Earlier today, Google announced on the Analytics Official Blog that the company has teamed up with Adobe Corp. and third party developers to develop a simplified Flash content tracker that can successfully spider media content such as embedded videos, branded micro sites, and even online games.

After AdSense, now even Google Analytics becomes more integrated with the Flash technology of today: even though a limited set of Flash tracking tools was already available on Google's tracking platform, the data wasn't well integrated with the rest of the content. The new tracking code allows webmasters to get detailed data on how visitors interacts not only with their websites, but also with the Flash content featured on their pages, and to integrate the results in a seamless way.

Nick Mihailovski, Analytics Specialist, further explains in the blog post: "In the past, Flash tracking was not provided out of the box, and every implementation had to be customized. Moreover, there was a lack of standards, and new developers who tracked Flash had to create their own processes to get it working." Now, Flash developers are being provided with an easy way to keep track of user behaviour when interacting with their applications.

The tool itself consists of an easy-to-use library that allows developers to track user activity. "We know there are many levels of experience in the Flash/Flex community so we tried to make it easy for both non-technical designers as well as seasoned ActionScript programmers to take full advantage of this Google Analytics Tracking For Flash", Mihailovski continued.

The new library, which is simply called "Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash", was released under the open source Apache 2 License, and translates Analytics' tracking code into the ActionScript programming language, though which webmasters can track Flash, Flex and ActionScript 3 content integrating it with their webpages data to get a much better picture of the user activity and understand how visitor interaction can be improved.

According to Mihailovski, Analyt

ics for Adobe Flash does in fact provide the same tracking possibilities that the current JavaScript-based version does, including pageview/event/campaign tracking, but can also be used with content such as online games or videos and report — for instance — how many times a certain video has been watched over time or how many times a Flash game has been played, although it has to be said that in the case of Flash games developers may not necessarily be interested in embedding Google's tracking code in their product before shipping them.

Matthew McNeely, VP of Engineering at Sprout, a company that helps advertisers design Flash and other media content, demonstrated the Analytics for Flash features in a recently uploaded YouTube video. In it, it is shown how to correctly add the tracking code provided by the API and to even set a particular event within the application as a "goal" on which to calculate conversion rates. As demoed in the video, it is also possible to send multiple events and track the time lapse between the two to get a very precise measurement for how exactly long a visitor has been using the same feature or portion of the Flash media/application.

The full API can be downloaded from here. As customary with open source products, programmers are encouraged to contribute to the product and make it even better and more efficient: to contribute to the development process programmers can visit the Google Code website, while online documentation for the API including samples is available from this page.

UPDATE: we contacted a Google representative to get confirmation that Flash developers are currently unable to monitor the user activity on third party websites — the information, as we understand, is only available to the webmasters hosting the Flash content, as we were told in this message:

"[...] You can track all the interactions within the game, but not the actual 3rd party sites in which the content is embedded. The code is native to action script 3 that communicates to Google servers directly and can be compiled into the game's flash content."