Comments on: Flash, SWFAddress and Google analytics

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 20:41:35 +0000

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?

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:37:05 +0000

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

By: Luís Neng

Luís Neng — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:37:59 +0000

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

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:17:27 +0000

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 );
}

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 04:32:56 +0000

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!

By: Markus

Markus — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:03:55 +0000

It is good! Yeeeeees… It is goood!

By: Micheal

Micheal — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 01:50:46 +0000

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/

By: Luis Neng

Luis Neng — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:25:16 +0000

We launched a new version of our design agency website today that fully supports SWFAddress. Take a look at http://www.spirituc.com

By: Antti

Antti — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:12:28 +0000

Yeah couldn’t agree more with you, Julia. Cool sites FlashJunior!

By: Julia Demchenko

Julia Demchenko — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:35:07 +0000

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 =)