Omniture Flash Clickmap implementation
If You use the automated tracking mode in the Omniture Actionsource component, you’ll be up and running with Omniture Flash Clickmaps in more or less no time according to the Omniture ActionSource implementation guide. Real world implementations may differ slightly
First challenge is that the implementation guide is missing some really really important information,
for some unknown reason this vital information has been placed in Omniture Knowledge base article ID 1587 instead.
Now, after getting all the facts together, it should be possible to get things working, but lets take a look at how we can minimize the amount of work that needs to be done every time a new Flash movie is created and used on your site.
The “Drag & Drop” implementation requires you to enter all the needed parameters into the Actionsource component manually each time you create a new Flash movie, that’s a pain, as you would probably even need different versions for your development and production environment, at least the report suite would be different. This method would also require you to reconfigure and recompile your movie in case it’s moved to another page, or the pagename changes.
I think Actionscript is the solution, with some simple changes to the sample code provided in the Omniture Code Manager (Admin -> Admin Console -> Code Manager), it’s possible to create a solution that configures itself with appropriate values. All You gotta do is make sure you provide the movieID in a flashvar (sc_movie_id in the sample below)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | import flash.external.ExternalInterface; import com.omniture.ActionSource; var s:ActionSource; function configActionSource() { s = new ActionSource(); s.account = ExternalInterface.call("eval","s_account"); s.pageName = ExternalInterface.call("eval","s.pageName"); s.pageURL = ExternalInterface.call("eval","s.pageURL"); s.movieID = root.loaderInfo.parameters.sc_movie_id; s.trackClickMap = true; s.autoTrack=true; s.debugTracking = false; s.trackLocal = false; s.charSet = "ISO-8859-1"; s.currencyCode = "yourcurrency"; s.visitorNamespace = "yournamespace"; s.dc = "112"; addChild(s); } configActionSource(); |
But wait, there is more, sometimes your Flash Clickmaps won’t work, not even after you did everything as described in the implementation guide and the knowledgebase article.
Apparently the Omniture Actionsource component contains a few bugs.
- Depending on your ActionSource component version, setting the s.charSet variable, will effectively prevent Flash Clickmaps from working, if you use a charset different from UTF-8, say ISO-8859-1, you’re out of luck. Versions prior to 2.8.0 appears to have this bug
- Hosting the .swf file on a hostname different from where your HTML is hosted will also prevent Flash Clickmaps from working.
Apart from this, Omniture Flash Clickmaps are pretty cool.
