Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

UPDATED BELOW!

So, the grand question of the day: how can I track how many people actually view our entire Flash presentations?

We've just uploaded a handful of new movies. They're built in Flash, based on some Powerpoint presentations we wrote. We used a tool called Pointecast to convert them -- I haven't used the tool myself, but it looks pretty good.

And of course, we want to know if they're doing any good. The final page of each movie has links to three differents "actions" -- our email form, and two other pages. We can track each of those actions, but we want to know how many people get to the end of the presentation at all.

In a more general sense, integrating tracking with Flash is often an important issue.

I can think of three different ways to do this:

1. Automatically redirect the presentation to a separate HTML page for the "call to action" final slide, and put Omniture code on that final page (easiest, but I don't know if Pointecast will let us do it, but maybe we could find another way to make it work even if there's no built-in feature for it)

2. Integrate external Javascript calls into the Flash itself (elegant, if it works -- and then we could track movement through the whole movie -- but I think it's unlikely we'll get this to work with Pointecast)

3. Break the whole thing into separate HTML pages (this will definitely work, but it's clunky and I'd only do it as a last, last resort)

So we're going to try for #1. You'll probably be able to tell what worked by checking out the movies at 10xmarketing.com.

UPDATE

Here's the strategy we ended up implementing:

1. Each flash movie went on its own html page, which was coded with a Campaign variable that corresponded to the movie.

2. Each movie ended with an automatic redirect to the "thanks and take action" page, which was coded with a commerce event.

This allows us to use all the commerce reports, with fallout and campaign effectiveness and so forth. The Best Solution Ever.

We don't get all the internal detail that actionscript on every page might have given us, but there was no way to implement that through the flash generator we were using, and we really didn't need all that extra info. (Though I still hope to learn enough actionscript soon that I could do that if I ever have an especial need to in the future.)

This solution should be pretty generalizable to anyone else looking to do the same thing. Let me know if it works for you!