Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

Best Practices - Tracking Flash Files

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There’s often a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding where to even start when tracking a site that’s essentially only a Flash movie so this post will try to clear some of that up. I’ll make the assumption here that your data collection method will be client-side / browser-based (Google Analytics, WebTrends SDC / OnDemand, Coremetrics, Omniture, etc.) but try to keep the conversation as vendor-independent as possible however I will likely use Google Analytics for examples.

First things first, remember that when using pieces of software that only know how to track page views and visits and visitors, tagging and tracking a Flash movie is essentially no different than tracking any one of your pages, it’s just that it requires a bit more manual intervention.

Just to cover my butt here before I get yelled at, Coremetrics and Omniture are starting to get clever in terms of tracking things like “events” as opposed to the standard three metrics, but I’ll leave it for your account people to talk to those points.

The next thing you need to know is the method for which you’ll be collecting data - while this may not be as important to you, it will be very important for your web developer to know. Flash contains a function named getURL which allows the Adobe Flash Player to change the location of the browser, but also, getURL can be used to execute JavaScript on pages. As you may or may not know, all client-side web analytics applications use a tiny bit of JavaScript embedded in each page to grab all data and send it off to the data collection servers. So then with Flash’s getURL, we can “simulate” page views by making calls to the functions our analytics applications expose to us.

Before we go any further just remember, the rule of thumb for Flash movies is you’re going to either be tracking “Flash page views” or “Flash events as page views” - there’s literally nothing else so don’t over complicate things.

Also, let’s use a working example to help us out a bit and refer to Stella Hernandez’s personal photography site (which by the way is using Google Analytics right now!).

Tracking Flash Page Views

This mindset tends to apply more to sites that actually use a Flash movie as either the entire site itself, or an embedded mini-site within.

Think of a Flash page view in the same way you would think of any other page view on a site. When you load your homepage you expect to see a page view for the homepage. When you click one of your navigational links, say to the contact us page, you expect to see a page view for the contact us page. In a Flash movie, things are no different.

Step one of tagging your Flash movie is to map out what in your Flash movie constitutes a page view. Taking Stella’s site as an example, when her site loads, we get a nice intro Flash movie loading and then it’s onto the main site with navigation. If I were tagging this site, I’d evaluate where we are in the movie so far as one page view - the homepage. Sure there was a bunch of funky animation going on, but what’s important is that I didn’t actually do anything in order to get to the next “page”, I was just brought there.

In order to grab this one page view, simply add the analytics tracking code to the HTML page that hosts your main flash file and presto, we’ll get a page view for the homepage. We’re not doing anything to the Flash movie itself yet, just having the tracking code on this page gives us the initial information we need. Having the tracking code embedded on this page also will allow us to do all the subsequent tracking that we need to accomplish for the entire Flash movie.

Next let’s examine this “homepage” a bit more. From the looks of the homepage we really only have four top-level pages to the whole site:

1. Collection
2. Friends and Clients
3. Tearsheets
4. Contact

Although I’m not sure how the Flash movie was written, let’s assume that every time I click one of those links I’m actually requesting a new movie (although to the end user it looks like one smooth experience). Following that logic then, when I click the “Collection” link and load the new movie I want to track a page view. If this site weren’t a Flash movie, then I’d expect this to be a page viewed, right? So when the movie loads then we make a little call inside the movie and just for example’s sake, let’s pretend we’re all using Google Analytics:

getURL( "javascript:urchinTracker('/collection/');" );

You’ll have to work with your vendor to establish the exact code to add inside the getURL() part.

But with Google Analytics, we’ve successfully just created a page view for the homepage of the /collection/ directory. You might be thinking, “Hang on…there is no /collection/ directory” and you would be absolutely right. For Flash movies, we don’t care that there is no physical directory named /collection/ on the web server, we’re just interested in grabbing the user’s activity and we successfully accomplish that with this method.

With that little line of code, you’ll now get all the information you ordinarily would from any other page on your site. Information like: total page views, total visits (unique page views), time on page, exit rate and bounce rate (single-page visits). It’s that easy!

Let’s continue this example to the images contained on the collections page. If I were Stella, I’d be very curious to know things like:

• What are my top 10 photos on the site?
• How long are people viewing my photos?
• How many photos do people view on average?

The good news is all of these questions can be translated into commonly answered questions by web analytics applications:

• What are my top 10 photos on the site? - Content report of the top 10 photos with highest page views or highest visits (unique page views)
• How long are people viewing my photos? - Average time on page for all photo pages
• How many photos do people view on average? - page views per visit for just the photo section of pages

So following our first example, say we add a little piece of code so that when any image loads (I’m assuming the code for image loading is probably shared for all images), we make a little call with our handy getURL that looks something like this:

getURL( "javascript:urchinTracker('/collection/imagename.jpg');" );

With just this bit of code (substituting imagename.jpg for the actual image file name) added to all images for this section, we’re now able to answer all the questions above and more!

For the rest of the Flash “pages” on the site the same methodology applies, just keep these things in mind:

• Page views as you’d normally consider them are no different from page views as you’d consider them in a flash file - they just take a bit more manual intervention
• When choosing the fake “location” of your page view (i.e. /collection/), name the location however you’d like, but just make sure it’s something that clearly makes sense to the business owners of the data afterwards. In other words, make sure that your programming team doesn’t decide to come up with their own cryptic naming convention on your behalf
• getURL will quickly become your best friend on a site that’s fully Flash enabled

Tracking Flash Events (as page views)

Many Flash movies contain “events” that aren’t really considered page views in the traditional sense. For example, on Stella’s site, she has the controls for the music player at the top of the page where I can stop or play the music for the site. Now ordinarily we wouldn’t think of pressing the stop button as a page view because the content on the page I was looking at didn’t change at all, but to most analytics applications, everything has to be considered a page view (see my note above about the clever innovations that Omniture and Coremetrics are starting to make).

The good news about this is that if everything is a page view, then the method that we used to track “traditional” Flash page views above, is the exact same method we employ to track Flash events.

Using those stop and play buttons as a perfect example, in order to answer the question: “How many people seem to be annoyed with my music and just turn it off?”, we simply need to track the stop button of the music control and report back how many visits out of our total site visits press stop.

On the stop button then, the code we might add to the “onClick” event (for you web developers out there) might be:

getURL( "javascript:urchinTracker('/music_controls/stop_button_pressed');" );

Similar to above, we know there’s no page at /music_controls/stop_button_pressed/, but that doesn’t matter. All we want to know is that there was activity around this stop button. Once this tracking is in place, we’re instantly able to know how many visits out of the total visits to the site are clicking the stop button. While some may click it for fun, if 80% of visits click stop, it’s pretty safe to say Stella may be annoying some of her audience.

To Summarize…

Tracking Flash movies with client-side methods is nothing to be afraid of. As I hope I’ve shown above, if you think of everything in your movie divided between either a Flash “page view” or “event”, then you’re set to understanding how to track these actions.

From there, you’ll just have to be a bit creative to get the types of answers you’re looking for (i.e. “Is my music annoying people on the site?”).

Hope this sheds a little bit of light for everyone out there!

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