Overview
With video becoming the new normal, organizations have long wanted to have deeper insight into how the video content is being consumed to make more informed decisions related to marketing campaigns, lead conversion strategies, etc.
In this article, we will be using VIDIZMO REST Services to obtain video analytics related to a certain product that your organization owns and study the response to get meaningful data. This data can then be further used to construct dashboards within your own CRM for the team to base their lead-generation activities on.
To learn more about what VIDIZMO REST Services have to offer and how to get started with using them, see: VIDIZMO REST API Reference Guide.
Use-Case Scenario
Let's assume you have a Custom Attribute "Product Type" added within your Portal that allows you to label your content against the Product it belongs to. This Custom Attribute has value types such as Lite, Standard, Pro.
For your marketing division that heads the Standard product, you want to be able to retrieve all videos of Product Type: Standard, and be able to obtain analytics data on those videos.
In the next sections, we will walk you through using VIDIZMO REST APIs to fetch relevant information about marketing videos and analytics on those videos so that you may integrate it within your preferred CRM solution.
Acquire Access Token
If the videos you are trying to access have been allowed for anonymous access, then you do not need an authentication token, otherwise you will be required to acquire an access token from VIDIZMO and pass it in the Request Header for fetching media in your portal.
Please note that VIDIZMO associates roles to its users which determine the set of permissions a user is allowed to perform in a Portal. Similarly, while accessing a resource using REST API, you will have to consider its user context. This means that if you wish to access or search a video in your Portal's media library such as in this case, you will need to pass the authentication token of a user who has the permission to search and view those videos in the portal.
Note: Public/Anonymous Access is not applicable for Digital Evidence Management Product
Use REST APIs to obtain Videos that were posted related to a Product
In order to fetch videos related to a certain Product Type, we will be executing a api/v1/mashup/search API call with the following search criteria as Query Parameters in the Request URL:
- The format of the mashup should be video
- The value of the custom attribute Product Type
- The video is published in the portal, which is defined by the attribute Status
- The video is currently available in the portal, which is defined by the attribute Publishing Status
- Bring back basic information related to the videos such as its title, description, creation-date, thumbnails, etc
- Fetch first 20 videos that match the search criteria, which is defined by Page Size and Page Index
You can try it out yourself at: https://{your-portal-domain}/api/v1/doc/index.html#/Mashup/SearchMashupsByGet
Here is a sample request and response:
Assemble the Request Message
After you have acquired the authorization token, and have figured out the parameters against which you need to fetch videos from your portal, you can now proceed with sending the request with the following components:
Request Method: GET
Request URL: api/v1/mashup/search
Request Header:
Process the Response Message
To process the response, parse the response header and the response body. In the HTTPS GET request, you used the /mashup/search endpoint to retrieve the list of mashup based on the search criteria provided. Assuming that the response was successful, you should receive response header fields that are similar to the following:
Response Status Code: 200
Response Header:
And you should receive a response body that contains a list of mashups matching your search-criteria and their individual properties encoded in JSON format, similar to:
Response Body:
The response shall help you retrieve video Ids, thumbnails, titles, descriptions and other relevant information to construct your own product knowledge base gallery within your dashboard. Let's look further into how you may obtain analytics for these videos based on the Ids we have obtained in the response.
Use REST APIs to obtain Video Analytics
Now since you have the media and their relevant Ids, let's look at how to obtain analytics on the media for an sketching an informed user engagement trend chart.
These are the statistics that we shall be obtaining on the videos:
- impressions
- views
- completions
- time played
- comments
- likes
- favorites
- shares
- embeds
- downloads
In order to fetch analytics on our product videos, we will be using api/v1/analytics/search API call with the following search criteria as Query Parameters in the Request URL:
- The IDs of the videos we obtained that belonged to our desired Product Type
- Start Date in UTC format for 1st October 2020 - this defines the start of the period you wish to fetch analytics against
- End Date in UTC format for 31st October 2020 -this defines the end of the period you wish to fetch analytics against
- The frequency of the statistics obtained to be monthly - this helps you segregate data based on a period
- Force Refresh as true - this fetches updated records from the database. However, to reduce direct hits, it is recommended to have this value as false and fetch records from cache instead. The default refresh time for analytics is 15 minutes.
You can try it out yourself here: https://{your-portal-domain}/api/v1/doc/index.html#/Analytics/SearchAnalyticsByGet
Here is a sample request and response:
Assemble the Request Message
Here is how you can send the request to obtain analytics:
Request Method: GET
Request URL: api/v1/analytics/search
Request Header:
Process the Response Message
Assuming that the response was successful, you should receive response header fields that are similar to the following:
Response Status Code: 200
Response Header:
And you should receive a response body that contains a list of mashups matching your search-criteria and their individual properties encoded in JSON format, similar to:
Response Body:
The response body shall help you further use these actionable insights and construct your own dashboard for every video related to the Standard Product Type. This information shall be a key resource for the marketing and business development departments to use it to construct valuable charts and infographics for the rest of the team to base their next campaigns on.