It can be beneficial to monitor the trends and behaviors of your users' video playback sessions. For example, you might want to assess the popularity of a video, identify _prime_ viewing times, etc. Metrics like these are tracked using Bitmovin's _analytics_ functionality. This functionality is enabled when you programmatically configure Bitmovin's web player on your webpage and the metrics are viewed using Bitmovin's [Analytics Dashboard](🔗).

The [Playback Quickstart for JavaScript](🔗) showed how to embed a player into a webpage to stream an encoded video. This Quickstart shows how to modify that player's configuration to produce analytics and how to access the resulting data in the dashboard.

The following subsections describe everything necessary to analyze video playback:

• [Prerequisites](🔗)

• [Step 1 – Locate Your Bitmovin Analytics License Key](🔗)

• [Step 2 – Add Analytics to the Player Configuration](🔗)

• [Step 3 – Add Metadata](🔗)

• [Step 4 – Test the Analytics](🔗)

• [Step 5 – Whitelist Domains](🔗)

# Prerequisites

The following items are required to complete this tutorial:

• DASH-encoded video files as per the [Encoding Quickstart for Java](🔗) tutorial.

• **index.html** web page from the [Playback Quickstart for JavaScript](🔗) that embeds the Bitmovin web player.

• Functional web server that hosts **index.html**. This tutorial assumes you're using the [XAMPP](🔗) web server that was set up in the [Playback Quickstart for JavaScript](🔗).

# Step 1 – Locate Your Bitmovin Analytics License Key

In order to generate analytics data from the Bitmovin web player, you must first provide the player with your Bitmovin Analytics key. This key is available via the Bitmovin Analytics Dashboard.

Follow the steps below to locate and copy your key:

1. Open the [Bitmovin dashboard](🔗) in a browser and log in.

2. Navigate to **Analytics** in the left-hand navigation bar, expand the dropdown, and select **Licenses**:

3. Click on **default-license** in the list.

4. Locate the **Analytics Key** and hover your mouse over it to display the copy icon:

5. Click the copy icon to copy the key. This key will be used in the next section.

📘

Note

If you're going to analyze videos played back from a website domain other than your `localhost`, you will need to first whitelist that domain for analytics in the license as described in [Step 5](🔗) below.

# Step 2 – Add Analytics to the Player Configuration

Follow the steps below to add the necessary analytics fields to the player configuration:

1. Open your **index.html** file, locate the `playerConfig` object, and add an `analytics` object:

2. Replace `<YOUR-ANALYTICS-KEY>` with the analytics key you copied in the [previous section](🔗).

👍

Tip

The `analytics` object can optionally contain:

• up to five custom fields in named `customData1`, `customData2`, etc. with custom values (e.g., custom metrics that you'd like to report).

• a field named `experimentName` that can be useful for tracking A/B tests.

3. Populate the remaining fields of the `analytics` sub object with meaningful values for your video solution. These will appear in the Analytics Dashboard later on. See [Analytics Configuration Overview](🔗) for the full list of metadata fields.

# Step 3 – Add Metadata

You can optionally add metadata when loading a video. Bitmovin's analytics will automatically pick up the new metadata and use it.

Follow the steps below to add metadata:

1. Locate the `sourceConfig` object in your **index.html** file.

2. Add an `analytics` sub object and enter the metadata fields. See [Analytics Configuration Overview](🔗) for the full list of metadata fields:

# Step 4 – Test the Analytics

Everything is now in place to use analytics.

Follow the steps below to test that the analytics you've configured work correctly:

1. Save your **index.html** file.

2. Ensure your web server is running.

3. Open your web browser, navigate to [http://localhost:8080/test/](🔗), and play the video.

4. Navigate to Bitmovin's [Analytics Dashboard](🔗) in a different browser window.

5. Ensure the **Analytics** dropdown is expanded and select **Audience**.

6. Ensure **Plays** is selected and verify that both the **Plays** graph and list show at least one video play. The graph in the example below shows several plays:

📘

Note

You may need to click the refresh button on the screen before you can see data.

7. Navigate to the **Breakdown** section near the bottom of the screen which shows metadata, select **Experiment**, and verify that the `experimentName` configured in [Step 2](🔗) is present:

8. Select **Custom Data 1** further down under **Breakdown** and verify that the value for `customData1` configured in [Step 2](🔗) is present.

9. (Optional) Click on the other menus under **Audience** or under the **Analytics** dropdown to view other analytics metrics.

# Step 5 – Whitelist Domains

By default, the analytics license noted in [Step 1](🔗) whitelists the `localhost` domain for video playback analytics. In practice, you will need to whitelist the domain(s) of your website(s) from which your video is played.

Follow the steps below to whitelist your domain(s):

1. Open Bitmovin's [Analytics Dashboard](🔗) in a browser window.

2. Navigate to **Analytics** > **Licenses** and click on **default-license**.

3. Locate the **Domains / Package Names/ Bundle Identifiers** section.

4. Enter your domain in the **Write domain names separated by comma** field.

5. Click **Add**:

This concludes the analytics tutorial. You've now verified that Bitmovin's analytics functionality is working correctly for your video.