This is another set of events tracked automatically with Enhanced Measurement. If your page has the YouTube player embedded, this will track automatically if YouTube’s Javascript API is turned on, through the video’s URL having “enablejsapi=1”. If you haven’t included this when embedding the video, the GA4 tracker will try to add it automatically.

Note that this happens for videos that are directly on the page. If a video is added to the page dynamically (eg. after the user clicks a button), you may need to add some tweaks to track it, including possibly using Google Tag Manager to add YouTube’s iframe API library to your page (more here).

If your YouTube video is delivered through a 3rd party embedding or sharing service (for example, there are a lot of these for WordPress), this tracking might not work.

This data is only for videos embedded on your website. Most of your video’s views might be on YouTube itself so you may want to supplement it with your YouTube Analytics data.

Finally this tracking won’t work for any other video players, although there is some custom 3rd party code available to track players like Vimeo (more here).

The main dimensions captured by the tracking are:

• Video provider: this is YouTube but if you’ve implemented custom tracking for another player, you should set the dimension to that player’s name.
• Video title: the video’s name as from YouTube.
• Video URL: the YouTube URL of the video. In most cases it’s not nearly as meaningful as the title.
• Video duration: the length of the video.
• Video percent: what percent of the video has played?

The main events tracked are:

• video_start: The user first clicks play on the video.
• video_progress: Fires at 10%, 25%, 50% and 75% of the video.
• video_complete: The user reaches the end of the video.

GA4 also tracks some other user actions (like pausing a video) but unless watching embedded videos is a key part of your website’s proposition, it probably won’t be relevant.

In terms of reporting, for most websites the main thing you’d need to see is the top list of videos by title, how many people are starting them and what their completion rate is. This will show whether people are actually starting the video and how they’re progressing. Some videos might have more starts but less completions (possibly because they’re longer).

You should also note that a lot of people will close the video just before it ends, a bit like pausing the microwave with 3 seconds to go, so you may want to look at how many are getting to the 75% mark as a better proxy of who’s watching.

By analysing these events, you can also find out if playing a video correlates to website conversion. Is the conversion rate of someone who started watching a video on your landing page higher than the conversion rate of people who were on your landing page and didn’t watch the video? If not, it’s at least possible that the video is turning people off.