MochiBot Blog

One of the most commonly requested features from our users is event tracking.  Everyone has a different goal in mind when it comes to tracking the various events that can happen within a Flash movie.  Therefore, I’ll go over some simple techniques that you can use to get better information out of MochiBot. 

You can track events within your Flash movie by simply creating a new MochiBot for each event.  Multiple MochiBots can be used in a SWF so all you have to do is place some MochiBot code on your timeline at the point where you want to track an event.  Here are some different scenarios of how this technique can be used.

Game Developers:  Game developers usually want to track what levels people reach and thus determine how hard their game is.  To begin tracking level progression with MochiBot you should create a new MochiBot for each level in your game.  It will help to organize your Dashboard if you name your MochiBots with the name of the game first and then the level after that.  For example, a game named Gopher with three levels could have the following MochiBots:

• Gopher: Level 1 (placed at the begining of Level 1)
• Gopher: Level 2 (placed at the begining of Level 2)
• Gopher: Level 3 (placed at the begining of Level 3)

Place the MochiBot code on the timeline where each level begins and you now have a level progression monitor.  

Flash Site Developers:  Web traffic monitors are great for seeing how much traffic you get to your site, but they just can’t track actions of your visitors if you have a site that’s built in Flash.  Therefore, you’ll want to use MochiBot in each of the various sections of your Flash site to see what “pages” your visitors are going to.  You may also want to track click events on a link so all you would have to do is to create a MochiBot to track that event and place the code in your button movieclip.

We’ve even seen people use MochiBot in a 1×1pixel SWF on each of the HTML pages in their site to see which pages are most popular.  We thought it was so clever that we did on our site too.  :)

Flash Videos and Cartoons:  People who publish videos or create animations in Flash need to know not only how many people are watching their work, but also how much of the work people are watching.  Do people watch the whole movie, 10 seconds of the movie or get half way through and leave?  One way you can monitor how much of your Flash movie people watch is to place some MochiBot code in different points of your timeline.  A simple and effective practice is to track every quarter of your movie.  For example, if you have a Flash video or animation that has 1000 frames, then you’ll want to put some MochiBot code at frames 250, 500, 750, and 1000.  

After reading all of this you may wonder why we just don’t build an additional event tracking system in MochiBot.  Well we’re working on it, but the biggest challenge that we have to overcome is finding a simple yet effective way to present the data so that all of the different types of people who use MochiBot can get the information they need.  It’s amazing how much little changes to the interface design can make a big difference in usability.  With that said we’re working to give you all the best possible experience while using our product.

Good luck with your Flash endeavors and we hope to hear some stories from you guys on how you’re using MochiBot.