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• How Media Analytics for Piwik gives you the insights you need to measure how effective your video and audio marketing is – Part 2

  
  2 février 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  In Part 1 we have covered some of the Media Analytics features and explained why you cannot afford to not measure the media usage on your website. Chances are, you are wasting or losing money and time by not making the most out of your marketing strategy this very second. In this part, we continue showing you some more insights you can expect to get from Media Analytics and how nicely it is integrated into Piwik.

  Video, Audio and Media Player reports

  Media Analytics adds several new reports around videos, audios and media players. They are all quite similar and give you similar insights so we will mainly focus on the Video Titles report.

  Metrics

  The above mentioned reports give you all the same insights and features so we will mainly focus on the “Video Titles” report. When you open such a report for the first time, you will see a report like this with the following metrics :

  

  • “Impressions”, the number of times a visitor has viewed a page where this media was included.
  • “Plays”, the number of times a visitor watched or listened to this media.
  • “Play rate”, the percentage of visitors that watched or listened to a media after they have visited a page where this media was included.
  • “Finishes”, the percentage of visitors who played a media and finished it.
  • “Avg. time spent”, the average amount of time a visitor spent watching or listening to this media.
  • “Avg. media length” the average length of a video or audio media file. This number may vary for example if the media is a stream.
  • “Avg completion” the percentage of how much visitors have watched of a video.

  If you are not sure what a certain metric means, simply hover the metric title in the UI and you will get a detailed explanation. By changing the visualization to the “All Columns Table” in the bottom of the report, you get to see even more metrics like “Plays by unique visitors”, “Impressions by unique visitors”, “Finish rate”, “Avg. time to play aka hesitation time”, “Fullscreen rate” and we are always adding more metrics.

  These metrics are available for the following reports :

  • “Video / Audio Titles” shows you all metrics aggregated by video or audio title
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs” shows you all metrics aggregated by the video or audio resource URL, for example “https://piwik.org/media.mp4”.
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs grouped” removes some information from the URLs like subdomain, file extensions and other information to get aggregated metrics when you provide the same media in different formats.
  • “Videos per hour in website’s timezone” lets you find out how your media content is consumed depending on the hour of the day. You might realize that your media is consumed very differently in the morning vs at night.
  • “Video Resolutions” lets you discover how your video is consumed depending on the resolution.
  • “Media players” report is useful if you use different media players on your websites or apps and want to see how engagement with your media compares by media player.

  Row evolution

  At InnoCraft, we understand that static numbers are not so useful. When you see for example that yesterday 20 visitors played a certain media, would you know whether this is good or bad ? This is why we always give you the possibility to see the data in relation to the recorded data in the past. To see how a specific media performs over time, simply hover a media title or media resource URL and click on the “Row Evolution” icon.

  

  Now you can see whether actually more or less visitors played your chosen video for the selected period. Simply click on any metric name and the chosen metrics will be plotted in the big evolution graph.

  This feature is similar to the Media Overall evolution graph introduced in Part 1, but shows you a detailed evolution for an individual media title or resource.

  Media details

  Now that you know some of the most important media metrics, you might want to look a bit deeper into the user behaviour. For example we mentioned before the “Avg time spent on media” metric. Such an average number doesn’t let you know whether most visitors spent about the same time watching the video, or whether there were many more visitors that watched it only for a few seconds and a few that watched it for very long.

  One of the ways to get this insight is by again hovering any media title or resource URL and clicking on the “Media details” icon. It will open a new popup showing you a new set of reports like these :

  

  The “Time spent watching” and “How far visitors reached in the media” bar charts show you on the X-Axis how much time each visitor spent on watching a video and how far in the video they reached. On the Y-Axis you see the number of visitors. This lets you discover whether your users for example jump often to the middle or end of the video and which parts of your video was seen most often.

  

  The “How often the media was watched in a certain hour” and “Which resolutions the media was watched” is similar to the reports introduced in Part 1 of the blog post. However, this time instead of showing aggregated video or audio content data, they display data for a specific media title or media resource URL.

  Segmented audience log

  In Part 1 we have already introduced the Audience Log and explained that it is useful to better understand the user behaviour. Just a quick recap : The Audience Log shows you chronologically every action a specific visitor has performed on your website : Which pages they viewed, how they interacted with your media, when they clicked somewhere, and much more.

  By hovering a media title or a media resource and then selecting “Segmented audience log” you get to see the same log, but this time it will show only visitors that have interacted with the selected media. This will be useful for you for example when you notice an unusual value for a metric and then want to better understand why a metric is like that.

