Really Aced » ga for flash http://blog.sommestad.net Web and Cocoa development through the eyes of Kristofer Sommestad, a SWAD developer. Sun, 23 Jan 2011 12:21:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Danger in using Google Analytics for Flash? http://blog.sommestad.net/2009/09/danger-in-using-google-analytics-for-flash/ http://blog.sommestad.net/2009/09/danger-in-using-google-analytics-for-flash/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:10:52 +0000 esset http://blog.sommestad.net/?p=144 I recently discovered that some of our stats in Google Analytics looked a bit suspicious. When looking into it, I remembered that there was a previous issue in the ga.js tracker, causing usage of user-defined variables, setVar(), to be tracked as pageviews. These pageviews corrupted stats like bounce rates and time on site.

Google fixed this issue in January, but the latest GA for Flash release is from December. So there’s a big chance that the bug still remains in the ActionScript version. I’ve posted a question in the GA for Flash discussion group, but as the group seems to be full of porn spam, I’m not very hopeful in getting an answer right now…

Also, some of our stats were missing data about screen resolution etc and I fear that the Flash tracker and setVar() is the root of that as well (since it’s working fine in products where setVar() isn’t used).

Anywho. I’ve not yet confirmed that this bug is still there, but an easy solution is to use Google Analytics for Flash in “Bridge mode“, instead of “AS3 mode”. This means that the ga.js file is used, which is a guarantee that the latest official Google updates are always used.

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