The problem with flash-websites

Historically, it has been a challenge for creators and owners of Flash-based websites to make URLs to act the way the users expect when navigating the site. This cause a problem not only for web-analytics tools, but also with common web-functionality like bookmarks and direct-links in advertising.

For example, if you create a bookmark for a specific page when viewing a flash based website, then you expect to get that specific page and not the main page of the flash-site when you use your bookmark later on.

The problem is that a flash-site use only one html-page which includes the flash-content, which in turn means that the visitor never leaves this single URL during his visit.

What about web-analytics?

This issue cause a lot of trouble when it comes to web-analytics. The need to track the activity of your visitors is equally important on a flash-based website as a ordinary website, but since the visitor only visit a single URL with flash content, ordinary web-analytics tools can’t track the activity on the flash-site.

A solution

Recently some developers have found a solution to the problem with bookmarks and direct links, which is to update the anchor of the page when navigating to various subpages in the flash-site, for example: index.html#page1, index.html#page2 etc. Since a change of anchor doesn’t generate a new request to the webserver, the page will not reload and that insures a uniform and uninterrupted visit on the flash-site. In case the page is bookmarked, the flash-site will still be able to read which anchor that’s been called and then also load the correct subpage.

The solution is not perfect

Nevertheless there are problems which anchor doesn’t solve. Since a change of anchor doesn’t generate a call to the webserver, it won’t be registered in any of the server-logs, and log-based statistic tools has no way to see how the visitors navigate on the flash-site.

The perfect solution!

However there is a perfect solution to the problem.

Today we’re introducing a Syntesio Analytics update that continuously is supervising changes of anchors on a webpage.

Syntesio Analytics together with anchors offers the same level of reporting and analytics for flash-based websites as for regular, html-based, websites. And best of all, it is available now!