Flash, SWFAddress and Google analytics
It’s been quiet here for a while, sorry about that, “been busy”.
Anyway, i was browsing through my news today and noticed that SWFAddress automatically gives google analytics hits. This means that if you build your site with the back button (etc) enabled using SWFAddress, Google Analytics will also track the visitors internal navigation, automatically! Nice! To some of you this maybe isn’t any news (1.1 has been available since February), I just hadn’t noticed it before.
To use this you don’t really need to do anything, as long as you have the _uacct="UA-xxxx-x"; part from the google analytics script, it’ll work fine. Also you don’t need to call it the first time, SWFAddress does it automatically.
<preach>
Now come on people. I know most of the people reading this are more or less experienced flash developers. Today it’s so friggin easy to have a fully functional, accessible and search engine friendly flash site that there’s not really a reason not to do it. Sure, it requires a little extra time to implement if you haven’t done it before, but when you’ve built a framework of some sort for it, it doesn’t really require any extra effort to implement.
Overall I think experienced flash developers should take responsibility for doing things right and show a good example to those who are learning. The people who say flash sucks have their reasons, but there’s a way to fix it (or at least parts of the problem).
Have it as a requirement, not a bonus, in your next project, ok? Thanks 
</preach>
via: danielyuen.hk
Comments
15 Comments
2007-07-03, 16:34 by FJ
year. it’s soooo coool
i use it for http://www.talentscreen.ch/ and http://www.stolze-openair.ch/2007/
2007-07-04, 12:35 by Julia Demchenko
I totally agree with this statement, Antti! And it’s more fun and self-satisfying to develop according to standards. Unfortunately, some flash-developers neglect existing possibilities. I hope it will change soon and accessibility on flash sites will become a trend =)
2007-07-09, 10:12 by Antti Author comment
Yeah couldn’t agree more with you, Julia. Cool sites FlashJunior!
2007-08-01, 0:25 by Luis Neng
We launched a new version of our design agency website today that fully supports SWFAddress. Take a look at http://www.spirituc.com
2007-08-20, 2:50 by Micheal
Absolutely Julia! After I discovered SWFAddress a few weeks ago I have been enjoying building fully-functional, fully-tracked websites. This has been a huge hit with my team and it’s really unbelievable how easy it is to implement.
I’ve done two websites so far using SWFAddress:
http://www.carbondesign.com/
http://www.siteofchampions.com/
2007-09-10, 17:03 by Markus
It is good! Yeeeeees… It is goood!
2007-10-27, 5:32 by Bruce
Yea this is cool. A couple of things I’ve noticed though.
1 – In IE the page reports a wierdly formated page title to GA.
For example, enter this url into IE:
http://www.spirituc.com/#/pt/grupo/servicos/
The servicos page displays ant the title bar of the browser reads: Spirituc – Servicos
All good, the problem is that the page title that gets reported to GA is “Spirituc#/pt/grupo/servicos/” it’s not a big deal but it messes up the page title reports in GA.
2 – Navigating to a page of your site using the back or forward button does not cause a page view to be reported to GA.
In general the systems awesome. These are not major issues but if anyone has solutions I would be most appreciative.
Thanks!
2007-10-28, 5:17 by Bruce
So I ended up commenting out the call to urchinTracker in swfaddress.js:
/*urchinTracker(_2e);*/
and just calling GA from ActionScript whenever a new section is displayed:
if ( ExternalInterface.available )
{
ExternalInterface.call( “urchinTracker”, “/” + sectionId );
}
2007-11-05, 19:37 by Luís Neng
Hi Bruce, thanks for your comment.
I double checked the GA Reports and only some of the page titles get mess up. What version of IE you are using?
I’m using IE7 and the weird URL thingy doesn’t exists…
Might be a browser version issue?
I also used your approach on other projects (but without SWFAddress): http://www.ibsbookmastertrends.com
2008-11-03, 18:37 by Jason
A search friendly flash site?
I know Google says their ‘indexing’ Flash now, but that claim is questionable at best – not to mention the fact that other workarounds are far from elegant
2008-11-08, 23:41 by Thomas
I’m using SWFAddress for the first time and wondering if there’s any additional coding needed in order for google analytics to record hits. I’ve added the GA javascript from google to the page holding my flash document. Is that all I need to do? Is the rest really automatic as Antti says?
2008-12-10, 21:46 by Matt
Jason: Yes you are right about Google indexing SWFs but that’s not really the point. Most content Flash sites are database driven so we can deliver the content as HTML and XML to be displayed within Flash.
Check out this site that we created that is fully indexed by Google et al:
http://www.redman-design.com
Try searching for ‘john rylands library design’.
2009-01-24, 23:10 by chris
Matt:
Hi, I’ve been through your redman design site, it looks great. I just wondered if you can explain how swfAddress is allowing dynamic xml to be indexed. I see that appears in the search results also – are you doing something clever for this? Or is google just taking its snippets from your xml?
2009-07-20, 13:34 by Matt
@Chris: Thanks. SWFAddress doesn’t really help to get the site indexed, but it does help to make the website search engine friendly. We can redirect search engine driven visits to domain.com/news/hello to the Flash version at domain.com/#/news/hello for Flash enabled browsers.
Creating a Flash website that is completely transparent to search engines is hugely important and should be recommended to clients as standard now.
2010-01-29, 18:18 by Jloa
Greets, guys.
I’ve just finished my new open source lib called SWFSize and wanted to share it with you, cause it really help A LOT.
In short: SWFSize is a small (really small) library for Adobe Flash technology that works in collaboration with SWFObject and provides control over the swf’s container metrics. By controlling the swf’s container metrics SWFSize gives you the ability to solve the MAC OS mouse wheel issue once and for all; don’t use workarounds – use the browser’s native scrollbars instead.
You can view the samples/get source/docs at the project’s home page.
Project home: http://chargedweb.com/swfsize/
It has already saved me time during my last two projects.
Hope it saves yours.
Cheers.
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