Flash Google Analytics Tracking
If you’re anything like me, which I’m sure you are, then you really don’t like Flash components & SWCs either. They’re huge, cumbersome, and offer little to no introspection. If they don’t do exactly what you want out of the box, well, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s no taking them out of the box without a decompiler, and even then, who wants to maintain ugly decompiled code?
That’s my number one reason for avoiding Google’s Analytics SWC. Well, that and the enormous file size. I mean, tracking with Google Analytics isn’t rocket science. It’s not like Omniture tracking or anything (Stay tuned for the Omniture Tracking post). So why all the meat?
It comes down to completeness. Google Analytics can be extremely powerful and do a lot of cool things, things you’re never going to use. If you’re like me, which we’ve established you are, then you’ll probably only ever need two types of Google tracking in the life of your project: pageviews, and event tracking. On top of that, the Google Analytics SWC gives you the wonderful power to not have to embed their javascript in your HTML page by bundling in all sorts of hardcoded scripting internally. That’s awesome, right? If you’re building an AIR app, probably, but I’ve yet to encounter an analytics team who isn’t concerned about getting pageview information for those visitors that don’t have the flash player installed, or that don’t wait for your SWF to load. Useful feature, meet my friend, the complete lack of a useful situation.
So you’re probably asking yourself, “Wait a minute. Is this going to turn into one of those rant posts that ends with him giving me a handy-dandy class that solves all the worlds problems?” Well, yes and no. I’m working on my WorldPeace.as class as we speak, but for now you’ll have to settle for a tracking class and helper.
Meet my homebrew GoogleAnalytics class. She’s not very complicated. At her core is a simple external interface that calls the JavaScript tracking methods. I’ve added some helper methods for simpler tracking, but that’s it. Everything I’ve ever needed from Google Analytics in about 95 lines with comments. The class requires that you have the Google Analytics script block included in your HTML page somewhere, but you surely have that already. Also note that the tracking calls use the asynchronous JS tracking method. What’s the implication of that? If you plan on tracking an exit link, there’s a chance you’ll navigate away before the tracking proceeds. There is a JS synchronous method you can use which coupled with the synchronous behavior of ExternalInterface will ensure your tracking gets completed, but I find a setTimeout delay of about 200ms does the job just as well and is all but invisible to the end user. Take your pick, gut my class, force it to do amazing things I never thought possible. Enjoy!
All that Availability talk in the previous class probably got a little annoying. It’s really there to handle testing environment problems that I run across all the time stemming from ExternalInterface.available. That property doesn’t do the best job of telling the truth, and a lying property is about as useful as your rapper friend as a character witness. The following utility class patches some of the holes that ExternalInterface leaves gaping. If you don’t feel like using it, do a find and replace in the GA class and change “private static var _availability:Boolean = Availability.available;” to read: “private static var _availability:Boolean = ExternalInterface.available;”. You’ll need to fix the imports as well, but you’re an actionscript rockstar, so I don’t need to cover that.
As always, my code’s free to use and distribute. I don’t need a credit or shoutout or anything, though I always welcome comments and feedback. Find it useful, think of a better way to do things, have a bone to pick, feel I’m dissin’ your rapper homies, the comment box is below.