I am using Google Analytics iOS SDK (version 2 but will upgrade if it solves problem). How can I track what percentage of my app users have pressed a certain button at least once? I set up a lot of event tracking, thinking this would do it, but the reports are in terms of sessions not users. E.g., it will show what percentage of sessions included an event, so a single user may be counted multiple times. I defined a custom dimension variable that is unique for each app install, but I don't see how to use that as aggregation unit.
All I can think of is to define my own "one time events" by keeping my own database on the device and only pass to Google Analytics the first time it occurs. Is there no better way?
Google Analytics now offers User segment. You could create a user segment, and use the particular event you're interested in as a condition.
In the context of app measurement, a User is defined as a unique Client ID, which is the random ID generated by the GA SDK when the application first runs. It remains stable for as long as an app is installed.
More details here: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2013/07/re-imagining-segmentation-in-analytics.html
Related
I'm running Facebook Ads campaigns for my iOS app and quite naturally I have Facebook Analytics SDK integrated inside my app to track App Installs and Start Trial events to measure the "quality" of the traffic my campaigns bring.
At the Analytics settings page inside Facebook developer dashboard.
https://developers.facebook.com/apps/XXX_APP_ID_XXX/analytics/settings/?business_id=XXX_BUSINESS_ID_XXX
I have the option Log In-App Events Automatically (Recommended) set to "Yes", which I presume enables the tracking of App Install and Start Trial events. There's also a Shared App Secret field filled in with the value from iTunesConnect.
Indeed, the App Install and Start Trial events have started to appear inside Analytics dashboard
https://www.facebook.com/analytics/XXX_APP_ID_XXX/AppEvents?__aref_src=landing_page&__aref_id=entity_name&force_desktop=1&user_id=XXX_USER_ID_XXX
However I noticed when viewing the stats for just App Installs there's a quite considerable value in USD attributed to these events. I decided to take a closer look into these events using Event Debugging
https://www.facebook.com/analytics/XXX_APP_ID_XXX/most_recent?since=1577923200000&until=1580256000000&__aref_src=landing_page&__aref_id=entity_name&force_desktop=1&user_id=XXX_USER_ID_XXX
and selecting "App Install" in the events filter.
There I saw that some (only some and as if randomly) App Installs have a value associated with them. To me this is an unexpected behavior since I can't imagine revenue being made by just receiving an install.
Same goes for Start Trial event, which always has the value associated to it (equal to the sale price of a subscription period) and once again this makes no sense to me because started trials themselves bring no value to me. They may be canceled or may end up in Billing Retry when the user has no money on the bank card attached to their iTunes account, etc. I track the conversions from Start Trial to Purchase on my backend separately with great precision and only these conversions as well as subsequent renewals would bring real value to my business.
I can and will track these Purchases manually and post them to Facebook (server-to-server style) and I will supply the corresponding value to these events myself, which will help to understand the overall performance and ROI but I need to clean my stats from these "false" automatically and erroneously attributed values to App Install and Start Trial events first.
I've already reported this issue to Facebook few days ago, however they seem to be slow in handling such requests so I've decided to ask here if anybody ran into similar issue.
Add this to your plist file to disable Auto Event Logging
<key>FacebookAutoLogAppEventsEnabled</key>
<false/>
Thanks to Lena Bru for giving enough food to find a solution.
The Facebook documentation is scarce on the raised questions and the support answer literally headed me towards the documentation. To recap things, there were 2 main issues (the second one I've mentioned in the comments to Lena's reply):
Facebook was tracking value for the events, which brought no value to my business
Some of the events I've sent from backend didn't appear in the campaign reports
To solve both of these problems, I:
Turned off the value tracking option in the Facebook app settings
On the client side I've started setting up User ID (which the client receives from backend) according to Facebook documentation
I've started to send all of the events, which I wanted to view inside Facebook business cabinet, under custom names from backend. I've supplemented them with app_user_id parameter (see Advanced Matching for App Events in Facebook documentation) so that they could match the App Installs reported from client.
There's still a smaller issue left (it feels like Facebook reports include 20% less installs than actually happening) but the current setup is already something to begin with.
I'm trying to run an affiliate project for my app and Apple's 24 hour cutoff makes it a bit difficult. I'm wondering whether there is a way to implement one's own tracking?
I first was thinking a landing page with a phone number input form. Upon submission we'd use something like Twillio to send the user the app store link via SMS and also store the phone number together with the affiliates code from the landing page URL. I then saw that Google somehow let's you track adwords in relation to app installs and thought that perhaps there might be a way that doesn't involve this phone number indirection... Anyone know how they do it?
To be or not to be
The main question here is nature of your intention.
It reasons necessary accuracy / limitations you have on iOS. I see two variants.
