( How do you track the success of a website which heavily uses AJAX, Flash, etc… )

Flash! AJAX! RSS! Java!

While using the aforementioned technologies may impress your superiors (and get you a tiny bit of credibility at your local BarCamp), they can also seriously detriment the validity of your online analytics.

Technologies like Flash, AJAX, RSS and Java all contribute to the
reduction of page views by allowing visitors to access a large quantity
of information from a single web page . This causes many problems for
marketers: not only are page views currently one of the main gauges of
website popularity, but many javascript-based analytic services
requires unique web pages in order to properly track conversions / goal
paths / etc…

There are a number of solutions to this problem. Here are a few ideas on the topic (disclaimer: I am not a programmer.)

The simplest solution is to just stick with technologies which don’t
require browser plugins (such as AJAX), and use your local server log
files for analysis (In some cases your local server logs can capture
information which remote tracking can not)

If using a flash enabled site, work with your flash designers to ensure proper Flash event tracking information is transfered to your analytic software.

You could also develop your own “analytic” software by having your
Flash / Java program generate a log file of significant events, which
you then important into a spreadsheet to run analysis on.

For news-pushing via really simple syndication (RSS), you could use a service like feedburner.com which specializes in the tracking of RSS subscribers.

Finally, if for whatever reason you are unable to implement a
tracking solution, instead of using page views as a measure of
popularity you could try to use time spent viewing a webpage instead.
For the purpose of pleasing the management overlords, you could even
create a simple multiplier for discussing virtual machine based
websites in terms of page views (I.e. 1 minute on this Flash-driven
page = 8 pages views on a traditional website).

Again, these are just some of my views on the topics. I’m excited to
hear your comments / suggestions on other methods which can be used to
track the performance of Flash, Java, RSS, and other plug-in driven
website designs.