Overview

Voters Aide – a little flash app I made in some spare time to help prioritize the issues and positions for the 2008 presidential election. The app would let uses assign a weight to each of the big issues (0 – 100), and then read each candidates positions on every issue and record to which candidate they leaned (0 -100). The app did all the math then. Simply multiply the weight by their leaning and total it up. So if on the economy (which was reported the heaviest weighted issue overall) you say it is a weight of 90 and you lean one way +25 then your economy position is calculated 25 x .9 toward that candidate (22.5). To get a better understanding of it even though the election is over, go ahead and run through it yourself. I copied the selection of top issues and each candidate’s position from CNN’s website. I even randomized which side each candidate would show up on and left them unmarked so no one would be prejudiced toward their candidate. I wanted uses actual positions and priorities to speak louder than their preconceived preference or bias. I know this is flawed because the candidates position descriptions often were dead a give away, even sometimes saying the candidates name. Ideally it’d be great to simplify the positions but I wasn’t about to try to summarize it all! =)

Now that the election is decided though, I wanted to share what else I learned with this app. I included my google analytics event tracking methods in the voters aide app. So to everyone that has been using the app, I was watching!

Results

I used event tracking to see what weight was applied to every issue, to see which way users leaned on every issue and of course their final calculations which told them who they support. The reports are interesting because they not only tell you how many people apply a weight to an issue, but also what value. They say not only how many users actually continued through each issue and stated which way they lean, but also how far they lean and who they lean to! Not only how many users actually completed voters aide to the final screen which shows their calculation, but also which candidate they supported in voters aide and even by how much!
The results were very interesting in the weights people used to prioritize the issues. Maybe that is because is is easier to visualize? But the issues were ranked in the following order:

Here is an example of the report for the most important issue, economy. It stats which candidate had the users support and even how many times and the average value.

I’ll go ahead and say, (although the app was not designed to predict the president or even considered your location, it just counted how many times it reported to users which candidate they leaned towards) according to Voters Aide, John McCain would have won the election.  So more people who used Voters Aide lean McCain in the end, once they get to the end of the issues. I’d have to add that this is a very small sample size and even if it were larger, I never tested the app for usability and user understanding, so the end result doesn’t mean that much in the end. But as you will be curious here is the report for the final page events:

Anyways, great election. I hope all this change will be a change for the better.

Congratulations to everyone who is excited about the future & condolences to everyone lamenting the end of the world.

Here are some screenshots from my example tutorial of integrating Flash with google analytics event tracking showing actionscript to use for event tracking in flash . To get to your Event Tracking Reports (once it is enabled) you just click on the Content section in the nav list and then Event Tracking drilldown will give all details…

The graphic chart report showing events

Numeric event stats

Event Categories and actions with stats

All actions reported for the ‘ball’ category

All labels for category ‘ball’ and action ‘created’.

Enjoy, and let me know if you want more images. Check out the full post with source code here: Event tracking with google analytics flash integration tutorial

Many have read my Integrate Google Analytics with Flash Tutorial in which I express enthusiasm for the new event tracking at google analytics! Well, it’s been a while, but I was admitted to the Beta testing group! So I’ve now had the chance to play with event tracking a bit and wanted to publish my findings!

Overview

Almost a year ago Google Analytics announced their new event tracking model and have had help documents published and code samples up. And as with many of Google’s products the beta stamp has lasted a very very long time. Many have seen my earlier tutorial exploring using traditional Google Analytics Tracking from within Flash, and it does wonders to track your flash apps in this manner, but there is a problem with it. We’re using supposed object oriented concepts to track objects as pageviews. One thing is it really isn’t a very intuitive way to represent that data, and another it inflates your pageviews! The solution? the long awaited and announced Event Tracking model. I’ve been itching for this to be released so I could refresh my analytic tactics I use in my flash projects. No, to answer your questions, it has not been released yet, but I contacted Google and explained that I would be a great beta tester for this feature and after a bit of correspondence they invited me to join in the beta testing! This is good news for you too! Because I will tell you all about how to do it and even show you what the reporting looks like and when it is released finally, you will know what you’re in for after this sneak peak!

