WordPress can be a volatile place for web video. Javascript, Flash, and HTML5 elements — these are all things that historically have trouble making it from the post editor to the user’s screen. External scripts get stripped, inline scripts get mangled, HTML tags and attributes get removed. And this is all happening at multiple levels: in the editor itself and when the page is displayed.

Of course, there are some good reasons for this behavior, and I think it’s important to understand that many of these limitations are intentional. For example, external scripts and Flash are blocked by default to prevent common hacks like cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. IFrames can’t be transparent because, theoretically, a malicious iFrame could take over the entire page. Javascript is often mangled so that it can be validated as XHTML, but the WordPress parser is imperfect. And TinyMCE, the editor used by WordPress, has its own set of filtering rules!

In the past, our solution at Wistia was to provide an oEmbed link and a WordPress plugin to enable it. This worked well enough for a while, but it’s ultimately an imperfect solution. Our feeling at Wistia is that, if you need to use a plugin, then why shouldn’t any Wistia embed code work flawlessly?

To get the Wistia WordPress Plugin, go into the Plugins section of the WordPress admin panel, click “Add New,” and search for “Wistia.” You should get a result for “Wistia WordPress oEmbed Plugin” or “Wistia WordPress Plugin” — we’re trying to get the name changed. Click Install Automatically, activate it, and you’re done! Now any embed code generated from Wistia’s SuperEmbed Builder should work flawlessly in your WordPress posts. Paste it when you’re in HTML mode, then feel free to switch editing modes. The embed code might change slightly, but it should still work just fine!

One of the most important things to us is to make sure that all of our customers’ videos can be played anywhere without any hassle. Like seriously. It’s more important to us than feeding our families, or even ourselves. We’d totally fast for three days in solidarity if something went wrong (but please don’t actually hold us to that). Our videos have always been able to play on iOS – we use a separate HTML5 encode and switch seamlessly based on what you’re using to view a particular video.

However, there have been some little lingering problems with iOS that we wanted to solve. Native video implementation on iOS differs on the iPad and iPhone. One of the most noticeable issues with mobile video for developers is that if you have a dropdown menu element on the same page as a video element, and the dropdown menu opens over the video, then the user can’t click the dropdown menu. The video loading process on iOS isn’t optimal: it starts with a black screen, then moves to a still image, then a play button. Since our customers put often put in the effort to customize the Wistia player, we want them to be differentiated from the default on mobile devices as well as desktops. We want our play button with the color our customer chose, with proper feedback when they click on it.

With Wistia videos on iOS, when you pause the video, the still shows the last thing you played, not the default still that other video players default to. The player has the native controllers, then, when you get to the end of the video, it returns to the main play screen. In addition, iOS is extremely buggy about loading the initial still for a video — it will work for a while, then when you use the iPad more, it just shows black. Our change fixes that scenario. Usually, when a video is over, a user has to click “done” to go back to the page, but with our Call to Action plugin, you’re forced out of fullscreen so you can see the call to action immediately. All of this means that the player plays well with other elements on the page in addition to staying intuitive for users. 

In addition, we simplified the mobile implementation of our Turnstile email gating tool; now, when you click the play button after entering your email, the video just goes, instead of having to click an additional play button.

But that’s enough talk; if you’re viewing this post on a mobile device, give it a whirl!

Sometimes more options can add confusion, but the power of these tools outweighs the problems — not to mention we know you guys are smart enough to survive Wistia with the training wheels off! Here are the features that we’ve newly activated in all accounts. As always, let us know if you have any questions!

• Video SEO
• SSL Embeds
• Data API (and a new developer forum for people using it!)
• Playlists
• Domain Restrictions
• Email Marketing
• Stats Export

This new engagement graph separates watches from rewatches (the former graphs were basically the top line of this graph). The first view by an individual of any part of the video is counted in the blue portion of the graph, while any subsequent views are counted in the orange (so take note: 16 views worth of orange could be one person watching 16 times, four people watching four times, or 16 individual rewatches — you can come to further conclusions in the individual heatmaps).

With the new engagement graphs, you can tell more than ever which parts of your videos are the most engaging, whether it’s because they’re the most interesting and most confusing, and continue to improve the videos you make in the future based on this information. Happy analyzing!

Gated videos should be no stranger to you if you’ve been following Wistia for a while. We’ve been using them for our content offer videos like Video Marketing 101, but we are mean and selfish so we wanted to keep all the fun for ourselves. Okay, no, actually it was just a lot of work — so when people would ask us how to do it, that was basically our answer. However, now that all of our hard work on getting Stats 2.0 out the door has come to a close, we’re finally launching Turnstile, our pre-roll email collector!

Turnstile is especially useful with our recent identity tagging feature that’s part of the recent update to Wistia’s analytics. Admittedly, it may not be quite as fun to look at the stats when you don’t have any identities tagged. Using Turnstile, you can tag the identities of more of your prospects, so you don’t just get new contact information — you also have a way to tie all of their activities together to figure out whose information might be most valuable.

Learn more about Turnstile or play with a live demo of the SuperEmbed Builder to see how it works!