100% Accuracy
If you need 100% accuracy, you can use SFSafariViewController - it's view is rendered by another process and it has shareable cookies between your app and Safari. It's iOS 9+ only 100% way to attribute installs. Also you can go with explicit attribution (email, phone number etc.) requested from user after app install. It might be needed if business model relies on this process (like each install is paid out to user account etc.)
You can get an idea and do implementation following this link
<100% Accuracy
If you want to provide greatest UX possible (but it's not critical) or gather analytics (but it allows some kind of deviation) you can go with some approximation techniques, like gathering IP addresses, location etc from requests to your affilate link. The flow can be following:
Your landing page contains dynamically generated link
Upon clicking on link, user metadata is stored (ip, location, device info - whatever can be grabbed from User-Agent or another info available to your web service)
User is redirected to App Store
Upon install and run, app queries your service with device info and ip.
Your web service now decides on attribution. Matching algorithm can include any necessary amount of variables / conditions. Like "Same IP + Device Type + No more than 5 minutes since clicking the link".
This way you don't request any user info (email, phone number) but you're already able to track attribution. Correctness percent is subject to tuning.
Edit #1
This approach might be helpful to you, it's used to attribute login, however you can use modified for analytics.
Edit #2
If you're really wondering, how AdWords does this, you might be interested in install tracking step-by-step guide. It's explicitly stated (section "Instructions for tracking iOS app installs (first open)", p.14) that you should either use AdWords tracking code (this tutorial describes how) or setup server-server integration. So, going back to original questions:
..there might be a way that doesn't involve this phone number indirection?
Yes
Anyone know how they do it?
There are lots of techniques (as well as measurement pixel built on top of mentioned above SFSafariViewController), described in these docs:
Google SDK,
3d-party SDKs
I have an iOS app with Google Analytics to track engagement/retention, and I have been trying to set up a way to track the session durations of specific users. I followed all of the steps to send the User-ID value when a user logs into a session (using &uid), and I have also created a User-ID enabled reporting view. However, I have no idea how to sift through the bulk session data to pick out the behavior of an individual user. Thanks for your time and help, this is really important to my company.
User ID - iOS SDK
The User ID feature enables the measurement of user activities that
span across devices in Google Analytics, such as attributing an
interaction with a marketing campaign on one mobile device to a
conversion that occurs on another mobile device or in the browser.
When User IDs are sent with Google Analytics hits using the userId
field, your reports will reflect a more accurate count of unique users
and offer new cross-device reporting options.
Userid is used internally by Google analytics to give you more actuate user data in your reports, there for your reports already have it included.
If you are trying to find the value itself so that you can track a user though their use of your application you cant. Google Analytics doesn't allow you to track individual users that would violate their privacy. You could add this value as a custom dimension and track them that way as long as its a non identifiable userid you are using, something that cant be tracked back to a specific user.
I'm building an iOS app and would like to use a analytics tool (Flurry, localytics or others).
My app will have 2 types of users, where some users can be of the 1st type, some can be of the 2nd type and some will be both kinds.
On which analytics tool can I get adequate reports that take these 2 types into account?
Is there some kind of "tag" that I can use to identify the types of users, and then see those in the reports? For example, a report that shows users only from a certain type.
On Flurry, you can use the setUserID to log the user's assigned ID or username in your system after identifying the user. Please be sure not to use this method to pass any private or confidential information about the user.
(Full disclosure: I work in the Support team at Flurry)
The Quantcast app measurement SDK allows you do exactly what you are asking. It is the "labels" feature of their SDK. It allows you to create audience segments against which you create reports for those users with a given label. This is different than setting a user ID (which the Quantcast SDK allows, but not requires, you to do too) in that a label is simply a tag that many users can share. Multiple labels can be assigned to a given user, and a user's labels can change over time.
(Full disclosure: I work at Quantcast. Also, as of July 2013, the reporting available against labels is rapidly evolving and improving).
We are using GA for Flash in our iOS app ported over with Adobe Air and are seeing some funky numbers being collected in Google Analytics. We ran some tests and saw that every time the app was opened it would count both a new visit and a new unique visit, even if it was just a minimize and re-open.
We would assume that the 30 minute time out would be in effect here and that even on a quick minimize and re-open that GA would count that as one visit. This doesn't seem to be the case.
Does anyone know how we could set-up the GA implementation to record unique visits based off of a user ID given on first launch of the app, and/or have it accurately count visits?
Has anyone seen something similar to this before?
Google Analytics allows you to set up Custom Events to track user interactions so this could be dispatched depending on a flag stored in a config file (to determine if it is the first time the application is run).
Depending on your implementation of Air, i.e AS3 / Javascript, if you are using AS3 you may have to utilise the ExternalInterface api to call a javscript method from the application.
This would then allow you to track these custom events and ignore the erroneous default visits?