Google Analytics: App + Web

Introduction

App + Web is a new property type that allows you to combine app and web data for unified reporting and analysis.

A user may check your app on their mobile device, then open it from their laptop, and revisit it later on their tablet. Basic analytics may interpret this as three different users, inflating your churn rate.

You can also go deeper to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns across platforms. For example, you can see how many users started on your app then visited your website to make a purchase.

The new property type utilizes a more flexible event-based model for collecting the unique interactions that users have with your content, allowing you to measure any custom event that you set up.

The difference

The most important thing to know about this new data schema is that it moves away from the traditional Session + Pageview method that classic Google Analytics has used for 15+ years. Instead, it uses an Event + Parameter model. It’s different, but it opens up a whole new world of possibilities in terms of what you can track, and all of the additional details you can add to each event action via the associated parameters.

Enhanced Measurement is a new feature that will listen for some of the most common events that you may want to track, and give you the ability to toggle on tracking for those things, such as Scroll tracking and Outbound Link tracking, right out of the box in the user admin section. You can find these settings under ‘Data Streams’ under the Property section of the Admin screen.

Firebase

Firebase is an online service provided by Google which acts as a very feature-rich, fully-fledged back-end to the application.

Firebase can be used to store and retrieve data to and from a NoSQL database called Firestore, as well as to authenticate users with the Firebase AUth service. Firebase Cloud functions allow the developers to run server-side JavaScript code in a Node.js environment.

Mobile app reporting in Google Analytics works in conjunction with the Firebase SDK, which automatically captures a number of events and user properties and also allows you to define your own custom events to measure the things that uniquely matter to your business.

Once the data is captured, it’s available in a dashboard in both the Google Analytics interface and the Firebase console.

If you need to perform custom analysis or go deep on your custom parameters you can link your Analytics data to BigQuery – and use templates in Data Studio to visualize it.

Implementation Path

Getting started with app analytics is easy. Just add the Firebase SDK to your new or existing app and data collection begins automatically.

Then connect your Firebase app to Google Analytics to get app reporting in both the Google Analytics interface and the Firebase console.

We’ll create a Google Tag Manager container for Firebase, and we’ll install that in the application. We’ll use that container to take the event we configured for Firebase and send the data to a (non-Firebase) Google Analytics property as well.

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