I’ve been working a lot lately on building marketing videos and tutorials for Datamartist, and one of the things i would like to do with them, is to know how many people have watched them and at what point they are dropping off.

I’ve been using the Camtasia Studio 6 product to build these videos and its pretty nifty software, but its call out functionality is not as robust as Adobe Captivate’s.  Now, according to this tutorial (found here originally) from Paul Betty at Regis University it is indeed possible to use a call out with the GA javascript function.  I have not however been able to get it to work thus far.  The call appears to be setup correctly and the google analytics code is in the page and functioning, but I’m not seeing the results in my reports.

Googling has proved relatively fruitless in this endeavor, as there are not a lot of resources in this area.   In fact, the video by Paul linked above is really the only one.  I’ll keep working on it, but it would be really nice if someone figured it out and posted something, you know,  for the good of human kind.

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Update!

As we have a license for this product we thought we’d hit up their support to see what we’re doing wrong.  It turns out that for Camtasia Studio 6 they are automatically adding “http://” to the beginning of any custom call out to a URL, breaking the javascript functionality seen in Paul’s video above, which was done in version 5.  There was some indication that this might be changed in a future release, but for the moment if you want to track video usage, either stay with Camtasia 5 or switch to captivate.