Video gating

When you next sign-in, you will see we now have a darker theme. This provides a nice contrast, distinguishing the various components from one another:

There have also been some more subtle improvements, such as analytics moving into a new reports section - in order to accommodate other categories, such as the interactions report (used in conjuction with video-gating).

Video gating

Two new types of overlay have been added as part of this update. One is gate. You will see that listed next time you create an overlay (the editor is located within the Overlays tab, found on each video’s page within the platform).

A video gate puts a barrier in front of the viewer, prompting them to perform an action. This differs from our call-to-action overlays, which are more unobtrusive. The reason why gating is useful is to prompt the viewer to provide some basic details such as their email address, their name or their company’s name directly within the player. That assists with lead-generation, since you then have some more information about otherwise anonymous viewers (assuming the video is embedded on a public page).

While we automatically ask for their email address, as this is the most common piece of information requested, we let you customise the panel by choosing whether to also ask for their name and company, and also what text to display both above and below the form. That helps explain what you are asking for and why. Further, the viewer can be given the option of closing the overlay panel without completing the gate form, or not to. So if that is not permitted, the gate only hides when they click on the ‘Submit’ button.

Image from ‘Elephant’s Dream’, Blender

A gate can be set to appear mid-roll (during a video) or post-roll (after the video ends). If your video gate appears mid-roll, then you can specify the time it should appear in a simple MM:SS format (for example to show it at 10 seconds, simply use 00:10).

There are yet more customisation options available: you can choose where to show the overlay within the available space - and also how big it should be. For added flexibility, either can be specified as pixels or as a percentage. For simplicity, you can set the overlay to take up the entire space available - and indeed for a gate, this is likely what you would want to do.

The data submitted from video gating appears in a new interactions report, found within the ‘Reports’ section of the admin panel. If you need to export the data, get in touch.

Overlay iframes

Another powerful tool is the ability to display a custom page within our player. That is done using another new type of overlay called an ‘iframe’. You will have seen that element before as we use an iframe as part of our embed code. Essentially it designates one part of a web-page to load in another page. The URL of that page is simply entered when constructing the new overlay.

This is useful because many SaaS platforms - particularly of forms or surveys - provide a link or URL to that form. So that means that you can prompt the viewer to complete that form or survey from within the player, as soon as the video ends. For example you may want to get some immediate feedback. Since it loads within an iframe, it means the data the viewer enters in that form is sent directly to your existing provider (such as Pardot or Salesforce) without you having to first export it from our platform (which has to be done with our in-house video-gating).

This type of overlay is normally used post-roll (at the end of a video). Also, it should normally be set to take up the available space (100%).

This image shows a feedback form we created in a couple of minutes using the popular getfeedback online-form provider - you could of course change the theme, colours, text and questions to suit your own requirements. We copied their provided link, created a new overlay, selected ‘iframe’ as its type, and entered that URL:

If you like video gating and find there are any other features you would like to see added to our professional online video platform please contact us at [email protected].

Updated: November 7, 2016