Home >
This article will focus initially on the strategies behind web analytics in RIAs and afterward will provide you with some resources to get started adding web analytics to your applications and interpreting the results.
Web analytics: What's the big deal?
You may have already heard about web analytics. It's a loosely-used term that describes the tools, the collection, reporting, and the analysis of data gathered from users that are accessing your website or application. The web analytics industry has matured a great deal in the past decade, moving from the more primitive Logfile analysis to today, where analytics solutions are robust and extremely powerful.
A while back, I summarized why you need web analytics in your Flash or Flex apps on my personal blog. Weakened economy or not, getting data for how people are using your application is an eye-opening experience. Web Analytics can provide you with some valuable bits of information. Here are just a few:
- Invaluable usability feedback
- Defensible ROI for your app [and you]
- Data-driven decision-making (no more "my gut tells me we should ...")
Where to Start
You're ready to start collecting and analyzing, but how? Consider the following steps:
1. Choose your web analytics solution.
If your company has already purchased an enterprise solution, this decision may have already been made for you. Otherwise, if you're looking for cheap as free analytics, your options are going to be a bit limited, but definitely not useless. Google Analytics is now a prominent player in the web analytics industry, and you guessed it, it's free.
2. Understand the "page view" paradigm.
Web analytics software is still emerging from a Web 1.0 world, where every page is its own and should be tracked independently.This unfortunately still applies today, and looking at your RIA in terms of individual page views may prove to be difficult. However, web analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Omniture have provided a great deal of customization when you're sending a tracking event. Google Analytics, for example, also allows you to track "Events," not just individual page views.
I would recommend sitting down with stakeholders and defining how you want your application to be viewed on the web analytics data collection side, what transactions are meaningful, and how deeply you want to go with your collection and analysis.
3. "Analyticise" your app.
Web analytics providers will be able to give you access to add tracking calls to your application, mostly through Javascript, or, in some cases, full ActionScript API's. This will require you to dig into your code and, based on your previously-defined strategy, add the appropriate calls. It might be advisable to set up a "test suite" of sorts before going live, so you can ensure that your content is being tracked accurately. In some cases, such as Google Analytics, you can enable a "debug" mode.
4. Now what?
Your first look at the data that's being collected will be both fascinating and overwhelming. There is most likely far too much for you to analyze and make sense of at first glance. Furthermore, there is even debate among experts about what metrics are most important.
Here lies another crossroads: if your company already has a web analytics hire or consultant, then you may not need to concern yourself with analytics analysis. But if you're like me and you want to get your hands dirty with analysis, then you'll probably want to start training yourself to be a developer by day, web analyst by night.
Here are some fantastic getting started resources for analyzing your data:
- Google Analytics' Conversion University
- Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day"
- Omniture's Industry insights blog
- Web Analytics Demystified
Conclusion
Web analytics solution providers have made it remarkably easy to integrate your applications with tracking. At worst it's a Javascript call, at best an integrated API. With tools like Google Analytics so easily available and useful, there's no good reason why you shouldn't start looking for places to put your tracking codes. All it takes is some time, planning, and a little research to get you on your way.
Some resources I used for this article:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics
- http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/docs/web-data-sources.pdf
- http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/recommended-reading/?utm_id=54
- Google's Cache of eWeek.com's article "Competition in web analytics is fierce" (not sure why the original link isn't working)
- Coremetrics Web 2.0 whitepaper
- gaforflash
- Webtrends article on Flash integration
Tag Cloud
Podcasts & Screencasts
@InsideRIA on Twitter
Follow InsideRIA on Twitter
Facebook Application Development
I wanted to play with using Google Analytics to track how people were using a Flash video player I made for one of our product pages.
I used it as an excuse to learn how to get Flash to talk to ga.js and to learn how people were using the player.
Every button has an event tied to it named according to the function of the button. Ok, that should have been obvious. But I also trigger events if the video reaches 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent viewed. This lets me know how much of the video people are watching to determine their attention span or maybe just how interesting the video is. It's not that detailed but it does give something I didn't have before.
It's just a video player but the info I've gathered will be very helpful in the next one that I build in terms of which functions I make more prominent in the player. I agree with Cahlan that having analytics in your web applications is rather useful and should be considered when planning the app.
I recommend you check out Woopra: http://www.woopra.com/
It's an amazing live web analytics application.
@Travis
One of the things I didn't even talk about was how more integrated and detailed tracking can tell us so much more about an application than simply sticking the tracking code on every page. Your video player was a perfect example. Thanks for sharing.
@Ronny
I really liked the idea of Woopra and signed up for the beta ... but it seriously took me like a month to get approved. Haven't had much time to play with it since then. Any idea why the long lag time? Maybe it was just me.
We (the team that I work with) have considered to do the same thing on a video player for educational purposes.
We believe as well that having feedback analysis based on user behavior of your UI maybe critical. Media advertisers should be asking for this allready....
@Daniel - I suggest you do it, it was easy to set up once I understood what was expected.
Another thing I did was trigger an event once the player loaded (event = initialized) and triggered another event if a user clicked to start the video (event = start).
Therefore I have a decent idea of how many people were given an opportunity to even see the video and how many from that number chose to start it. That was one of the most helpful bits of information I got out of it. I can compare the initialize event to the pageviews for the page to determine how many people fail to see the video in the first place for various reasons, such as a Flash blocker.
The "page view paradigm" is the trickiest bit here, I find. It all depends on what you to track, I guess. One other "alternative" use I have found for analytics is tracking which way users do things: In RIAs there are often many ways of getting the same result. When studying that big button in the middle of the app and the item in the menu that do the same thing, analytics sometimes reveals interesting things.
Ariel
You have a very, very simple solution on that if you're using Flex to develop your application. It has a built-in history functionality for you application and you can easily track and make permanent links to your site's sections. You can read more on:
Great digg! I use Google Analytic. I heard great stories about the Yahoo!’s analytics tool. I’ve also used 4Q I perceptions for survey (user satisfaction analysis), but didn’t know they were coming out with web analytic solution.
Why would you want to do that?” Practitioners, on the other hand, wondered, “how are you going to do that” with the current tool sets available at the time. Consultants would say, “we can help you with that, as long as you purchase specific tool X and have your data in database Y.”
One of the unique things that PostRank does is take into consideration comments and mentions elsewhere on the web (Twitter, Delicious, Magnolia, etc.). It compares it to your recent posts, too. For example, when I first start a blog, getting 1 or 2 comments is a big deal, and thus, will rank that post quite high.
One of the unique things that PostRank does is take into consideration comments and mentions elsewhere on the web (Twitter, Delicious, Magnolia, etc.). It compares it to your recent posts, too. For example, when I first start a blog, getting 1 or 2 comments is a big deal, and thus, will rank that post quite high.
Both are Object-Relational Mapping frameworks in .NET 3.5 but have different goals, qualities, behaviors and their own programmatic approaches towards modeling and defining the meta data. How do they compare to each other
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 bets Firefox hands down. We have been using to browse Dubai Escorts and it has been working really well for us. Fire fox was good in it's time but now it must move over for Internet Explorer 8 beta 2.