Man I love how Ajax, video, and Flash based Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are getting incorporated into the next generation of websites. I could talk for hours about the greatest and latest buzz around cool flash/Ajax websites, online games, rich modular experiences, integrated video, etc.; but instead I’m going to talk about web analytics programs we have in our tool box today and how you can use them to analyze all those cool technologies like you would any regular HTML site.

I recently heard someone complain about a Flash based tool they had that looked and worked great (well at least they thought so); however they couldn’t measure the effectiveness of the tool without investing in building custom analytics and reports. They’d invested most of their budget to ensure the tool had all the bells and whistles; however they couldn’t effectively realize the ROI on their investment.

I asked them why they didn’t use their web analytics program to analyze the effectiveness of the tool and generate reports much like any other website. They said the only stats they got were basic page view data like how many times the page that contained the Flash tool was accessed, how long people spent on the page, where they came from, etc. All the regular stats you’d expect from a page view analysis, however that didn’t tell them how users were interacting with the tool, which part of the tool they were using, if they were converted in the tool, the path/flow the user took, which section of the tool they were abandoning, etc. They thought they had to build a custom application that could provide the data their web analytics product couldn’t. They were surprised when I told them this wasn’t the case. A good web analytics product can provide all the data needed and more, you just need to know how to configure it correctly.

First let me explain why most people don’t think a web analytics product can track within a Flash tool. Most analytics products are initially configured to only report when a page is loaded. They show the Flash file only being loaded once each time the page is loaded and have no way to measure what the user did when using the tool. This is true for most embedded media (Flash video, Flash applications, applets) or pages that only load once that contain Ajax, show/hide DIV CSS Layers, etc.

Normally this is fine for HTML sites, however you can configure web analytics products that rely on JavaScript calls (like WebSideStory’s HBX) to track any element on a page even after the page has been loaded because you can call the JavaScript again using Flash ActionScript, Server Side Scripts (using AJax), or other event based JavaScript functions.

Most popular ASP based analytics products like WebSideStory HBX, Coremetrics, Omniture, etc., rely on JavaScript to provide the actual data rather than analyzing log files. Typically you place a piece of code on every page. When the page loads the code triggers some JavaScript that provides the page name, category/section, funnel/path, conversion data, etc., to the web analytics product.

Well what if you could trigger the JavaScript call from within a Flash tool, and provide whatever data you wanted to the web analytics product stating a different page name, category/section, path, etc. An actual page view is only recorded as such because the JavaScript passes the data to the web analytics product saying it’s a page view. In theory I can browse the homepage of a site, and a Flash movie on the page might call the JavaScript 50 times telling the web analytics product I’m on 50 different pages, however the reality is that I only loaded the homepage once. Once you think of a page view as any call to the JavaScript you can start wrapping your head around how you’d configure the Flash tool to provide all the data needed through the web analytics product without having to build a custom application.