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Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

2.08.2008

Google Analytics part 2: tracking outbound links from within a Flash document using Google Analytics

>Geek-out alert<
Tracking intrasite links using GA is pretty easy: as long as you have the tracking code installed in the body of each page, Analytics is doing all the heavy lifting for you. The one exception would be if you have a Flash-based site, in which case you need to do the first half of the below bit. The second half applies to tracking outbound links, either embedded in a Flash file or in normal XHTML. Let's get to the Flash-embedded link-tracking first.

You can track any Flash or java-enabled event using Analytics. The trick is calling out to Analytics in each event (or action in Flash, say) using GA's JavaScript. Here's the note from Google. Specifically for Flash event, you just include an action that tells GA to create a link entry to a fake directory or page. Clicks on those actions in Flash are then recorded by GA as links to that directory/page, and you can then access stats for them in GA. Confused? Don't be, it's simple.

Say I have a map, like this one, and I want to know when people are clicking on, say, Boise. I would place this in the action for my Boise button:

on (release) {
// Track with no action
getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/city-clicks/boise');");
}

I'd then see an entry on my Analytics page for /city-clicks/boise and could measure how many times Boise was clicked. Remember, this works for _any_ action, not just clicks. Over, Hit, Release....lots of possibilities to measure how people interact with your Flash file here.

Now for part 2.

The map example above was developed for one of my clients, who needed a gateway page that their member public radio stations in different states could send people to when they wanted to donate money. They wanted one simple URL to announce on-air, to keep their branding and messaging consistent. Easy enough. As you can see on the example page, there's a list of stations below the map with clickable logos and text links to the member stations' giving/donation pages.

But we wanted something more compelling. Something that would make station location easy for geographically disprate listeners easy. The idea of a map came up, and we realized we could do something special with it in Flash: the user rolls their cursor over the map, landing on their city. The city's state is highlighted, and a balloon with the call letters and station logo appear, linked to the city location. Not too flashy, but it provides necessary information for the user (is this my station? If I click here am I giving to my station, or to someone else's?) and does it without making things too crowded (a list of stations and call signs or cities).


The problem was this: With all of this in Flash, Analytics has no way of tracking the links out to the member stations' donation pages. So all GA tells us is how many people visited the map page, not where they went afterwards. Not very useful when the client wants to be able to tell a particular station how many potential donors they sent them. Enter the JavaScript call mentioned above, but slightly modified.

Before we implemented this action, the action to send people from the Flash map to, say, Boise, looked like this:

on (release) {
getURL("http://radio.boisestate.edu/members.html");
}

...and they were sent on their way to KBSU in Boise. But they weren't being tracked.

So we added this:

on (release) {
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/outgoing/kbsu');");
getURL("http://radio.boisestate.edu/members.html");
}

and now Analytics reports each click for KBSU as a link to the fictional directory "/outgoing/kbsu", making it a breeze to track.

There are a few additional things to do, like placing your Analytics tracking code ABOVE the Flash element that contains your embedded tracking calls, but really it's pretty easy. I mean, it's not rocket science. So give it a try, and your Flash-based design clients will love you.

For more information on how to embed tracking code for outbound links, see these Google Analytics help documents:

How do I track Flash events?


How do I manually track clicks on outbound links?

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posted at 7:30 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.07.2008

Why Google Analytics matters. Part one: the overview

>Geek out alert<

Tracking links within your site is really easy using the Google Analytics tool. Oldsters may know it as Urchin, too. To use GA, you place a little bit of JavaScript code in the body of your XHTML which basically sends info to Google whenever that page is accessed. Or maybe little gnomes do it. I am not a programmer. In any case, Google gets the info and you can assess your access stats for any page with this code on it from within the increasingly-ever-more-useful Google Analytics tool.
But Alan, you say, I am just a designer. Who cares? Let the programmers take care of all this stuff. Well, wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell your clients "hey, we can measure how your page is accessed, where people go within your site, and what is so unpopular you might want to consider sending it out on the ice floe to die with dignity"? These sorts of metrics help the client (and you) to assess the value of:
  • their content (information)
  • their site's structure (information flow)
  • the usability of their site's navigation (flow control)

How would you like to be able to tell a client "hey, you should structure your site in a certain way so as to maximize your revenue"? I bet they would be willing to pay you more for such value. Eh? Eh? Never dismiss (more importantly, never let your clients dismiss) the value of measurability.

