Google Analytics For Flash: Tracking Your RIAs

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Not long ago Google announced that Google Analytics can track Flash applications. That was a great development for Google Analytics, but how many people have actually used the code or the API for tracking their Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?

If your knowledge of web development is limited to HTML and CSS then you may not know what an RIA is. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from developing one.

Matthew McNeely wrote a great piece on using Google Analytics for Flash open source code. At first, I thought the abbreviation for their website folder was gatorflash (as in Gator Flash), but then I realized it stood for Google Analytics For Flash, hence gaforflash, a fine distinction. But that’s a weird digression.

Anyway, McNeely talks about how you can use Google Analytics to track page views and events such as downloads and interaction with your RIAs.

The first thought that comes to mind for use of the tracking for Flash is the obvious: Video viewing. But the applications for this tracking code go much further than mere videos. If you have useful widgets that can be downloaded or embedded on other websites then you can track how many people are using your widgets. If you have a game site that uses Flash and other high-impact Web code then you can track how many people start your games, how many finish the game, which games they play, how long they play for, etc. And you can view all of these statistics within Google Analytics. How useful is that?