It is, as everyone knows, best practice to use analytics code on websites to track visitors.
Pretty much every client we talk to expects metrics on their website (and we soon suggest them if the client doesn’t), but no one seems to know that you can track visitors in Flash applications too.
Video players, interactive widgets, dashboards, games; Flash is everywhere on the web. Entire websites can be built exclusively in Flash and it seems an awful waste not to track interactions with the Flash elements of a website. Examples of useful metrics include:
- How many people played a video?
- How long did they spend watching it?
- How many people reached the end of the video?
- How many people clicked that button?
- If it’s a game, how many people completed it?
- Which parts of a Flash app did people look at – and which parts did they ignore?
It’s really quite easy to implement Flash tracking: just add some code to your Flash application while it’s being developed and voila it’ll start reporting to your stats server as soon as it’s live on the web.
If you’re using Google Analytics or Webtrends, you just need to check out these pages to get started, and if you’re using something else then chances are that Flash will still be able to report for you if it was developed properly:
