Google Analytics via Firebase
Google Analytics for Firebase helps you understand how people use your web, Apple, and Android app.
Requirements
In order to see Analytics data of your app, you will need to have completed the following steps:
After enabling Google Analytics, update the app with a new store version to enable tracking.
You need at least a few hours of data. Even for the Realtime analytics, we see that there is a delay.
What is Firebase analytics?
Once the data is captured, it's available in a dashboard through the Firebase console. This dashboard provides detailed insights about your app's usage.
In this article we will use our own Balanced Yoga app as an example. You can find the Balanced Yoga app in the Google Play Store and in the Apple App Store, if you want to check it out for yourself.
Google Analytics for Firebase has some similarities with Google Analytics - which can be helpful if you are already familiar with that platform.
Firebase is a mobile development program. It is tailored more towards app behaviours.
Google Analytics, on the other hand, is an analytics specific platform.
Interesting reports in Firebase analytics
In this article we will help you understand the basic and most important functions of Firebase Analytics and where to find them.
When you open Firebase Analytics and go to the Reports tab in the top left corner you will see a lot of interesting data.
Reports snapshot: shows you a summary of the data that is available within all the specific tabs (which you will find on the left side of the menu).
Realtime view of your app analytics. This will show you the app user activity from the last 30 minutes. You can see their location, device category and what blocks or screens they visited.
App developer > Firebase : a summary of available data within Firebase analytics. Like all other screens, you can customize this to your own needs and wishes by clicking the edit icon in the top right corner. In this corner you can also adjust the time period over which the data is shown.
Life cycle collection - data is organized and displayed by the stages of a customer's journey – acquisition, engagement, monetization and retention. We will be skipping Acquisition and Monetization in this article, as they are less relevant as of now. Acquisition focuses on the paid channels through which visitors are acquired. Monetization is interesting if you have in-app purchases - which AppMachine does not yet support, or if you have ads in your app.
Engagement offers insights into what your users are looking at and how long they stay engaged with your app. The Engagement overview screen gives a summary of the most interesting data of the tabs below. The most interesting tabs for you as an app builder are Events and Pages and screens.
Events will give you an idea how often and by whom, certain actions are being taken. Think of opening the app, updating the app or receiving notifications.
When you go to the pages and screens tab it's important to change the setting pictured below to 'Page title and screen name'.
This helps you read the data, as it is now listed with a friendly name instead of a technical one. In the grid you will see the amount views per page, the engagement time of your users, and more, for each page in your app. With this information you can find out which pages are more interesting to your users and which are not. Based on this, you can choose to make changes to the screens with less engagement.
Retention helps you understand how frequently and for how long users engage with your website or mobile app after their first visit. The topic also helps you understand how valuable users are based on the additional revenue you generate after their first visit.
Tech. As you know for mobile apps it can be very interesting to see which platform your users are using and what kind of devices. This information can be found on the Tech overview screen. On this page you'll find whether your users are on Android or iOS, and the Users by Device model tile even shows you which model of the device they are using.
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