Wistia Viewing Analytics

Wistia stats are the best way to get a complete view of who is watching your video, how they are watching your video, and how your video initiatives are performing.

This guide will show you how to approach the two parts of Wistia analytics, Stats Trends and the Viewer Stream.

Wistia provides you sight into performance from the single video, to a Project (perhaps a collection of your tutorial or marketing videos), to the entire Account (perhaps all the videos across your website).

Starting from the Projects List page of your Account (myaccount.wistia.com/projects ), access your high level stats by selecting “Trends” from under the Stats drop-down menu.



This will bring up the Trends overview of your account, which is a dashboard for public stats performance.

The graph at the top shows the Projects in your Account according to views over time. Using your mouse, choose to either see all views across the account or across a single Project by rolling over the lines in the graph.



Underneath the graph, use the yellow tabs to select a date range for analysis. Drag either end to change the range to be displayed in the graph.

The Sorting Bar within Wistia analytics pages helps sort analytics data in the way most useful for you, showing Projects or Videos, selecting by date ranges (Months, Weeks, Days) and sorting by attributes like amount of videos, date created, or number of plays. The sorting bar is slightly different at the account and project levels.

By default, the Trends page will show you stats for all Projects in your account. This allows you to see all the views by time as you move your cursor around on the map. The details for the views across the account will appear in the upper two rows of the Trends table.

To see the data for a specific Project compared to the others, use the selection tool functionality. Clicking on one specific Project in either the list view or in the graph will “lock” it, so you can view the analytics performance for the Project more specifically.

Underneath the Trends graph is the list of Projects or Media that is represented in the graph. To drill down to the Project or Media level, click the title of the Project/Media.

The Trends graph for projects is very similar to the aggregate Account-level graph. Moving your cursor along the graph will show information on the corresponding date. Selecting a single video will isolate it's data from the rest of the videos in the project. The yellow tabs under the graph can be moved to adjust the date range for data analysis.

Clicking the title of an individual media will move you to the Media-level Trends.

The media level provides detailed insight into how the video was viewed, both at an aggregate level through an engagement graph, and individually through heatmaps.

To access the media-level trends page, you can either select a Media from the list in the Account or Project-level trends page, or you can open the Media page in your account (where you can watch the video) and select “Stats” from under the Media Actions drop-down menu.

The blue section of the engagement graph shows the engagement of viewers who clicked play on the video. The orange section on top shows the number of times that section was re-watched. Move your cursor over the graph (from left to right) to see specific information for a time in the video, and click the graph to jump to that point in the video.

More on Audience Engagement Graphs.

Select the 'plays by date' tab above the engagement graph to see Trends-type data for the video. Moving the yellow tabs below the graph will change the date range, while hovering over the graph will display specific view count data for that date.

The summary bar underneath the engagement graph displays overall data for the viewers of the video. This is extremely useful high-level data for comparison, such as % of viewers who clicked play, % viewed, and total time watched.

Under the engagement graph area and summary bar are a list of the individual viewers who have watched your video, along with their heatmaps.

Each viewer of a Wistia-hosted video is assigned a heatmap, which shows the specific interaction they had with the video. Heatmaps are powerful for understanding how certain users watch your video. Is there a specific topic that is interesting to viewers from your email campaign? Do international viewers tune out quicker than local ones? When are the most engaged viewers watching your videos? This information and more can be derived from heatmaps.

The time to the left of the heatmap displays when the viewer watched the video. Next to the time is the information Wistia gathers automatically, like their location. If this viewer has watched other videos in your account, the number will show up in a bubble next to their name. Scrolling over the name will reveal the IP address of the viewer, along with where they viewed the video (on your blog, on your homepage, etc.).

The heatmap itself displays viewing sessions in a color-coded manner. As viewers re-watch certain portions of the video, the heatmap moves from green to red. If a viewer completely skips a certain section, that appears empty in the heatmap (and a dip in the engagement graph above).

Clicking on the name link on the heatmap will take you to the Viewer page for that viewer. The Viewer page is part of the Viewer Stream.

The Viewer Stream is the other way of viewing Wistia analytics for your Account. It begins a list of the latest viewers of any videos in the account, but can be drilled down into the individual viewer.

To open the Viewers Stream page, select “Viewers” from under the Stats drop-down menu.

The Viewers Stream is a snapshot of the viewers of your publicly embedded videos. These will appear as a list of viewers, with their most recent heatmaps.



Use the sorting bar to specify which group of viewers you'd like to see, or use the search box to find a specific viewer. The number bubbles next to each name designate how many videos the viewer has watched. Clicking on a viewer will take you to the Viewer Page.

From the Viewer Page, you can track activity for a specific viewer. Want to 'tag' this viewer for future tracking? Edit their name as you would a Wistia media title, by clicking the 'edit' tag and then typing changes.

The activity bar underneath the viewer name tracks the number of videos the viewer has watched, the amount of times they have loaded a page with a video on it (to derive video play conversion rate), and the total amount of video they have watched. Which videos do your new customers watch before signing up? Which videos do your customers come back to watch again and again? The viewer page gives you a clear view into the activity of your video viewers.

Adding a name to a viewer makes it easy to track their viewing sessions in your analytics. You can also tag viewers with email address automatically, using email marketing embeds.

Once your viewer is tagged with an email, you can sort to view them in the Viewer Stream by clicking the “With Emails” option on the sorting bar.