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How Vidyard tracks and identifies viewers

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Brendan O'Driscoll
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Vidyard tracks and identifies viewers using browser cookies.

Each time someone watches a video, Vidyard will check for an existing visitorId value in the viewer’s browser. If one does not exist, a new visitorId will be added to the browser to keep track of and associate view data with the viewer for every video they watch going forward.

Key tracking behaviors

There are a few things to be aware of in regard to how Vidyard handles tracking cookies:

  • Vidyard will always track when viewers watch your videos, even before they become identified. If and when a viewer becomes identified, Vidyard will associate previous anonymous viewing data with the viewer based on the visitorId in their browser.

  • If a viewer clears their browser cookies, they will be considered a new viewer and assigned a new visitorId the next time they watch a video.

  • Since cookies are unique to a browser, if two people share a single computer, their viewing data will be associated with the same visitorId in Vidyard

Identifying your viewers

All viewing data remains anonymous in Vidyard until you can associate the viewer’s visitorId with an email address. View data is only shared with connected MAP/CRM platforms once a viewer has been identified.

There are 6 main ways to identify a viewer:

  • Sharing video link with tracking
  • Adding a Vidyard form to your video
  • Sharing a video in a Vidyard Room
  • Using the "vyemail" parameter to associate an email address with a video view 
  • Setting up an integration with a MAP (marketing automation platform)
  • SSO-secured sharing pages/hubs

Sharing video link with tracking

A video link with tracking is automatically created whenever you share a video with the Vidyard app in Gmail, Outlook and other popular email communication tools.

If you want to share a one-to-one video outside of email and identify your viewer (for example, in a LinkedIn direct message), you can create a unique video link in Vidyard that includes tracking to share with a specific person.

When your recipient clicks on the tokenized link in an email or message, Vidyard will direct the viewer to the video’s sharing page and associate the view with their email address.

Here’s an example of a tokenized video sharing link: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/<uuid>?vyetoken=<alphanumeric token>

Tracking tokens have their own set of behaviors to consider, depending on which email platform you are using and the number of email recipients. Learn more.


Adding a Vidyard form to a video

A form is a type of Action (CTA) that allows viewers to self-identify when watching a video. A basic Vidyard form contains a single field for an email address, but more custom forms might contain additional information fields.

When your recipient submits their email address in a form, Vidyard will associate the video view with their email.

Forms can be added to different positions in a video (before, during, or after playback). You can change settings to set whether the form is skippable, mandatory or only appears for brand new visitors to your page.

Sharing a video in a Vidyard Room

A Room is a digital space that lets you bring buyers and sellers together to collaborate, share resources, and keep stakeholders mutually informed to move deals forward.

All contributors to a Room must sign in or create a Vidyard account in order to collaborate with each other. Because they are signed in, any contributors are automatically identified when they watch a video that you've shared to a Room's timeline.

Using the vyemail parameter

vyemail is a value that you can manually add to a video’s sharing link or embed code to associate the viewer with an email address.

When added to a video sharing link, it looks like this: share.vidyard.com/watch/<uuid>?vyemail=viewer.name@email.com

Most commonly, the vyemail parameter is used to identify viewers when sharing your video as part of an email marketing campaign from your MAP, CRM or other email marketing tool (for example, MailChimp).

When combined with an email merge tag from your marketing platform, vyemail allows you to uniquely identify each viewer in your campaign’s email distribution list.

Simply add the email merge tag from your marketing tool to vyemail following the = sign. This indicates where each recipient’s email address will be dynamically inserted upon sending your message.

For example: share.vidyard.com/watch/<uuid>?vyemail={{contact.email}}

Integrations with marketing automation platforms

Vidyard has integrations with several common marketing automation platforms (MAPs), including HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Pardot.

When a viewer watches a video on a page with your MAPs tracking script, the integration allows Vidyard to look up the viewer’s email address from your MAP. This assumes the viewer has previously been assigned a cookie from your MAP and their email address has been obtained through interactions with your various marketing assets and activities (forms, webpages, email campaigns, etc).

In addition to sharing viewer/visitor identities, the integrations allow Vidyard to pass video view data to your MAP’s contact records. The data can then be used in lead scoring and segmentation, automation workflows, and reporting.

SSO-secured sharing pages and video hubs

You can use single sign-on (SSO) to require that viewers authenticate to your company’s identity provider system (IdP) before they are permitted to watch videos on a Vidyard-hosted sharing page or video hub.

Common IdPs include Okta, Azure, OneLogin, G Suite, and many others.

When pages are secured with SSO, Vidyard obtains viewers’ email addresses as part of the SAML assertion received from your IdP when they sign in to access the page with your video(s).

This means that Vidyard can always identify permitted viewers on pages that require sign in via your IdP.

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