On Google Analytics side, nothing changed; no specific stats just for Flash,  just the good old interface we all know.  On the Flash side, nothing changed much there either; instead of doing this:

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ExternalInterface.call("pageTracker._trackPageview('/somepage');");

You now do this:

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tracker = new GATracker( this, "window.PageTracker", "Bridge", false );
tracker.trackPageview( "/somepage");

From the look of it, it’s actually more code than before.

The cool thing about GA for Flash is the ActionScript 3 mode. In that mode, you can call the tracker even if the JavaScript code wasn’t imported in the HTML page the Flash file is embedded. Now that is a possibility that we didn’t have before. So in a context where you do not have control over the HTML you flash will be embedded, this will enable you to do analytics just the same. I have also seen in the road map for the project that they want to implement it for Adobe AIR also; this will be very useful.

What will you be using Google Analytics for Flash for?

Well first of all ExternalInterface works very badly with Opera (at least the ActionScript 2 version, haven’t tested the ActionScript 3 version). Searching a bit I found people saying the it worked sometimes, it worked when it wasn’t inside a mouse related event, etc. Well this isn’t very reliable.

Also I ran in some trouble where when the Javascript was called in the html it worked fine in all browsers, when I used ExternalInterface it worked fine in Internet Explorer, didn’t do a thing in Opera and just crashed Firefox. Well that’s nice cross-browser behavior…

To solve my problem, I just had to do it the good old way; getURL(“javascript:myFunction()”). For the same Javascript function (the one that crashed FireFox), it worked in all browser. I hope this all works better in AS3.