Google Indexing + Tracking of Adobe Flash objects secures flash’s spot on the web.

Google just announced on the Official Google Blog that they’re working with Adobe to enable developers to add Google Analytics tracking code to Flash objects. This will allow site owners a new, powerful way of tracking not only user views of flash objects, but also user interaction with flash objects. The new tracking code features built in tag support for “click events”. By integrating these click event tags into Flash or Flex objects’ ActionScript, user interactions, including engagement length, can be tracked.

This is especially valuable for media-rich sites, in which a users engagement and value on a site is not necessarily most accurately measured by clicks, but more by engagement length and habits.

This move by Google is yet another show of search and tracking support for flash. Earlier this year Google announced that they were going to be indexing content in flash objects – this indexing has already begun, however the quality of the index is largely dependent on the flash development community implementing best practices for ensuring semantic relevancy and organization of data contained in a flash object.

The combination of flash content indexing – and thus giving flash objects SEO-relevancy, along with flash object analytics tracking – enhancing a flash object’s potential for monetization are two huge factors in ensuring flash has a place in the future, and that the technology continues to grow and be a viable commercial medium on the web.

Now that flash sites are becoming increasingly monetizable assets, I believe support and development will continue to grow. Based on my experience working with clients who are focused heavily on their brand image and website, I know that maintaining the flashy aesthetic of a flash site is important. Sure, a similar feel can be attained with a hybridized XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash site, but for those companies who choose to remain purely flash based, this is great news.

Industry support for these new tracking and indexing initiatives for flash has been strong. Shenan Reed, owner of Morpheus Media (full disclosure: I currently work there as SEO & Emerging Technologies Manager) commented:

“This is very exciting news for some of the luxury brands out there that are very concerned about the image their sites project and maintaining the same smooth, glamorous aesthetic they have in their stores. The previous challenge was that they were building beautiful sites that were un-findable – it would be like building a gorgeous retail location in a dark alley of a major city and not putting a name on the door. Finally they can have their cake and eat it too!” – Shenan Reed

I agree, and look forward to the future of the semantic, trackable, indexable and usable web. In addition to the Morpheus Media Mlog, I also write my own emerging technologies blog, Jeffzilla.com and have posted a summary of this post on it. Here’s Google’s video explaining the basics of the tracking, as well as a real world demonstration, hosted by Brett Crosby, Group Manager Google Analytics, and Matthew McNeely, VP of Engineering at Sprout.