Google Analytics Rolling Out Tracking for Flash/Ajax

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Google Analytics is rolling out some new features that will be of interest to Flash/Flex developers. As part of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking you will be able to expose your Flash events to Google so that you can track how people are interacting with your site. At first I thought this was like Nitobi’s RobotReplay for Flash but after talking to Andre, we came to the conclusion that it’s not quite that cool. However there’s still some interesting stuff here. The line that everyone keeps repeating is this:

These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics. In order to provide a way for you to define and track a wide variety of applications and interactions, there will be a new tracking module called ga.js.

But I wasn’t really sure what that meant. So after discussion I think you can actually expose your Flex/Flash events to this JavaScript file using ExternalInterface so that they show up on your Google Analytics page. That means anything in the Flex/Flash event model could potentially be reported on. A drag operation, a button click, even a custom event. This could be a really interesting way to track Flash and Flex apps so if anyone has a demo or an account, I’d love to hear what you think.

[tags]Google, Flex, Flash, Web Analytics[/tags]

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  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    That rocks! I’m going to implement this in to my current project right away.
    Now all Google needs is a flash version of Google Adsense (so Flex/Flash-based sites can easily start earning money from ads in their app)

  • http://www.apcoworldwide.com David Sanchez

    I am not surprised with this simple step Google is taking. Flash Event tracking is a standard procedure with most advanced Third Party Ad Servers like Atlas DMT (Microsoft/aQuantive) and Double-Click (Now part of Google). But I can tell you it make an impressive difference in terms of reporting metrics to clients.

  • http://http:www.java-entrepreneur.com Gautam

    certainly this will help the cause of search engine optimizers who will be able to track their websites in a better manner

  • http://fernandocomet.blogspot.com Comet

    In fact I implemented together Google Analytics + Nielsen Netratings in a bank application.

    You can have more info here:

    http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27243&query=analytics+flash&topic=&type=
    http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27206&query=analytics+flash&topic=&type=

    Once you have your Urchin Code in the website, I did something like this:

    function searchAndReplace(holder, searchfor, replacement) {
    temparray = holder.split(searchfor);
    holder = temparray.join(replacement);
    return (holder);
    }

    function sendAnalytics(flashaction:String){ var analitycs:String=”/”+searchAndReplace(flashaction,”.”,”/”);
    ExternalInterface.call(“urchinTracker”,analitycs);
    }

    closeButton_bt.onRelease=function(){
    sendAnalytics(“application.close”);
    }

  • http://blog.wrench.com.au Jason

    The Google website doesn’t really articulate the difference between the current way of tracking Flash events (with calls to javascript within Flash) and the new way. I’m tracking full Flash sites just fine with GA and don’t believe there are any artificially increased page view metrics being recorded. I’ll be interested to see what changes the ga.js code makes compared to the urchin.js (other than the obvious removal of urchin from the name).

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