This might be my favorite custom event.
When someone plays an embedded YouTube video on my website, an event fires.
That event captures:
• URL it was on,
• Title of the video,
• Percentage of the video that was watched
• Total time watched in seconds
I add a column to my Ads Manager to see how often people are watching these videos from my ads.
You can even set this event as a performance goal and optimize for it. That might make sense if the video is the focus of a page. You could create a custom conversion using this event based on a specific video watched.
If you wanted to do some crazy detailed retargeting, you could also create a custom audience based on that video.
To set up these events, I’m using Google Tag Manager to manage my pixel. Since YouTube is a Google product, GTM has built-in triggers that make these events possible.
You can learn more about some of the custom events I'm using here:
https://www.jonloomer.com/9-custom-events-that-fire-on-my-website/
Are you using custom events?
