Google Analytics

Google Analytics For Adobe Flash

by admin on 20/11/08 at 11:47 am

The Google Analytics team have just unveiled a solution for web analytics tracking for Adobe Flash applications. Owners of websites incorporating Flash applications now have access to the rich analytics data that owners of ’standard’ html websites do. All that is required is the insertion of an ActionScript 3 API.

The analytics code is inserted into the Actionscript code of the Flash site. When visitors click links, their behaviour can now be recorded even though those links are embedded in the Flash application. It’s hard to tell from their video guide, but it looks like you have to insert Analytics code into each event handler. I could be wrong on this, but if this is the case it will mean more overhead in terms of labour than introducing Google Analytics to a html site.

Sprout debuted the use of Google Analytics in Flash applications, as was announced at Adobe MAX 2008.

Tracking libraries for both Flash and Flex are available here and there is also some Google Analytics for Flash documentation available too. In addition, here is the entire open source AS3 code base, so if you’re a developer you can improve its functionality and contribute to the code base.

Although this recent development is relatively new, some people have jumped on it already. Check out Corban Baxter’s approach here.

Of course, Google provide some help on implementing Google Analytics for Flash here, but it’s often much more illuminating to read experiences of real people using it. So here is Tiago’s take on it.