the Visitor Loyalty numbers for the iOS Google Analytics seem to be wrong (at least in my case). According the numbers the app is visited only 1 or 2 times. Never more than 2. This made no sense to me so I created a new account using Google's example app, same results.
Now the question remains: is this a known issue, do you guys also have problems with Visitor Loyalty numbers with the use of the iOS GA sdk or am I missing something here? Are the cookies overwritten or deleted after the second time? All the other results are okay (also the absolute unique visitors) so the cookies don't seem to be the problem..
(btw with the Android sdk I don't have these problems)
Google say:
Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
So every time you re-install your app on device or simulator, a new unique visitor will be detected.
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 not sure I've stated the title correctly, but I have what I think is an unusual issue. Not something I'm terribly worried about but curious. If I'm tagging this inappropriately I apologize.
I have a google ad running and track clicks using Final URL. So I track keywords, Ad_ID, Location, etc. Looking at the database I noticed that I am getting a hit on my website from what appears to be one user fairly regularly (sometimes minutes apart - other times days - 3200 entries) for the last 2 years, at least to when I started tracking this way. The entry shows the same keywords and the same location - which is local - a mobile device - but not an Ad_ID or a referring URL. I take the google info from the query string in the url so the query string would have to be the same every time.
I recently added a tracking cookie (long expiration) on the user end and this activity shows up with a different cookie value every time meaning either its either a different device or the device doesn't accept cookies. Each hit also starts a new session.
These hits do not show up as clicks on Google Ads so I'm not being charged, it also means that someone is not actually out there clicking on the ad.
I don't see where this is causing problems but am curious as to where this may be coming from. I don't know if there is a way to stop it.
So nothing critical but ideas on what might be causing this would be appreciated. I also get a ton of spam or bot hits on the site but that's a different issue.
Thanks!
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
We're trying to implement deferred deep linking in one of our iOS applications to encourage users to invite their friends to use the app, and reward users based on how many installs occur from their referral link. Basically similar to TapStream's product.
Consider this example:
So, UserA shares their link, “ourappURL.com/refer?id=userA”, on any
network they want. UserB clicks that link, which will take them to
Safari and then bounce them to the App Store page where UserB
downloads the app.
When UserB opens the app, the app checks which referral ID they came
in on (if any). In this example, the referral ID would be “userA” as
that’s the ID that was in the referral link. The app then sends this to
our servers and we award UserA with a referral credit.
I'm trying to break this issue down into its core parts. I believe the first part is getting the web page for the user's referral link to save the referral ID to the device somewhere that the app can access it. But I'm not sure this is possible because of the sandboxed nature of iOS.
I know this is fundamentally possible because many ad providers offer the ability to track installations from an ad campaign (see Mobile App Tracking for example).
We have also attempted to do this ourselves and I will try to break down the different steps here.
Going back to your example, you are correct about "remembering" the device identification, and all relevant data "id=userA". You are also correct about "sandboxed nature of iOS" which I presume it means a web page is not allowed to store information outside of the browser app (Safari) and apps (your app) are not able to access information stored by other apps (Safari).
Our solution to this is to store this device to data key-value pair in an environment that is both accessible by the browser as well as by your app, i.e. your backend server.
The next challenge, which remains to be the biggest challenge, is how to uniquely identify this device from the information collectable from the browser? Javascripts in browsers, unlike native apps, don't have access to IDFAs which could be used to uniquely identify a iOS device. To overcome this, one can imagine to use a combination of common information that is available both to the browser app as well to your native app, i.e. OS type, public IP, screen size, etc. etc. Please note, a composite key from these data fields does not guarantee uniqueness (imagine two iPhone 6 visiting this web page via the same router). Therefore, your backend server (assuming you are using it to store this key-value pair), will want to have a strategy on how to handle collisions on keys i.e. the second key deletes the first key, or you allow collision to exist by having a queue of values for a single key. This really depends on how you actual plan to use this technology.
The last step is to form this composite key on your app using the exact same fields you used earlier in the browser to perform a "lookup" on your backend server to retrieve the value previously stored.
Here is a summary of the steps:
User 1 invites User 2 by sending the following link to 2: example.com?inviter=1
User 2 visit Web Page P
P constructs and sends the following key-value pair to your server S iOS|55.55.55.55|750×1334 -> inviter_id=1
User 2 goes to the app store and downloads your App A
User 2 first launches A, A contacts S with the same key (assuming the IP hasn't changed).
S finds the value inviter_id=1 by using this key passed in and, let's say, reward User 1 five points for inviting 2.
Hope this help!
Edit 04/24:
Since Derrick mentioned it in the comments, I figure I would take this chance to finish our story here.
Going back to the beginning of my answer where I mentioned we've attempted to do this ourselves. We had a working prototype based on our current system architecture (which is not in anyway optimized, or meant to be optimized, for storing and analyzing deep link data like this), we ultimately decided not to allocate any additional engineering resource into this project.
Due to the heuristic nature of this matching process, we found this project needing debugging, tuning and optimizing constantly for a diminishing ROI. More importantly, we have found other companies which are more specialized and do a much better job than ourselves.
It has been probably 6 months since we stopped using our internal system and we haven't regretted making such decision.
During this processes, we've worked with a number of vendors, Appsflyer, Adjust, TapStream and we have ultimately ended up with Branch Metrics https://branch.io.
Whether you should DIY or work with another company again depends on your specific objective. We finally decided to stay with Branch, not only because the other vendors charged anywhere from $500 to thousands of dollars per month while Branch is completely free, but also the level of the support they have provided is simply unparalleled.
We've successfully used the clipboard (NSPasteboard) to achieve this: the web page that processes the redirect to the app store does a paste to the mobile device's clipboard before letting the user download the app. Once the app is installed, it uses NSPasteboard on first launch to check for an appropriately coded string. This string can contain the text of interest or, more securely, a token used to fetch interesting data from the backend. In Objective C:
UIPasteboard *pasteboard = [UIPasteboard generalPasteboard];
NSString *pasteboardString = pasteboard.string;
The clipboard can be cleared once the app is done with it, to avoid repeating the same action.
There is a good solution here: http://blogs.innovationm.com/deferred-deep-linking-in-ios-with-universal-link/
Basic workflow:
User selects domain link on web.
Link sets referral ID to cookie.
User redirected to app store.
On app launch, load referral page in SFSafariViewController.
Referral page checks for cookie and if it exists calls a deeplink into the app with the referral ID.
My answer from HERE
Apple no longer supports Deep Links. It is now called Universal Links and works a bit differently.
Source
Now that Apple no longer supports URI schemes for deep linking, developers must implement Universal Links in order to deep link properly on iOS. If you are already using URI schemes, check out our blog on transitioning to Universal Links.
From: HERE
And HERE is another article on Universal Links and what they are.
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