Marketing Pilgrim

Ever wondered how your visitors interact with the Flash movie on your website—are they watching it, skipping it, using it at all? Now you can find out: Google Analytics has added Adobe Flash tracking. The program is an open source API.

With the API, Google Analytics will now be able to track various uses of Adobe Flash in a website, including the number of viewers, whether the creative attracts new users and the effectiveness of the flash at getting visitors to take action. The API supports the Flash visual component, Flash AS3 library, Flex MXML component, and Flex AS3 library.

The GA blog includes a video showing page view tracking, event tracking within the Flash content and engagement tracking in action:

Google explains the change in terms simple enough for even me (for someone employed in a computer-related field, I know virtually nothing about programming):

This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

Google announced their capability to crawl Flash files in June, so this may be a natural extension of that development.

What do you think—will you be using Google Analytics to optimize your Flash files’ performance?