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of a Wistia + Get Smart Content integration! Now, combining the power of our video marketing tools with their content personalization technology is so easy, even my mom could do it! Okay, it’s not quite that simple, it does still require using the Internet, but it’s pretty darn easy.

Individually, both Wistia and Get Smart Content help marketers convert more website traffic into leads and customers. Combined, these tools form a powerful marketing 1-2 punch that we’re excited to unleash on the world.

Want to try it out the functionality? Just head over here to get rolling!

*Note – you need both a Wistia and a GSC account to take advantage of the integration, but this link will give you access to free trials of one or both services if you are not yet a customer of either.

It’s the small things that make us happy and complete. Here’s a fun new small thing that makes SuperEmbeds feel more complete: now, when you customize the color of the Wistia player, the play button on popover thumbnails will also change. You can experiment on the demo page or by embedding any video in your Wistia account as a popover. Happy customizing!

To access IP Filtering now, go to Account Dashboard > Embed Settings and enter the IPs you’d like to exclude!

-

When we launched the new stats, we decided to try another thing that was new for us: instead of only explaining the new feature on a feature page or in a blog post, we also added a popover video inside everyone’s accounts so that no one would find themselves nose-deep in stats with no idea what was going on. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible for everyone to find the right resources and know what was different — without any startling surprises — and hopefully reduce support requests on our side.

The window had a quick (and very engaging, apparently — 88% of people finished watching!) video introducing the new stats, then offered two options for viewers: to close the popover and explore or to visit the feature page:

Because of our new identity tagging feature, we could see that 34% of people who watched the popover video within their accounts then made it to the feature page to watch additional videos and learn more there before engaging with the new feature within their account. In an email, a 34% click-through rate would have been absurdly high. We were able to use identity tagging to see how people viewed all of the videos, and how those views related to one another, on an individual basis. We didn’t see any noticeable increase in support requests with the Stats 2.0 launch – something that we did notice when we launched SuperEmbeds, which we didn’t use a popover for.

Being able to see what our viewers watched, by individual, in sequence, allowed us to make connections that would previously have been a mystery. Have you made any interesting new connections yet using Stats 2.0?

Today, we’re really excited to announce the birth of a new family of features that have been in the works for quite some time. If you haven’t viewed the feature page yet, you can learn more about the basics of Stats 2.0 there. Here, we want to explain the philosophy behind these new features, why things are set up as they are, and why it took time to make these new analytics part of Wistia.

When we started with video analytics, our first big feature was heatmaps. The earliest incarnation of heatmaps just showed whether a viewer had watched a certain part of a video or not — an area was either green or white. Next came colorized heatmaps that displayed more layers of viewing information, with areas that were rewatched showing up as shades of yellow, orange, and red. People really liked this, and with the addition of engagement graphs to summarize this information on a video-by-video basis, we basically reached “Stats 1.0,” the stats Wistia has been offering for some time now. Since then, we’ve made small tweaks based on user feedback, but many higher-level changes ended up in the big ol’ bucket known as “Stats 2.0,” and as that bucket became deeper, it became an increasingly daunting project to actually tackle. We’ve been gathering all of this information since the very beginning — you can view your stats starting from the inception of your Wistia account — but it was important to make sure those numbers made sense.

In the end, we’re happy we waited until now to launch Stats 2.0. Instead of working blindly on adding features that just sounded good, we were able to base our decisions on tons of unique feedback and information that only we have to create not only the next generation of stats for Wistia, but also a whole new way of approaching video analytics in general.

Our biggest worry was losing the simplicity of the old Wistia stats. Stats 1.0 didn’t offer an overwhelming amount of information, but what it did offer was carefully selected to be as powerful as possible while making it almost impossible for users to get lost. One of the biggest problems with all-encompassing stats tools like Google Analytics is their complicated nature — in order to get exactly what you want, you have to put in a lot of effort, and while you’ll eventually be able to view your data in the precise way you need it, there’s a much higher learning curve. We wanted to put a lot more power into our stats without complicating the simple flow we were proud of. We wanted to focus on what’s valuable so we wouldn’t dilute what’s really important with clutter.

One big way we’ve made stats easier to browse is that the stats area now mirrors the main area of the Wistia app, with project-level organization and project-level stats. We’ve also made several small changes to existing features to make them feel less cluttered. Hovering over certain areas, such as heatmaps, displays more information, but only when you want it, with everything contained in the rectangle. On graphs, axes are not labeled until mouseover.

Stats 2.0 is playful — you can interact with almost any element of your stats and access deeper layers of the information you care about, but we worked hard to keep the interface intuitive. Another fun fact: we built our own graphing library for the Trends stacked area graph — we’ve played with a lot of other libraries but we wanted this one to be suited perfectly to our unique task.

As always, it’s important to us that an audience isn’t just an amorphous blob. For some companies, the aggregate numbers are most important, and for others, every individual viewer counts. You’ve always been able to view heatmaps, but now, you can also track individual viewers across all of your videos. See who’s the most active and identify who’s been engaging the most with your video content.

We hope you enjoy playing around with Stats 2.0! Or, you know, not playing and being really, really stoic and serious. Keep the feedback coming, we’d love to hear what you think!