Mashup: Rich Internet Applications and Web Analytics

Can they collide?

With the explosion of RIA sites in recent years, a visit no longer begins and ends with pages loads - rather, we have had to come up with ingenious ways of measuring a visitor's "engagement" and "conversion path". Using the traditional web analytics toolbox, analysts have been able to leverage "event based tracking" (such as is available through Google Analytics and most enterprise-level vendors). This has proven to be a tricky road, and deriving actionable insight is highly dependent on defining the right macro and micro level experiences and events to track.

What has been your experience in RIA analytics? Have you been able to build an engagement model that steps past the limitations of the traditional WA toolset?