Getting started in Google Analytics is easy. Head on over to www.google.com/analytics/ and get going. Really. If you have a gmail account you are pretty much ready to go. I'll let the online tutorials and Q&A take it from there.

Once you have a site set up, there are lots of ways you can use GA to analyze data. Lots of books have been written on this, so I won't go over much more here. Let's just say that you can assuredly show your clients how awesomely their content is (or isn't) being received. You can then use these stats to retool the site structure and content to better reach your audience with the content you really want them to see. The web is iterative, iterative, iterative, itera----- you get the idea.
Next post: Solving the problem of tracking outbound links (or any links, really) that are embedded within a Flash document.

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posted at 4:27 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

12.03.2007

Ellen's got a new website


Ellen Bruss, my favorite boss of all time (from back when I had a boss), has a new website up for her firm, EBD. I'd like to say it was an incredible amount of foresight that made me recommend to Ellen that she use the very desirable three-letter "ebd.com" as her domain, way back in the mid-'90s, but really it was that I thought people would be too lazy to type out "ellenbrussdesign.com" into their browser. I can tell you this: I bet her domain is misspelled a lot less than mine.

This new site has a ton of whitespace in it: something we all wish more of our clients would allow into the concepts we create for them. It has a novel navigational grid, which overlays the viewing area. And lots of nice portfolio images from the last few years' of their environmental, collateral, print, identity, and web design work.

So: Yay Ellen, and crew! Good work.

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posted at 4:17 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

11.02.2007

The Beatles and Pink Floyd, sure....but Linkin Park?

Gracenote, the database that software like iTunes uses to grab title and track info, now has an interactive Flash map showing what groups and albums are popular in any given state or country. The amazing thing I learned is how popular the Beatles and Pink Floyd still are, despite their, shall we say, inactivity. Linkin Park is also quite popular across the globe (whaaa?).

The map is a nice example of how you can show a large amount of data in an understandable fashion. I wish there was some way of typing in a band or album name and having the map display relative popularity from country to country...as it stands now, you can only roll over one country at a time and view those stats by themselves. Why not have a color- or intensity-coding scheme tied to specific artist popularity?

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posted at 10:42 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

9.13.2007

Keep the Music Alive

i just finished a nifty little funding gateway page for a consortium of public radio stations that play classical music, and I am rather proud of the map. The rollover areas pop up little info bubbles with the location and logo of the stations represented. More stations will be added in the future.

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posted at 2:37 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

8.04.2007

Simpsonize me!



Not really a fan of Burger King, but their Flash Nerds made a pretty neeto application: take a photo of yourself over to simpsonizeme.com/ and Kang and Kodos will turn you into a Simpson-like version of yourself. It takes a while, but they got it pretty close to perfect from an application standpoint. Here I am, at left.

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posted at 7:14 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

5.22.2007

Flash Bug: Find/Replace doesn't work with Carriage Returns in the string

There's not much else to report other than what you see in the title of this post: In Flash CS3, trying to Find a string that contains a carriage return returns a negative result. This, obviously, sucks. Especially when you need to modify, say, a hundred or so instances of an ActionScript across a dozen or so files.

I reported this to Adobe a couple of weeks ago, when I first ran across this issue. They confirmed that it was, indeed, a bug, and submitted a bug report on it. So, hopefully, it will get fixed in the next update.

Now if they could just get the documentation not to suck so much, Flash might actually be a decent program....

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posted at 7:47 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments


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