Flash or not so flash

16th August 2010

Flash or not so Flash

Flash Rich Media – benefits

Rich interactive content, built in Flash, delivers a more engaging online brand experience. Users that interact with this content are more likely to purchase, and when they purchase, they spend more. The attached Savile Row press release is good evidence of this trend (they have an Aus $ version of the site)

Great applications for Flash include:

1)    Rich carousels on landing pages, that add depth and interactivity to those areas of the site, which account for 25%+ traffic, so have a high impact on overall eCommerce performance. For lifestyle driven brands - the opportunity to feature lifestyle images and video with interactive product driven overlays that merchandise directly on key landing pages is becoming a standard feature.

2)    Get-the-look / product collections modules provide a simple way to merchandise product collections – driving up average order values and conversion, as well as providing a premium content destination on the site which provides users with a rich and engaging user experience.

3)    Video channels – Flash is the ideal medium for delivering TV / Video functionality with interactive overlays that feature product. Catwalk video is increasingly used by fashion brands to merchandise product. M&S TV is a good example of how rich engaging video content drives sales.

4)    Facebook stores – Flash is an ideal mechanism for distributing the eCommerce store to off-site destinations like Facebook. An increasing number of brands are using Flash applications to deliver a micro-shop experience to Facebook, engaging customers in the social media that they

5)    User generated content applications. Flash is used in a wide variety of outfit makers / mood board applications. These have a double benefit in that they engage users with branded content which encourages them to convert, and users are also encouraged to share their creations (outfits / mood boards) with their social peers, acting as a form of user generated advertising.

Flash issues / the Apple discussion

There has been much press of late about Apple’s refusal to allow Flash to run on their iSeries devices (phone/pad/touch etc). Some thoughts yoy might find useful:

-      Flash is generally available on 98%+ of devices, but is occasionally blocked by corporate firewalls, and to date has not been available on mobile devices. Apple has publically stated that it will not be supporting Flash on it’s mobile devices. This has the effect of increasing costs for retailers as they are forced to support multiple devices with different content and applications.

-      Flash 10.1 will be available on all other Mobile platforms (Android, Blackberry, Nokia (Symbian), Microsoft) etc. as of June – providing a single content platform across a variety of devices – saving content production effort, and enabling the full site user experience for the 75% of smart phones that are not iPhones.

-       Although Apple tout a web standard called HTML 5 as the replacement for Flash, what is clear is that while HTML 5 will, over time, replace some of the things that Flash is used for today, it will co-exist with Flash (and Silverlight and JavaFX) for a very long time to come as it will take 3+ years for a majority of desktop internet users to upgrade their browser to a version that supports HTML 5.

-      Right now you cannot (practically, i.e. without lots of bespoke development effort) deliver the same sophisticated rich media experience in HTML 5 as you can in Flash.

 Other challenges with Flash

1. Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to search engines.

-       Most web users begin a session with a search engine. Even when they know a domain name, they start with Google or a similar search engine. With all the possible confusion of .com, .net, .eu, .com.au, it’s better to trust Google to find the “right choice”. As search engines are the gatekeepers to the Internet, it is imperative that companies maximize their natural visibility in search engines.

-       Search engines work by scanning information on the web, processing it, and retrieving the best match for each user query. Search engines are fine-tuned to process text, semantically wrapped in tags. The markup in hypertext markup language is our specification of a document title, headings, paragraphs and links – structural meaning which helps search engines place appropriate importance on each text element.

-       Information hidden in graphics formats, such as Flash, is difficult, if not impossible, to find and process. While search engines such as Google try their best to extract links and textual content buried in Flash objects, the process is far from perfect. Sites constructed completely in Flash often offer very little textual information – consequently what information a search engine does find ranks poorly. Even sites partially constructed using Flash often “hide” their internal site links using Flash based site navigation.

-       Search engine optimization practitioners can help companies with Flash based web sites overcome Flash limitations without violating search engine guidelines.

1. Website reporting on Flash navigation is problematic and cumbersome. Web analytics systems help marketing and e-commerce professionals evaluate website visitor behavior in and around a website, providing actionable information valuable in improving a website’s business performance.

-       Basic Web Analytics reporting tells marketers where their visitors came from, the pages visited and where in a site visitors abandon a site. One type of web Analytics reporting uses web server based data – log files which track every page, image and download served to site visitors.

-       A second type of reporting system relies on JavaScript tags that need to be inserted in every site page and on every downloadable object. While both types of web analytics systems have advantages and disadvantages, Flash based websites can present real problems for both types of Web Analytics reporting tools.

-       Web server log based systems are able to track when a Flash object, typically a swf file, is viewed. They are not able to track navigation within a Flash object – so if a site is composed of one Flash object which contains multiple site sections, the Web Analytics system will see a swf download, but will have no idea which parts of the site a visitor viewed nor where the visitor abandoned the site.Flash ActionScript coding can overcome some of these issues, but they add extra implementation cost and complexity. Flash designer(s) are often unfamiliar with Web Analytics requirements and thus don’t consider Flash events tagging requirements during site design. Implemented tag verification is a tedious process as it requires waiting for data to appear in the reporting system – hours or days later. However Flash does not provide referrer information, making it very difficult to track navigation paths.

Managing Flash and rich content: Using it to drive trading

There is a software supplier in the UK called 10CMS who design rich content solutions to optimise the user experience to deliver the most compelling content for the customer’s context. If a user has the Flash player they get the very richest user experience. This is desirable as these interactive elements drive significant improvements to Conversion and AOV (They are getting lots of stats in at the moment that show users are 2 – 4 times more likely to convert after interacting with a 10CMS rich merchandising module, and they spend 25 – 50% more).

This activity should be a core element of day-to-day site trading within the e-commerce team as it provides the ability to be far more reactive to the current situation.

 The main challenge for retailers is in managing the above Flash applications once built. Most require expensive agency intervention to update – Flash developers, limiting the speed and frequency of updates. 10CMS empowers all content management resource to have full control over rich content to be able to merchandise it and link to product, without the need for any technical intervention.

So my conclusion is that flash and rich content are here to stay, and whilst they present a number of challenges around SEO, analytics, and usability, they empower the retailer to begin closing the gap between the offline and online user experience. And to deliver a rich and engaging experience that drives conversion, but also builds loyalty, creates word of web (Word of mouth) and aids customer lifetime value.

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