Tracking your visitors and attempting to better understand them is a large part of having content produce successful results on the web. Since the days of visitor counters displayed proudly on every site, along with dozens of animated gifs to the days when site were designed solely with efficiency and conversion in mind. There are many services that will do this for a fee and other that will do it for free. A popular free web analytics tool is provided by Google.

Google Analytics, by far is the absolute best - is started by including JavaScript on each page the user wishes to track. This JavaScript loads larger files from the Google webserver and then sets variables with the user’s account number. This JavaScript is used to track and log information of the user who is visiting the site. This includes GEO location, where the come from, what they click, how long they stay, what they view, what keywords are working, and even a map overlay which tells you in percentage values who is clicking what on your site the most. You can even create reports to measure the performances of certain design elements or funnel campaigns. If you dont know, click here to get it.

Here we're going to discuss how you can use this same technology to track what flash does. (note: when you use this technique, it provides valuable user data, but the data is sometimes fishy as its more on the developer to have the proper instance calls)

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Steps:

1. If you haven’t already, install Google Analytics on your site. (Note that your analytics tracking code must be placed on the page above the flash call(s) to _trackPageview or urchinTracker)
2. Determine which events in flash you want to track.
3. Place in the external.interface code in your actionscript at the specific event(s).
4. Watch the events get logged in you Google Analytics Reports!

Example:

Here’s a simple example, say you want to track how many times an object is clicked or dragged by a user or how many times it bounces (something that could be tracked but doesn’t necessarily have any required user interaction). In this example flash file I have a ball which bounces off the walls and users can click to drag and even throw it, press the spacebar to create more balls and toggle the gravity on and off with the arrow keys (up is weightlessness, and down is gravity). Each of these events has code to communicate with Google Analytics JavaScript and track the events. I made my own function to call the google analytics code. Do I hear “but sometimes I want to use the new version of Google analytics, and sometimes I want to use the old one…” Have no fear, this function works for either one, or even both. If you’re not using the newer code the calls to the functions in the new code (pageTracker._trackPageview()) will be ignored and vice versa, if you are using the new code, then the calls to the functions in the old code (urchinTracker()) will be ignored, since the functions are not defined. You can track virtually anything with this method. I’ve exaggerated greatly in this example- just to show the variety of different ways this can be used. You might want to make certain the things you track will be useful and relevant for you.

track Google Analytics actionscript function

Calls to Google Analytics actionscript function