Tutorial: How to Add Interactivity to Your Vimeo Videos

Welcome to Part 2 (of 2) of our series on adding interactivity to some popular online video players. In this tutorial, we’ll look at interactivity features available in Vimeo. Part One of this series covered interactivity within the YouTube player, so be sure to check out that if you're using YouTube.

I'm a big fan of Vimeo and everything this platform offers. Not only is their quality unmatched, but they also have a ton of player options that are incredible marketing and lead-generation tools.

Even if you're not creating marketing videos, you can still create clickable calls-to-action within the Vimeo player that can encourage your audience to do something after watching your content.

The features I'll highlight in this demo come with a Vimeo PRO account, which is a paid option (Figure 1, below). While it's not free, this is one of the more economic and easy-to-use players out there in online video land.

Figure 1. Vimeo Plans & Pricing Options

Custom Controls

Starting with having a video uploaded to Vimeo, navigate to the video settings for any video. Then, navigate over to the Embed choice in the side menu (Figure 2, below). Here, we're going to add two different interactive elements to this video. These will work when the video is embedded onto an external page or website.

Figure 2. Click here to open the Embed options for your video.

Once you have the embed page open, you'll see a sidebar with several options (Figure 3, below). Scroll down to the Custom Controls section. Here, we're going to add a custom logo to our player (indicated in Figure 3). I like to use this feature to watermark my videos. Not only will this logo show up on my videos, but I can also link to this logo by enabling this option and entering a URL. It's a pretty cool way to ensure that people are getting back to your website or page even if your video were to get embedded in some other place.

Figure 3. The Custom Controls section of Vimeo’s Embed options sidebar