Comments on: Integrate Google Analytics with Flash | Tutorial

By: Loony

Loony — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:55:22 +0000

There still seems to be a problem. But thank you very much anyway ; I appreciate your time.

By: Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:39:34 +0000

@Loony - if you look closely you’ll see the type… traceGA != trackGA, my bad.

By: Loony

Loony — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:11:56 +0000

There seems to be a problem with the line:
traceGA(”buttonRelease/66″); It appears yellow meaning there is an error.

Here is what I have once I added the code you gave to me:
on (release) {
traceGA(”buttonRelease/66″);
_root.gotoAndPlay(66);
}

function trackGA(action:String) {
ExternalInterface.call(”pageTracker._trackPageview(’/”+action+”‘)”);
trace(”Google Analytics Tracking: ” + action);
}

Now the button is inactive. Any idea?

By: Loony

Loony — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:56:41 +0000

wow thank you so much for being so quick at replying. I’m trying it now.

By: Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:22:04 +0000

@Looney - try this:

on (release) {
traceGA(”buttonRelease/66″);
_root.gotoAndPlay(66);
}

function trackGA(action:String) {
//Old Google Analytics Code
ExternalInterface.call(”urchinTracker(’/”+action+”‘)”);
//New Google Analytics Code
ExternalInterface.call(”pageTracker._trackPageview(’/”+action+”‘)”);
trace(”Google Analytics Tracking: ” + action);
}

You can send a different action on each button, and analytics will tell you reports for each button pressed. Or you could put the analytics call onto the timeline, so when they go to a certain frame the function is called to log the tracking.

By: Loony

Loony — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:54:49 +0000

Hi.
Thanks for all the info.
My website is all flash (swishmax to be precised).
I have a menu with several buttons. Once a button is released the movie goes to a frame and plays it. How do I add google analytics to track that somebody clicked that button?
Here is the simple code - but unfortunately no answer:

on (release) {
_root.gotoAndPlay(66);
}

Please make it real simple! Thank you

By: Mukesh

Mukesh — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:58:23 +0000

Thanks Evan. Actually I had waited for 48 hours before contacting you. What you suggested about Firebug sounds cool. That will help me in finding if I am making any syntactical or other mistake.

Thanks,
Mukesh

By: Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:52:46 +0000

Mukesh - Nope, it should show up, be sure to give about 24 hours for the hits to show up in your reports. But in this example I make calls to trackGA(”ball/”+this.ballNum+”/pressed/”);, so you can search in the top content page of your reports for a page containing (in this example) “ball/” or “/pressed/” and if everything happened correctly they should show up there.

If you aren’t as patient as that though, you can see live evidence of the tracking being sent to google analytics… Get the firebug extension for firefox and you can easily monitor network calls. This will show you the header and parameters sent with all calls to google analytics, you can see the path that gets sent! Pretty cool, eh? It will look like this “GET __utm.gif?utmwv=……sending tons of parameteres!

By: Mukesh

Mukesh — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:12:34 +0000

Hi,

I tried this code, but in my Google Analytics page I don’t see any separate entries for the events that I created. Do I need to create some corresponding entries in GA settings manually too?

Thanks,
Mukesh

By: Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:36:25 +0000

@Avangelist - This is a tutorial to track an event (something that happens in Flash) in Google Analytics as a pageview.

This is a simple example about how to implement this idea. It can be pushed much further. This example shows how to track events with this ball (user interaction and not) in Google analytics. If we wanted to havea button going to another page it may be better to just put the analytics code on that page.

You have a swf with buttons, which click through for pages? are these “pages” separate html pages or frames in your flash?
You want to track the click of the button? That would be the exact way I track clicking this ball in the example. I’m placing the tracking code in the onPress event for that movieClip, as you can see in the source file provided.

_root.ball.onPress = function () {
startDrag(this);
this.dragging = true;
trackGA(”ball/”+this.ballNum+”/pressed/”);
}

thanks for reading