of the month.

Why Do I See a Discrepancy Between Total Viewers and Viewers by Resolution?

When you don’t have a specific event selected at the top of the analytics page, you may see a discrepancy between the total number of viewers reported in the summary card and the total number of viewers in the breakdown chart when grouped by resolution. Here’s why:

Each section of the analytics page is configured to give you the most helpful and pertinent information possible. For high-level stats, the summary card gives you the total number of unique viewers for the time range (and event when selected). 

When grouping viewer data by resolution without selecting a specific event, the viewer breakdown chart counts single users who view multiple events at different resolutions as multiple viewers. For example, 

• If a viewer watched 2 events and their resolution was 1080 for both, the breakdown chart would report them as 1 viewer watching in 1080. 
• On the other hand, if a viewer watched 2 events, one in 1080 and the other in 720, that viewer would be reported in the breakdown chart as two viewers, one for 720, and one for 1080.

You can resolve this discrepancy by selecting an event from the events list at the top of the page. Because Studio reports one resolution per viewer per event, the viewer count in the viewer breakdown chart will match the summary card.

Where Can I See Viewers by Watch Time?

The viewer breakdown chart provides information about your viewers based on a range of criteria (Learn more). The available options for this chart vary based on whether you’re viewing analytics for a single event or for all events in a time range.

In order to see your viewership data by watch time, you must select a specific event using the Event List button at the top of the page.

Why Is Average Watch Time for Saved Videos Significantly Lower than Events?

A low average watch time for one or more of your saved videos does not necessarily mean that your content is not being watched all the way through or is otherwise performing poorly. On a high level, the analytics engine calculates average watch time based on time watched and individual viewing sessions. What’s more, skipping back and forth, past a video’s starting or ending buffer point, counts as a new viewing session. This means that a low average watch time could be the result of a user going back and forth to rewatch one or more segments of the same video in order to take notes, present key points for a small group, etc. This can be confirmed by exporting your documents to a CSV file and checking to see if one or more ClientIDs have multiple SessionIDs with short watch times.

Why Are There More Viewers in My CSV Export than on My Heat Map?

The Analytics heat map places pins by gathering information about a viewing device’s location. In order to do this, the heat map needs to know the City, latitude, and longitude in order to place a pin or count a view in a particular location. If any of these fields come back null, as is the case with some secured devices, then your heat map will not count the view. However, the view is still counted and displayed in your top chart CSV.

Why Do My Library Analytics Look Different After 2/17/23?

Users who have Library Analytics data that comes from before 2/17/23 may notice a change to any subsequent data. Prior to the implementation of a bug fix on this date, certain embedded videos may have shown inflated view counts for certain videos.

If a viewer clicked on a link to a Library video and never clicked on the play button (except when a web player embed code has been configured to auto-play), a SessionID was sent to Library Analytics with a watch time of 0. This caused Analytics to report view counts even if a viewer did not play the video. In addition, more SessionIDs would be generated if a viewer sat on the webpage, without clicking play, for an extended period of time.

Since the implementation of this bug fix, Analytics no longer receives data for viewers who do not click play on Library videos. This may result in view and viewer counts for these videos going down, but will also result in your average and median watch-times being increased since the number of viewers with a 0 watch time will go down. Data prior to this fix will not be altered or deleted.

Why Do I See Bandwidth Usage for an Event That Has No Analytics?

In order to make it easier to tell when bandwidth is being used inside Studio by your organization and when it is being used by actual viewers consuming your content, you can click on specific dates in the bandwidth usage summary to view the Events Summary table. Prior to 5/10/2023, this data was represented as individual events with no analytic data associated with them, just like the Studio Usage summary. There is a chance that you could see the Studio Usage “event” as far back as 4/26/2023, but you will always see it (when applicable) after 5/10/2023. It is possible that, between these dates, you may see both individual events AND a Studio Usage summary “event.” You can read about how to check your bandwidth usage to learn more.

Why Don’t I See Location Data Between 6/12-6/15?

Studio’s systems experienced an outage that led to a loss of Embed Player location analytics for events that ran between 10:30 am 6/12/23 and 3:30pm 6/15/23 CST. Unfortunately, there is no way to recover this data. This loss did not affect analytics for Library Videos, Stream URL, or Facebook destinations.