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What analytics are available from Digital Theatre+?

This article explains the usage analytics Digital Theatre+ provides today, who they are intended for, and - importantly - what they do and do not include.

We offer analytics through two channels:
  1. COUNTER 5 usage reports -  a self-serve, industry-standard set of reports you can download or harvest yourself.
  2. Customer Success usage reports - a richer PDF report prepared on request by your Customer Success Manager.

Both draw from the same underlying data, presented in different ways for different audiences.

COUNTER 5 usage reports

COUNTER 5 is the international standard for reporting usage of scholarly and educational digital resources. It is primarily used by libraries, library consortia, and institutions that need comparable usage data across the different content providers they subscribe to.

Digital Theatre+ offers the six standard COUNTER Release 5 reports (Platform, Item and Database reports, each with a master and a standard-view variant).

You can access these in two ways:
For an explanation of what each report contains and how to interpret the metrics, see Understanding COUNTER 5 Reports

If you are a school, college or trust and the language of COUNTER feels library-oriented, don't worry - the data it reports on (visits, content accessed, time spent with multimedia) is the same data that feeds the Customer Success usage report described below, which is designed to be easier to read at a glance.

Customer Success usage reports

For customers who want a more narrative, presentation-ready view of how their organisation is using Digital Theatre+, your Customer Success Manager can generate a PDF usage report covering a period of your choice.

These reports are well suited to sharing with senior leaders, faculty, governors, boards, or procurement teams as part of renewal conversations or annual reviews.

What a Customer Success usage report includes

A typical report contains:

  • Headline KPIs for the period. Each KPI is a single number covering the whole reporting period:
    • Total User Visits - the number of sessions made to Digital Theatre+. A session starts when a visitor arrives on the site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. The same person returning on three separate days counts as three visits.
    • Total Time Spent (optional) - the cumulative duration of all visits in the period added together.
    • Total media played - cumulative time spent engaging with multimedia resources (video and audio) across the period.
    • Total multimedia plays - the number of times a video or audio resource was started. The same resource started twice counts twice.
    • Total multimedia resources used - the count of distinct video and audio resources that were engaged with at least once. The same resource played ten times still counts as one.
    • Total written resources used - the count of distinct written resources (study guides, lesson plans, interviews, and similar) that were accessed at least once.
  • Summary of resource-type usage - a table showing, for each type of resource (productions, interviews, study guides, lesson plans, workshops, and so on), how many times it was accessed, how many unique resources were used, and how many are available in total on the platform.
  • Top resources used - for each resource type, a ranked list of the most-accessed resources during the period, including time-spent figures for video and audio.
  • Professional development and training summary (conditional - see below) - number of users who completed training, the total number of training modules completed, and certificates generated.

When the training section will and won't appear

The training section is only populated for users who sign in with a unique identity - typically customers using single sign-on (for example, Entra ID, Google Workspace, or a similar identity provider) where each user has their own account.

It will not be populated for users who access Digital Theatre+ through:

  • IP authentication (where anyone on your institution's network can access the platform without signing in individually), or

  • Proxy authentication (where users are identified only as members of the institution, not as individuals).

This is because anonymous access, by design, does not link training module completions or certificates to an identifiable person. 

How to request one

Contact your Customer Success Manager. Please let them know:

  • The period you would like the report to cover.

  • The audience for the report (e.g. internal leadership, governors, a renewals review).

Level of detail available

All Digital Theatre+ analytics are aggregated. Specifically:

  • COUNTER 5 reports are produced per organisation. How organisations are set up under your account was agreed with you when your subscription was created.

    • Some accounts have a single organisation; others split staff and students into separate organisations; others have one organisation per site or school; others combine both patterns.

    • If your account has more than one organisation, you receive a separate set of COUNTER reports for each.

    • If the numbers in a report look lower than you expect, check whether you have additional organisations whose reports you also need to review.

  • Customer Success usage reports are produced at account level - that is, usage across all of your organisations combined into a single PDF.

    • Our reports will tell you:

      • How many visits were made in a period.

      • Which resources were accessed, how many times, and for how long.

      • Which resource types are most used.

    • Our reports do not currently tell you:

      • Which individual users watched, read, or spent time with a given resource.

      • Which class, module, course, or cohort a piece of usage is associated with.

      • Which teacher or faculty member set or recommended a resource.

      • Session-level detail such as watch paths, pause points, or drop-off for a specific learner.

Why this is the case

Digital Theatre+ is used by minors in schools and by named individuals in universities and libraries. We intentionally limit how much we identify individual users in our analytics, which reduces the amount of personal data held about learners and aligns with the expectations  institutions have of their content providers. For IP- and proxy-authenticated users - common for library and institutional access - we have no reliable way to identify individuals in the first place.

The one area where we can provide some user-adjacent detail is the training section of a Customer Success usage report, which is available only where users sign in with a unique identity.

Class, group, cohort, teacher-attributed and per-learner reporting is not something we can provide today. If this is important to you, please tell your Customer Success Manager so we understand the demand.

Why COUNTER and Customer Success reports may show different numbers

If you compare the headline numbers in a COUNTER 5 report and a Customer Success usage report for the same period, they will often not match exactly. Both are accurate for what they measure; they simply measure different things according to different rules.

  • COUNTER 5 follows a strictly-defined international standard. What qualifies as an "item request", a "unique item" or a "session" is specified by the standard so that figures from different content providers can be compared on equal terms.

  • Customer Success usage reports are generated from our underlying analytics using broader, non-standardised counting. A "visit" is any session on the site; a "multimedia play" is any time a media player is started; a "resource used" is any resource that was accessed.

When the two sources disagree, COUNTER is the canonical answer for standardised content usage. The Customer Success usage report is a narrative view designed to be readable by an audience unfamiliar with COUNTER.