Web analytics is a way in which individual visitor action can be easily tracked within a site, and the aggregate statistical data derived from this can often lend remarkable insights into the effectiveness of your design, how ‘sticky’ your content is, and what your users are actually looking for. Unfortunately, extending this paradigm into flash has always been tricky, because it doesn’t adhere to the page-based paradigm on which most Analytics packages are built. Once a flash application or widget is loaded, the server loses most knowledge about what the user is actually doing within it.

Usually this isn’t really a problem- flash applications have not been too complex and not many people care where on the banner you clicked, just that you left the site as a result. Yet now with the strong growth of Flex and Ajax our web applications are becoming more and more complex, and marketers and usability experts are now demanding this tracking data in spite of the paradigm limitations.

If you really think about it, what we really are interested in tracking is a user action, rather than the page loads we are collecting right now, which means that the largest part of an analysts job is turning these page events into meaningful user actions, rather than interpreting those users. There’s been some attempt to set metrics to individual places within a page flow, yet nobody has yet thought to rethink the paradigm. But I digress…

Most Metrics providers have since opened their API’s enough to allow a developer to pretend like a new page refresh has occurred. While this is hardly optimal, it does allow us to track user events from inside of flash, but the fact that each provider has implemented their API a different way means that implementing metrics for each is still a string of unique problems to solve.

To that end I’ve written the Metrics package, which is intended to provide a common metrics proxy that any developer may use, which relies on a common library of connectors that can be swapped out as needed. In this article I go over the details of how to use it, and touch on how individual connectors might be written.

The Metrics package was designed to provide a simple, reusable, extensible and flexible interface to any web metrics package, including Google Analytics, Urchin, Omniture, WebTrends and more. It supports multiple connector management, instantiating only those registered connecters that are successful at autodetecting their environment. If a developer does not know in advance which metrics package his client is using (or whether his client might change his mind at a later time), he may safely add several connectors secure in the knowledge that the package will do the heavy lifting. Additional functionality allows you to “hot-swap” connectors should that become necessary, though I myself don’t exactly know why you’d want to do that.

At this point in time, the only connector published with this library is the UrchinConnector. Google Analytics and WebTrends will follow shortly, however due to my employers’ client agreements I find it prudent to not release connectors for API’s that are considered proprietary (such as Omniture) unless I have a formal letter granting me legal permission to do so.