Guest Speaker - Curtis Morley

Yesterday, my web analytics class was lucky enough to have Curtis Morley come speak to us. He taught us more about things we can do with Google web analytics especially in conjunction with flash pages. Below I've included what I found to be the highlights of his presentation.

In web analytics, there is a lot of data, so you need to know where to look. More specifically, you need to know what path is important to the information you want

On the blog AboutNiceo under the "Analytics Reporting Suite bets for AIR 1.0 available" there is a link to download, or you can go directly to the page of download through this link. I have yet to experiment with it, but it seems exciting. The site describes it as "The Google Analytics Reporting suite is an Adobe AIR application that brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all features of Analytics. See the feature list for more info." One of the coolest features I've seen is that you can actually select a range of dates to view.

If you want to track specific actions using Google analytics, you can create a new profile by following these steps:

• Log in to Google Analytics
• Select Account Settings (top left)
• Select the + button or "Add Website Profile"
• Make sure the "Add profile for existing domain" radio button is selected
• Give it a profile name and select finish
• Select edit for that profile
• Select Add Filter
• Add your filter
• Example: select the "include only traffic to a sub directory" then type in the sub directory
• Finish

By applying this filter to your profile, that profile will include only the data that you have told it to. When adding a filter, make sure to double and triple check the spelling. A missed or added character will impede your ability to receive data.

With FLASH
Google’s analytics through flash tells you to use a string called geturl. It makes it so javascript is sent across constantly (like constant mouse over’s).

The following piece of code contains how it is actually sent (an example used in class):
Private function sendAnalytics (trackURL)
{
GAShared.date.today = theDate.getDate();
GAShared.data.topFive = this.topFive;
GAShared.flush();
ExternalInterface.call("pageTracker._trackPageview", "/[insert your subdirectory name]/" + trackURL);
}

The last line of code is what is really important…that line is what actually sends the data. Make sure to import the external interface class at the top of your code. Then you’d say to send the analytics whenever something happens (color to bw, or mouseovered) by calling sendAnalytics and passing in the trackURL.

It was great to have Curtis come speak to us. I haven't had previous experience coding in flex or flash, but I still feel like I learned a lot about how to setup the web analytics on pages coded in flash. If you are interested in learning more about him or voting on his logo go to curtismorley.com.