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
9 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
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