  

  Applying segments

  Media Analytics lets you apply any Piwik segment to the media reports allowing you to dice your visitors or personas multiplying the value that you get out of Media Analytics. For example you may want to apply a segment and analyze the media usage for visitors that have visited your website or mobile app for the first time vs. recurring visitors. Sometimes it may be interesting how visitors that converted a specific goal or purchased something consume your media, the possibilities are endless. We really recommend to take advantage of segments to understand your different target groups even better.

  The plugin also adds a lot of new segments to your Piwik letting you segment any Piwik report by visitors that have viewed or interacted with your media. For example you could go to the “Visitors => Devices” report and apply a media segment to see which devices were used the most to view your media. You can also combine segments to see for example how often your goals were converted when a visitor viewed media for longer than 10 seconds after waiting for at least 20 seconds before playing your media and when they played at least 3 videos during their visit.

  Widgets, Scheduled Reports, and more.

  This is not where the fun ends. Media Analytics defines more than 15 new widgets that you can add to your dashboard or export it into a third party website. You can set up Scheduled Reports to receive the Media reports automatically via email or sms or download the report to share it with your colleagues. It works also very well with Custom Alerts and you can view the Media reports in the Piwik Mobile app for Android and iOS. Via the HTTP Reporting API you can fetch any report in various formats. The plugin is really nicely integrated into Piwik we would need some more blog posts to fully cover all the ways Media Analytics advances your Piwik experience and how you can use and dig into all the data to increase your conversions and sales.

  How to get Media Analytics and related features

  You can get Media Analytics on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.

• How Funnel for Piwik Analytics enriches your Piwik experience giving you ultimate insights and debugging capabilities

  13 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  No matter what type of website or app you have, whether you are trying to get your users to sign up for something or sell products, there is a certain number of steps your visitors have to go through. On every step you lose visitors and therefore potential revenue and conversions. Therefore it is critical to know where your visitors actually follow those steps in your website or app, where you lose them and where your visitors maybe get confused. By defining a funnel, you can improve your conversion rates, sales and revenue as you can exactly determine where you lose your visitors in converting your goal or a sale.

  A Funnel defines a series of steps that you expect your visitors to take on their way to converting a goal. Funnels, a premium feature for Piwik developed by InnoCraft, lets you create funnels to get the data you need to improve your websites and mobile apps. Learn more about Funnel.

  In this blog post we will cover the reports the Funnel plugin provides. The next blog post shows you how to configure and validate your funnel in Piwik.

  

  Integration in Goal reports

  At Piwik and InnoCraft, we usually start looking into our goal reports. Funnel integrates directly into each goal reporting page giving you a quick overview how your funnel is doing. This saves us a lot of time as we don’t have to separately look into each funnel page and only takes us maybe an additional second to keep an eye on our funnels. By clicking on the headline or “View funnel report” link, you can directly go to the funnel report to get a more detailed report if you notice any spike in the evolution of the conversions or conversion rate.

  

  Getting an overall Funnel overview

  Next we usually go to the “Funnel Overview” page where it shows a list of all activated Funnels and their performance over time. You will find the look familiar as it is similar to the “Goals Overview” page. If we find something unusual there, for example any spikes, we usually directly click on the headline of the Funnel to go to the detailed Funnel report. You can also choose a funnel from the left reporting menu or search for a funnel by entering the shortcut “f”.

  

  Viewing a funnel report

  A funnel reporting page looks very similar to a Goal reporting page. It starts with an evolution graph and sparklines showing you the performance of your funnel over time.

  

  In the evolution graph you can select the metrics you want to plot. We usually have an eye on the funnel conversion rate and the number of “Funnel entries” or the number of “Funnel conversions”. The conversion rate alone does not show you how your funnel is performing. Imagine the rate is always stable at around 20% and you might think everything is alright, but if the number of visitors that take part in your funnel goes down, you might have a problem as the number of funnel conversions actually decreases even though the rate is the same. So we recommend to not only have a look at the conversion rate. The report will remember the metrics you want to plot each time you open it so you don’t have to re-select them over and over again.

  

  The funnel overview

  In the funnel overview we are giving you more details about the funnel and goal related conversion metrics so you don’t have to switch between the goal and funnel report and compare them easily.

  When you analyze a funnel report, you might not always remember how the funnel is configured. Even though you specify names for each step you sometimes need to know on which pages a certain step will be activated. By clicking on the funnel summary link you can quickly look into the funnel configuration and also see all important metrics at a glance in a simple table without having to scroll.

  

  You might also notice the Visitor Log link which will show you all actions for all visitors that have entered this funnel. This lets you really understand how your visitors navigate through your website and how they proceeded, exited or converted your funnel on a visitor level.

  

  The Funnel visualization

  Below the funnel overview you can visually see where your visitors entered, proceeded, converted and exited your funnel. We kept the UI clean so you can focus on the important things.

