Track a Adobe Flash app hosted on multiple domains with Google Analytics
- by roberkules
I'm working on a flash app that's gonna be distributed to more and more partners (and obviously domains). It needs to be tracked aggregated and also separately.
I implemented Google Analytics using gaforflash, tracking virtual pageviews and events inside the flash app.
What I want to achieve:
View an aggregated report of all partners.
Identify the partner not by the domain (where the flash is used), but by a partnerID.
Each partner needs access to the report of his domain. (no admin rights needed)
I came up with this solution:
Using only one "Web property" in Google Analytics.
UA-XXXXXX-4
.example.com
Set a custom/virtual hostname per partner. (GA's "utmhn" parameter)
partner1.example.com
partner2.example.com
Create a profile for each partner, setting the filter to include only the relevant "subdomain"
Problems that came up:
The gaforflash library doesn't support overriding the host name.
Possible workaround: The gaforflash source code is available, so I could add the functionality.
Any goal from the "master" profile is not copied to the partners profile.
profile 1: include traffic from hostname ^partner1\.
profile 2: include traffic from hostname ^partner2\.
Is it (very) bad to fake the hostname?
Are there better approaches?
Or what improvements could you think of?
UPDATE:
I'm looking primarily for a solid data structure inside Google Analytics regardless of the flash implementation. The only limitations:
We need an aggregated view across all partners
Our partners need to have access to their subset of data
We want to identify the partner by a custom partnerID, not the domain