Announcing my first Adobe Launch extension: YouTube Playback

Today is a big day for me. After 24 hours over 10 days, my very first extension for Adobe Experience Platform Launch has been published: YouTube Playback.

YouTube playback extension for Adobe Launch

As the name implies, it allows marketers to measure playback of their YouTube videos – without any custom coding! It performs the following functions:

  • Prepares YouTube IFrame elements with enablejsapi and origin parameters.
  • Detects all YouTube player and playback events, including playback state change, playback quality and rate changes, and player errors.

It also allows a selector to be used to select specific YouTube IFrame elements to track their playback.

Announcement of my extension in the Launch Developers Slack workspace

This has been a labour of love for me. It all started when I had to setup YouTube video tracking for a client in Adobe Launch. Like most marketers, I went with the tried-and-true method of adding custom code to work with YouTube's IFrame API.

But as I worked on that implementation, I realised that this was ripe for building an extension around. Surely I wasn't the only person who needed to track YouTube video playback? (And I'm certainly not!) So why were all of us resorting to custom code?

Being a programmer as well, I was in a perfect position to "convert" that custom code into a full-fledged extension to use with Adobe Launch.

Besides performing the heavy work of setting up your YouTube videos to be "trackable", my extension also exposes all of the playback and player events available through YouTube's IFrame API. Besides the obvious ones like "Video Playing", "Video Paused" and "Video Ended", I have also exposed events related to changes in playback rate, and playback quality. And even when the player has loaded (or unloaded) a module with exposed API methods!

Track all of the events that YouTube makes available in its IFrame API.

If you need to track YouTube videos with Adobe Launch, please install my extension and try it out.

How to install the extension in Adobe Launch

If you discover any errors with the extension, or if you have a neat idea that I should incorporate, please open an issue at my GitHub repository.

Also, read the blog post about the v1.2 update!

And read the blog post about the v1.5 update!

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