Tuesday,
18 Nov 2008
Google Analytics for Flash
A cool new library for Google Analytics tracking was released yesterday at Adobe MAX. I learned about it thanks to webmonkey and I wonder why still there is no such info in the Adobe feeds.
So far the tracking of page views and events using the free Analytics tool from Google was pretty straightforward but still hard for many Flash developers. Basically it requires you to include a few lines in the HTML, call some JavaScript from Flash and eventually watch for security restrictions. The nice thing about this new project is that now it will allow you to do all this with just ActionScript. The quality of the library absolutely exceeded my initial expectations and I couldn't resist to not blog about it. You don't have to miss it if your projects require such functionality.
I'll be looking into integration between SWFAddress and GA for Flash in the near future. It won't make it into the upcoming release but I'm definitely interested in playing with it.
Comments:
At first I didn't see the point since it doesn't seem too difficult to make the calls via ExternalInterface. But their overview makes some good points... such as using it on swf's that you don't control where they are placed (banners, games, video, etc). Right now you can use MochiBot for this type of thing, but its nice to have something plug right into Google Analytics instead of 3rd party software.
Great post, glad you pointed it out!
Yes, this is cool. I did some tests in both Flash and Flex yesterday, and it was very easy to get both page views and event tracking calls working. Page view stats were working as they should today. Now Google just need to get event tracking on the actual Analytics page out of closed beta to I can actually see my event calls I made ! ....
Hrm guess they are going after more of mochimedia's market with mochibot. I have used that for sometime and it is great for atleast user tracking, not really sections in the flash. Maybe this Google Tracking allows much better tracking within the flash itself.
Adding tracking calls manually to large Flex application is a pain. This add-on invokes GA tracking calls automatically: http://riatest.com/products/targetstat-flex-analytics.html