Mobile Avatar of Google Analytics
Google Analytics, the company’s service for tracking and analyzing Web traffic, is going to be available in mobile version. Google has made announcement regarding the enhancements to its analytics service, a series of reports called Mobile App Analytics. This is designed to help developers and marketers understand how customers are using mobile apps.
Google will be providing access to Google Analytics users who sign up to participate in the beta test, with general availability coming later this summer. The company will also offer user acquisition metrics such as the number of downloads and new users; engagement metrics such as user retention, user conversion, and app crashes; and commerce metrics such as app sales and in-app purchases.
There is an additional plan to make additional metrics from its online Android store, Google Play. Google has rewritten the Google Analytics SDKs for iOS and Android, and plans to add support for custom solutions on other platforms. The Software Development Kit code now provides support for allowing users to opt out of analytics tracking and for secure HTTPS connections, to safeguard analytics data. Network access has also been optimized to preserve battery life on mobile devices.
According to the company spokesperson the tracking is to be done using a using a random, anonymous number and not to be tied to a specific user or device and therefore it will not be usable to track users across different apps. This should help mitigate privacy risks associated with reliance on a tracking mechanism that can be linked to user identities.
The engagement reports will display things like how much time users spend in an app, how many screens they viewed per session and what the app’s most popular screen is. In addition to that and the ability to view app crashes and network timeouts, developers can also track the flow of those sessions to see what paths users take to from screen-to-screen. According to Google, the new Mobile App Analytics functionality is “designed to measure the entire mobile customer journey – from discovery to download to engagement.