Google Analytics Now Tracks Silverlight Content

By Chelsi Nakano | Published Mar 17, 2010

How would you all—including non-techies—like to be able to track how users interact with your Silverlight content? Well, now you can. Google Analytics has officially integrated into the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework.

Drag and Drop

It sounds fairly simple. Using the Google Analytics component, designers will be able to drag and drop icons for tracking the number of interactions on a design element. Then, within Google Analytics, they can segment and compare the difference in behavior between users who interacted and those who didn’t.

Tracking features supported include event tracking, pageview tracking and custom variables.

Why Google Analytics?

“One of the core principles of Google Analytics has been to democratize the utility of the web analytics tool, and to open up the platform with an API,” wrote Nick Mihailovski of the Google Analytics API Ttam on their official blog page. “This enables developers to innovate new uses of Google Analytics to help analysts, marketers, and executives make better data-driven decisions. Since we launched Google Analytics, developers have extended the product to track Flash/Flex and recently Android and iPhone Devices.”

The announcement was made at this year’s MIX10 conference, which saw a lot of focus on the new Analytics Framework for Microsoft's RIA technology in general. Designed to support data collection modules online or off, the framework parties with more than just Google, too.

"We also wanted to support multiple analytics services simultaneously," said Michael Scherotter, principal architect of the framework. “Multiple analytics vendors hooking into an application using different mechanisms can interfere with performance and appear as glitches to end users,” he explained.

We're not surprised to see Google at the front of the line for a next-generation solution such as this, and we expect similar announcement from companies like Webtrends and Omniture in the near future.