  Most tools only give you the pages where visitors have entered your funnel but we do better and also show you the list of external referrers used by visitors to enter your funnel directly (marketing campaigns, search engines or other websites). Also we do not only show only the top 5 pages but up to 100 pages and 50 referrers (more can be configured if needed). When you hover a row, you will not only see the number of hits but also the percentage each row has contributed to the entries. Here you want to look and understand how your visitors enter your funnel and based on the data maybe invest in successful referrers, campaigns and pages. If the pages or referrers you expect to see there don’t show up, your users might not understand the path you had in mind for them.

  

  Next you may notice how many visits have gone through each step, in this case 3487 visits. The green and red bar lets you quickly identify how many of your visitors have proceeded to the next step (green) compared to how many have exited the funnel at this step (red). Ideally, most of the bar is green and not red indicating that more visitors proceed to the next step than they exit.

  

  Now the next feature is really valuable. When you hover the step title or the number of visits, you will notice that two icons appear :

  

  Those two little icons are really powerful and give you even more insights to really dig into all the data. The left icon shows you the visitor log showing all actions of each visitor that have participated in this particular funnel step. This means for each step you get to see all the details and actions of each visitor. This lets you really debug and understand problems in your funnel.

  At InnoCraft, we understand that plain numbers are often not so valuable. Only the evolution over time, when you put the numbers in relation to something else you can really understand how your website is doing. The icon to the right lets you do exactly this, it lets you view the row evolution for each funnel step. We are sure you will enjoy this feature. It lets you explore how each funnel step is doing over time. For example the number of entries for a step or how many proceeded to the next step from here over time. Here you ideally want to see that the “Proceeded Rate” increases over time, meaning more and more visitors actually proceed to the next step instead of exiting it.

  

  We are sure you will really love those features that give you just those extra insights that other tools don’t give you.

  On the right you can find out where your visitors went to, if they did not proceed any further in the funnel. This lets you better understand why they left the funnel and did not proceed any further.

  

  At the end of the funnel report you find again the number of conversions and the conversion rate. Here we recommend looking into the visitor log when you hover the name of the last step as you can analyze how each visitor converted this funnel in detail.

  

  Applying segments

  Funnels lets you apply any Piwik segment to the Funnel report allowing you to dice your visitors multiplying the value you get out of Funnel. For example you may want to apply a segment and analyze the funnel for visitors that have visited your website or mobile app for the first time vs. recurring visitors. Sometimes it may be interesting how visitors from different countries go through your funnel, the possibilities are endless. We really recommend to take advantage of segments to understand your different target groups even better.

  The plugin also adds some new segments to your Piwik letting you segment any Piwik report by visitors that have participated in a funnel or participated in a particular funnel step. For example you could go to the “Visitors => Locations” report and apply a segment for your funnel to see which countries have participated or converted most in your funnel.

  Widgets, Scheduled Reports, and more.

  This is not where the fun ends. Funnels defines new widgets that you can add to your dashboard or export it into a third party website. You can set up scheduled reports to receive the Funnel report automatically via email or sms or download the report to share it with your colleagues. It works also very well with Custom Alerts and you can view the Funnel report in the Piwik Mobile app. You can manage Funnels via HTTP API and also fetch all Funnel reports via the HTTP Reporting API. The plugin is really nicely integrated into Piwik we will need some more blog posts to show you all the ways Funnels advances your Piwik experience and how it lets you dig into all the data so you can increase your conversions and sales based on this data.

  How to get Funnels and related features

  You can get Funnels on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about Funnels you might be also interested in the Funnel User Guide and the Funnel FAQ.

  Similar to Funnels we also offer Users Flow which lets you visualize the flow of your users and visitors across several interactions.

• Subtitling Sierra RBT Files

  2 juin 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  This is part 2 of the adventure started in my Subtitling Sierra VMD Files post. After I completed the VMD subtitling, The Translator discovered a wealth of animation files in a format called RBT (this apparently stands for “Robot” but I think “Ribbit” format could be more fun). What are we going to do ? We had come so far by solving the VMD subtitling problem for Phantasmagoria. It would be a shame if the effort ground to a halt due to this.

  Fortunately, the folks behind the ScummVM project already figured out enough of the format to be able to decode the RBT files in Phantasmagoria.

  In the end, I was successful in creating a completely standalone tool that can take a Robot file and a subtitle file and create a new Robot file with subtitles. The source code is here (subtitle-rbt.c). Here’s what the final result looks like :

  
  
  “What’s in the refrigerator ?” I should note at this juncture that I am not sure if this particular Robot file even has sound or dialogue since I was conducting these experiments on a computer with non-working audio.
  