UPDATE: Here are the reports for this very example: Report from Event Tracking with Flash Tutorial

The very quick summary is this:

Note that the _trackEvent function is called on the pageTracker object itself. (initially Google had you instantiate a separate event tracker for every object (or category) you wanted tracked)

For example, if we want to track a ball. All the actions that can apply to the ball are: it being created, dragged, dropped, bounced, deleted… You get the idea. We can have direct user actions tracked or even automatic actions. If we have gravity and physics running, the ball may bounce a lot without any direct user interaction. But it will never be dragged or dropped without direct interaction. I’d recommend only tracking user interactions because who cares how often a ball bounces on your page (unless you’re doing an experiment, of course), want we want to know is how and when a user interacts with the ball.

category:string (required)

This is the name of the object you are tracking.

action:string (required)

This is the action that happens to your object you want to track.

optional_label:string (optional)

This can be more information to accompany the action.

optional_value:integer (optional)

A number to provide numerical information to accompany the action.

Steps

1. First, I’d recommend reading up about Event Tracking at Google
2. Decide your object oriented structure for tracking events. What objects do you want to track and what useful information do you want to get through tracking user interaction?
3. Make sure you have the new Google analytics tracking code on your page
4. Use these functions to communicate Google Analytics from your flash
   1. Call the main function with the specified parameters
   2. It will call the appropriate function and send the data to your pageTracker object through javascript with externalInterface calls
5. See the reports in your analytics profile! (if your a beta tester, or else, wait until it is released)

Source code

The tracking functions are below, I enhanced the earlier trackGA function I wrote about. Now you call trackGA with 2 required parameters, categoryOrPageTrack and action. categoryOrPageTrack is where you have to pay attention. I wanted to keep the ability to track pageviews as well as have event tracking, so as the first param you either send in the string ‘page’ to explicitly state that you want to track the page view, or you send in another string to state you want to track an event on that specified object. Action remains the same, the action you want tracked (either on the pageview, it is the path that will appear in your reports; or the event tracking will be the action tracked to the category)…
So to track a pageview I call

and to track an event to an object I call ball:

The trackGA function will rout your call to the appropriate place and send the info to Google through either the trackGAPage function or the trackGAEvent function.

Here’s the actionscript lines where I call the trackGA function:

Example

View example in it’s own html page, I even added a couple html buttons with javascript hooked in to show javascript event tracking implementation.

Download

Download Source

Concerns

I’ve noticed while putting this together that the calls to google analytics are not completely fullfilled, this example sends out correct calls to javascript, but (in firefox at least) a max of about 1 tracking call is registered with the tracking code every 5 seconds or so. I noticed this as I was monitoring the drag and drop events for each ball, although the drag and drop events are both fired, usually the drag event was received and the drop is not. After verifying that my code was consistent, I noticed that no matter how fast I interacted with the objects, the calls were much slower. I’m guessing this is a limit placed by the google team to keep us from sending pointless data such as is posted at the bottom of the event tracking implementation guide, titled Events Per Session Limit.

I’ve re-purposed an old project of mine, the interactive pog portfolio viewer, to FlashDen. I call it the pog portfolio because each work is represented by a circle, or pog, and you play ith it in the “bay” with different interactive physics configurations. When you click a pog you can view a close up image of that item and more details. The whole file has been cleaned up (code and graphics) and documented for easy customizations.It is a small file size as well, under 36kb swf!

This is mainly an image viewer, stay tuned for any updates, like video support etc.

INTERACTIVE IMAGE VIEWER WITH PHYSICS AND ANIMATION EXAMPLE!

View Details here at FlashDen

Works and configuration loaded in through a single xml file. Select works from the bay to view title, description image and a link (if applicable). Organize works with the tags or select all and choose the physics of the bay for interactivity control (gravity, spring, grid and friction).

It is fully customizable and fully driven by xml. The xml file contains values for configuring the swf, and also all the information about each work to be included in the portfolio.

Each work is loaded into the “bay�? as a round thumbnail or “pog�?. These pogs are animated with the interaction options (gravity, friction, spring and grid). The pogs are sortable by tags (parsed in from the xml).

The whole color scheme of the image viewer is configurable, or can even be set to random! Have a different color scheme every time your image viewer loads!

Clicking a pog in the interactive bay sends that thumb to the holding area and loads the close up into the focus window for that work. It also loads the details about that work into the detail box (to the right of the focus box). Each works needs a 50×50 thumbnail and a close up (max 375px x 270px) image. Focus images are all loaded in with an informative preloader and fade is once loaded.

Site easily integrates with Google Analytics to track user interactions within this flash portfolio!

All works in the portfolio are passed in through an external xml file, here is a sample work node from xml:

Download source at FlashDen

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Circlecube Files on FlashDen

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