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Exclude Admins from viewing analytics
Richard O'Beirne
Crackerjack
It would be very helpful to be able to exclude specified usernames from analytics. Our admins generate a lot of usage while processing videos which aren't of interest in terms of measuring 'real' views. (The workaround is to export and filter out usernames in Excel.)
24
Comments
God yes. Perhaps doing this by role would be easier/better?
"Exclude Admins from viewing analytics"
Second Charles.
Re-upping this one. Our admins generate a lot of views. Larger events aren't that big of a deal, but for smaller events a few admin views can really skew our data.
I agree 100% on this. Editing the CSVs to exclude viewers in order not to skew data is time consuming. I've had to do this many times.
Perhaps an "exclusion" user group can be created for listing. This list could be edited as needed.
Agree!
Just adding a comment since this item was updated to "Tracking". If implemented, it would be very important for us to still be able to audit views made by an admin as well as end users. Maybe this could be implemented as a checkbox in the analytics UI that will exclude support staff. I don't know how it would best fit to name this option, maybe a string that could be set at the site level so each campus can name it how they describe their support staff locally?
@Michael Espey We're changing the status of items here because we are implementing a new way of consolidating feature ideas+votes from the forum with a separate internal-only feature idea system we have. So when you upvote something here, it is fed directly back into our main dashboard for ideas. This will make it much easier for us to look at and report on the highest requested features from customers. We're changing the idea status to make sure we don't miss any on clean-up.
It might be worth looking at some of the changes Instructure recently made to their process for incorporating community feedback. They had like more than a decade worth of suggestions which weren't getting implemented. They started by grouping them into buckets, chose a few buckets they wanted to prioritize, then asked people to vote for the buckets. Then they will prioritize certain ideas within those buckets and work on them in the next 6 months.
They just started but it might be worth watching the process.
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/New-Ideas-amp-Themes-Now-Live/ba-p/552918
I agree this would be a very helpful feature -- BUT, there are some considerations to keep in mind.
"Views" could be thought of in two ways. People who watch a a video, and those who open it up to help with tasks (Admins, support staff, etc.). For this reason, I'm all for filtering out those excluded users from a Views Analytics report (and other up-reported metrics).
However, the Views Analytics also provides insights into who has access and has accessed a particular video. We have need from time to time to audit that admins aren't watching videos that they shouldn't be (e.g. closed meetings that they weren't invited to), or on the flip side, to show that that admin DIDN'T watch a video that they had access to (respecting privacy). Perhaps there's another way to report these views with a security/auditing lens more effectively in a different part of the Admin panels so that it doesn't weigh down the normal Video View metrics. But we definitely SHOULD NOT get rid of the ability to see what a privileged user has actually seen, so to keep auditing integrity intact.
Great points. Auditing and access compliance should be viewed differently than analytics.
It did also occur to me that perhaps Admin views should not preclude a video from being archived. (At least not for content they don't own.) If an Admin views their own content, those views should reset the archival clock.
This would be very helpful! Thank you for sharing this idea. We also would like to be able to exclude admins from our analytics data.