  The RBT Format
  I have created a new MultimediaWiki page describing the Robot Animation format based on the ScummVM source code. I have not worked with a format quite like this before. These are paletted animations which consist of a sequence of independent frames that are designed to be overlaid on top of static background. Because of these characteristics, each frame encodes its own unique dimensions and origin coordinate within the frame. While the Phantasmagoria VMD files are usually 288×144 (which are usually double-sized for the benefit of a 640×400 Super VGA canvas), these frames are meant to be plotted on a game field that was roughly 576×288 (288×144 doublesized).
  

  For example, 2 minimalist animation frames from a desk investigation Robot file :

  
  
  100×147

  
  101×149
  

  As for compression, my first impression was that the algorithm was the same as VMD. This is wrong. It evidently uses an unmodified version of a standard algorithm called Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS). It shows up in several RFCs and was apparently used in MS-DOS’s transparent disk compression scheme.

  Approach
  Thankfully, many of the lessons I learned from the previous project are applicable to this project, including : subtitle library interfacing, subtitling in the paletted colorspace, and replacing encoded frames from the original file instead of trying to create a new file.

  Here is the pitch for this project :

  • Create a C program that can traverse through an input file, piece by piece, and generate an output file. The result of this should be a bitwise identical file.
  • Adapt the LZS compression decoding algorithm from ScummVM into the new tool. Make the tool dump raw Portable NetMap (PNM) files of varying dimensions and ensure that they look correct.
  • Compress using LZS.
  • Stretch the frames and draw subtitles.
  • More compression. Find the minimum window for each frame.

  Compression
  Normally, my first goal is to decompress the video and store the data in a raw form. However, this turned out to be mathematically intractable. While the format does support both compressed and uncompressed frames (even though ScummVM indicates that the uncompressed path is yet unexercised), the goal of this project requires making the frames so large that they overflow certain parameters of the file.

  A Robot file has a sequence of frames and 2 tables describing the size of each frame. One table describes the entire frame size (audio + video) while the second table describes just the video frame size. Since these tables only use 16 bits to specify a size, the maximum frame size is 65536 bytes. Leaving space for the audio portion of the frame, this only leaves a per-frame byte budget of about 63000 bytes for the video. Expanding the frame to 576×288 (165,888 pixels) would overflow this limit.

  Anyway, the upshot is that I needed to compress the data up front.

  Fortunately, the LZS compressor is pretty straightforward, at least if you have experience writing VLC-oriented codecs. While the algorithm revolves around back references, my approach was to essentially write an RLE encoder. My compressor would search for runs of data (plentiful when I started to stretch the frame for subtitling purposes). When a run length of n=3 or more of the same pixel is found, encode the pixel by itself, and then store a back reference of offset -1 and length (n-1). It took a little while to iron out a few problems, but I eventually got it to work perfectly.

  I have to say, however, that the format is a little bit weird in how it codes very large numbers. The length encoding is somewhat Golomb-like, i.e., smaller values are encoded with fewer bits. However, when it gets to large numbers, it starts encoding counts of 15 as blocks of 1111. For example, 24 is bigger than 7. Thus, emit 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 8 from 23 -> 16. Still bigger than 15, so stuff another 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 15. Now we’re at 1, so stuff 0001. So 24 is 11111111 0001. 12 bits is not too horrible. But the total number of bytes (value / 30). So a value of 300 takes around 10 bytes (80 bits) to encode.

  Palette Slices
  As in the VMD subtitling project, I took the subtitle color offered in the subtitle spec file as a suggestion and used Euclidean distance to match to the closest available color in the palette. One problem, however, is that the palette is a lot smaller in these animations. According to my notes, for the set of animations I scanned, only about 80 colors were specified, starting at palette index 55. I hypothesize that different slices of the palette are reserved for different uses. E.g., animation, background, and user interface. Thus, there is a smaller number of colors to draw upon for subtitling purposes.

  Scaling
  One bit of residual weirdness in this format is the presence of a per-frame scale factor. While most frames set this to 100 (100% scale), I have observed 70%, 80%, and 90%. ScummVM is a bit unsure about how to handle these, so I am as well. However, I eventually realized I didn’t really need to care, at least not when decoding and re-encoding the frame. Just preserve the scale factor. I intend to modify the tool further to take scale factor into account when creating the subtitle.

  The Final Resolution
  Right around the time that I was composing this post, The Translator emailed me and notified me that he had found a better way to subtitle the Robot files by modifying the scripts, rendering my entire approach moot. The result is much cleaner :

  
  
  Turns out that the engine supported subtitles all along
  

  It’s a good thing that I enjoyed the challenge or I might be annoyed at this point.

  See Also

  • Subtitling Sierra VMD Files : My effort to subtitle the main FMV files found in Sierra games.

  The post Subtitling Sierra RBT Files first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.