Last year as I worked on the analytics (social media & web analytics) for a mens grooming site dedicated to removing extra unwanted facial hair (details omitted). I marveled at the work that went into the Flash modules that took me into a virtual grooming party and by looking at the tracking code, Google Analytics JavaScript tagging that was put in place for the grooming website) saw what I expected I would find, a basic tracking script with no calls to any Flash tracking, calls built into Google Analytics that could have provided a lot of information on how the website was used by visitors.
All it took was adding some code here and there, not a big deal if you knew what to do.
It was so dumb, people put so much work into developing “flashy” content then decide to omit any real tracking; either they didn’t know or did not care most of the grooming site was invisible to any analytics tracking.
It happens way too often.
That situation is beginning to change, at least, if the developer has the latest version of Flash Professional CS5 and is adding the SiteCatalyst Extension. Hat Tip to my friend and consultant Dean Landsman for pointing me toward this information.
With the release of Adobe SiteCatalyst extension for Flash Professional CS5 a Flash developer can implement web analytics tracking of Flash content as they are developing a website.
In the past i’ve written about the lack of analytics tracking for websites, particularly Flash sites. I suggested tracking should be addressed by baking it in as sites are built. However, it was not easy to implement tracking for at least a few reasons (see the 4 reasons below):
1. Analytics has almost always been added as an afterthought, once a site is rolled out. Even if a developer wanted to add tracking scripts to Flash files they would not know what tracking to add and where or what data reports should contain.
2. Following the first point, there has been no easy way to add tracking before hand because different teams handle site development than analytics almost never talk to each other (even more true when the web content is developed by a third party).
3. The creatives/marketing group that put in the RFP don’t understand analytics tracking well enough and would not have known what to ask developers to implement, even if it were possible to request analytics tracking be added.
4. Analytics enablement for Flash files has been looked at as somewhat exotic addition few developers knew to add, if it were added it would significantly add to the cost of developing a website and that’s something no one is eager to do.
I looked at the Adobe supplied tutorial and it doesn’t look like that big a deal but it also doesn’t look that implementing tracking is easy, either.
For one thing your shop has to have Omniture (or at least, whoever is paying for the site needs to be running Omniture) and your Flash development tools need to be up to date. If you meet both conditions you can use the SiteCatalyst extension to “bake in” analytics tracking as I suggested earlier. If your shop doesn’t use Omniture, but instead, Google Analytics, WebTrends or something else, your out of luck (but you can still do the same enablements it’s just a little more complicated getting all you need into place).
Eventually Adobe will add Flash Extensions for other analytics platforms (though they don’t own the other platforms while they do own SiteCatalyst). It’s not clear to me if creating a Flash extension for SiteCatalyst only happened because Adobe owns the analytics now, or if adding the extension was just a marketing enhancement they made to sell more of the Flash Dev and SiteCatalyst platforms. Would it be just as easy to add a Google Analytics extension had Adobe wanted to? My guess is yes, and when they figure out it’s profitable enough, Adobe will add support for more analytics platforms.
It’s also timely Adobe is enhancing site analytics tracking just as Google announces full support for text crawling of Flash SWF files (not that there’s that much text in most Flash files, often being glitzy, multimedia movies). But think of one case this new tracking helps — it’s Radian6, a Social analytics platform written entirely in Flash.
Ha, just think of the widget tracking Radian6 can do if they want to, by using SiteCatalyst now.
On the other hand, to close out this post, nothing the SiteCatalyst Flash extension does is entirely new, the same enablements could take place manually in SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics or WebTrends, it would just have to be a more deliberate, time consuming set of tasks, but still doable. The SiteCatalyst Flash extension just streamlined the development process by adding Analytics enablement.
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