Every video and audio player embedded on your published site reports what viewers actually did with it, second by second, with nothing to configure and no player setting to enable. You get more than a play count: you get the shape of attention across the asset’s timeline — where people arrived, where they stopped, and which moments they went back for.
What is recorded
While media is playing, the player reports back every five seconds. Each pulse carries the seconds of the asset’s timeline that were played since the last one, so the stored data is one row per second watched, per viewer, per session — not one row per play.
Each row is tagged with the playback event that closed the segment:
| Event type | When it is written |
|---|---|
end | Playback reached the last second of the asset |
pause | The viewer paused, or the player stopped for any other reason |
nav | The viewer navigated away or closed the page while media was playing |
Rows written mid-playback by a routine pulse carry no event type at all. That distinction matters more than it looks: the play and replay metrics count only rows that are untyped or end, which is what makes them a measure of seconds genuinely watched rather than seconds scrubbed past.
From these rows three questions become answerable: who watched, how long they watched, and where they stopped.
Where you see it
On the asset
Open a video or audio asset from the asset library and scroll to the Analytics heading. The section carries its own date-range picker and shows that asset’s summary row — unique viewers, total time viewed and average time per viewer.
Below Growth the section is still there, but the picker is gone and the summary is replaced by an upgrade banner.
On Know
The Most viewed videos card on the Know dashboard ranks every video you have by unique viewers, top eight, and clicking a row opens that asset. Its column headings are shortened for the card — Video / Viewers / Watch time / Avg per viewer — where the asset page and the metric catalog use the longer names. They are the same four numbers.
The two summary metrics
The summary metrics answer “which of my media is working” across every asset at once.
| Column | videoSummaryAnalyticsMetric | audioSummaryAnalyticsMetric |
|---|---|---|
| First column | Video — the asset | Audio — the asset |
| Unique Viewers | Distinct visitors who played it | Distinct visitors who played it |
| Total Time Viewed | Seconds of the asset watched, deduplicated | Seconds of the asset listened to, deduplicated |
| Average Time Per User | Total Time Viewed divided by Unique Viewers | Same |
Both sort by unique viewers, descending. The catalog names them Most Viewed Videos and Most Listened Audio; the audio metric keeps the word “Viewers” in its column heading rather than “Listeners”.
What “Total Time Viewed” counts
It is deduplicated per viewer. A viewer who rewatches the same thirty seconds three times contributes thirty seconds, not ninety.
That is a deliberate product decision, not an implementation detail. A raw total-seconds column existed and was removed as actively confusing: on any asset with real replay behavior it inflated in a way nobody could explain, and it made two assets with identical audiences look wildly different. There is no raw figure anywhere in the product to reconcile this against — if you want to see replays, that is what the replay metric is for, and it reports them separately and by second.
The six per-asset metrics
Each of the six takes one assetId and returns one row per second of that asset’s timeline, sorted by second ascending. Read them as curves, not as tables.
| Metric | Columns | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
videoPlayMetric / audioPlayMetric | Second, Event Type, Unique Users | The retention curve — how many people were still there at each second. It starts at everyone who pressed play and decays; the steep stretch is where you lost them |
videoPauseMetric / audioPauseMetric | Second, Event Type, Unique Users | Where attention breaks. A pause spike is not automatically bad: it often marks a slide people wanted to read, a URL they wanted to copy, or an instruction they went off to follow |
videoReplayMetric / audioReplayMetric | Second, Event Type, Total Replays | What people rewatched. Replay counts total repeats rather than unique users, because the same person watching a moment three times is the signal |
These six have no screen
None of the six is rendered anywhere in the CMS. There is no retention chart to open, and no amount of clicking around the asset page will produce one. They are reachable through the API, through the assistant, and over MCP.
They are ordinary list metrics, served by the same endpoint as every other one — the extra parameter is assetId:
curl -G "https://app.leed.ai/api/analytics" \
--data-urlencode "metric=videoPlayMetric" \
--data-urlencode "assetId=$ASSET_ID" \
--data-urlencode "start=2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z" \
--data-urlencode "end=2026-08-31T23:59:59.999Z" \
--data-urlencode "limit=600" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LEED_TOKEN"{
"name": "Video Play Metrics",
"headers": [
{ "name": "Second", "value": "second" },
{ "name": "Event Type", "value": "eventType" },
{ "name": "Unique Users", "value": "uniqueUsers" }
],
"values": [
{ "second": 0, "eventType": null, "uniqueUsers": 141 },
{ "second": 1, "eventType": null, "uniqueUsers": 140 },
{ "second": 2, "eventType": null, "uniqueUsers": 138 }
],
"count": 412
}Omitting assetId is an error rather than a site-wide result — a per-asset metric has no meaningful unscoped form. Below Growth the same request returns 402 upgrade_required. Asking the assistant or an MCP client for the same thing in plain language is covered in analytics for AI and MCP clients.
Media in the session record
When a session closes, it records how many distinct video and audio assets were played in it — not how many plays happened. A visitor who replays one video five times contributes a video play count of one.
That is the right shape for the question the field answers (“did this session engage with media at all”), and the wrong shape for “how much was watched”. Use the media metrics above for the second question. How a session is assembled and when it closes is described in how Leed tracks visitors — the same page covers the five-second pulse that produces all of this, and the fact that it runs on every plan.
Getting media onto a page in the first place
Nothing on this page requires a special player, an embed setting or a tracking flag: uploading a video or audio file and placing it on a page is all that is needed, and it is covered in video, audio and document assets. The eight metrics here sit alongside every other ranked table, with their exact declared columns, in the list metrics reference. Transcripts and text extraction are a separate Starter feature on the same assets, described in transcription and text extraction.