At my company, we use Omniture SiteCatalyst for our web analytics/tracking. Unfortunately, Omniture does not give user’s Flash Version statistics in their standard reports like Google Analytics does. On the other hand, Omniture gives you the freedom to create custom reports that you can determine on your own using their provided JavaScript code.
I am already using SWFObject to load the flash piece on our homepage to users with a specified version. So I figured I could hack that code a bit in order to pull the version it was already determining for me, and plug it into the Omniture code.
After mulling through the SWFObject code, I finally was able to run this page successfully, which will alert the exact version of flash I am using:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>test</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
</head><body>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert(deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().major+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().minor+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().rev);
</script>
</body>
</html>
Basically, you can use deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().major to get the major version, etc.
Once I got that working, I was able to use that same concept to plug it into my tracking code.
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Hi Jason,
I noticed your post and just wanted to reach out to you about Omniture’s Flash analytics solution. Using Omniture ActionSource, you can leverage native ActionScript programming to send analytics data to Omniture. This also allows for direct access to the Flash version number, which can be passed through in a custom variable and available in reports as you mentioned.
Omniutre ActionSource is available within the SiteCatalyst Admin Console which can be accessed through SiteCatalyst 13. The solution was released in fall of 2006 and is immediately available for use.
If you have specific questions, please contact an Omniture representative and they will be able to provide you with more information.
Take care,
Steve
Steve, I appreciate your feedback. I did look into ActionSource but there are several reasons why I chose not to go that route. First, it’s a bit overkill for simply getting a feel for what Flash version our visitors have. I have now implemented the solution above on sites that don’t even have any flash embeded, in order to determine a) whether we should even be using Flash, and b) what our target version should be if we decide to use it. Also, it concerns me that ActionSource itself is a Flash solution. Using only Flash in order to determine what version of flash a user has is frankly an antiquated approach. And how will I determine the percentage of my visitors that don’t have Flash installed at all, if ActionSource never loads for them? As I see it, ActionSource is an amazing tool for tracking (as the whitepaper suggests) Flash applications, but for simple version tracking, I’d rather see a JavaScript solution built right into the standard reports in the Traffic/Technology section.
I agree with Jason. Not all of our users have Flash installed, so ActionSource won’t work for us. I’d like to know what version of Flash, if any, that a user has, without needing to load any Flash content at all.