There are cases where shipping javascript code with your flash video is not an option. One of these cases is when you’ve bought space on a website to place your ad banner. In those cases I want to use the 1×1 pixel image tracking method on Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics to track the amount of views on my banner.
I have heard that flash blocks any attempt to load data from a third party host (frankly I don’t see why they would do that) which presents a problem. I would love a solution.
I can picture several methods and their downsides
- I could host the banner on my own server, counting the downloads. Unfortunately this would prove to be a tremendous load on my server when possibly millions of downloads would happen per day.
- I could write a PHP script, hosting it on my own server, that when requested tracks a page view in GA or YWA. I could place a crossdomain.xml file on my server allowing the flash banner to request my script using a Loader. Unfortunately, the problem of server load still exists as my private server probably can’t handle millions of requests per day.
Possible solutions are other tracking hosts that allow for flash cross domain file requests, or perhaps a method I haven’t thought of.
Summary: The challenge here is to be able to track the number of views on a flash video without using any javascript. The problem is the sheer amount of load this would put on my own servers if I were to track using my server as a proxy. The best solution would be a tracking service using crossdomain.xml
What you want is something like Google Analytics with in AS3 mode.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTrackingIntro.html#trackingModes
I’ve used something similar with Omniture SiteCatalyst to track embedded video players.