How to measure Silverlight or Flash control load time with Google Analytics

Question

Hi everyone

I have a simple silverlight page for for finding available domain names. This problem is equaly valid for a flash control as well.

I use Google Analytics for monitoring the traffic. I would like to find out how long it take for users to download and render the Silverlight control.

Once the java script on a page is loaded there should be a way to start a timer and then stop the timer once the Silverlight/flash control is loaded. Key points I would like to measure are:

• Time it takes to download the silverlight/flash control
• Time it takes to initialize the control

Thanks

Answer 1

You can start keeping track of time via JS using setInterval. When the flash app is done loading and ready to use, you can use ExternalInterface from flash to call a JS function to stop the timer and send the tracking. I'm not sure if there is a Silverlight equivalent of ExternalInterface, but i would imagine so.

AS3 ExternalInterface Documentation:

http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/external/ExternalInterface.html