Empowering the Mobile Application with analytics strategies

Prepared by: Pushpendra Yadav (Team GMA)

INTRODUCTION TO MOBILE APP ANALYTICS Table of Contents

1. Abstract …………………………………………… 2 2. Available tools for Mobile App Analytics …………………………………………… 2 3. Firebase Analytics ……………………………………………………. 4

3.1 Why Firebase Analytics? ….………………………………………………… 4

4. How it works? ……………….…….………………..…………….………………………. 5

5. More on Firebase Analytics …….………………..…………….………………………. 6

5. Conclusion ……………………………….…………………………………………………. 7

6. References …………………………………………………………………………………. 8

1 | P a g e 1. Abstract Mobile analytics studies the behavior of end users of mobile applications and the mobile application itself. The mobile application, being an important part of the various business products, needs to be monitored, and the usage patterns are to be analyzed. Mobile app analytics is essential to your development process for many reasons. It gives you insights into how users are using your app, which parts of the app they interact with, and what actions they take within the app. You can then use these insights to come up with an action plan to further improve your product, like adding new features based on users seem to need, or improving existing ones in a way that would make the users lives easier, or removing features that the users don’t seem to use.

2. Available tools for Mobile App Analytics There are lots of tools on the market that can help you make your app better by getting valuable insights about return on investment, user traffic, your audience, and your app in general. Let’s make some mobile application analytics comparison and see which tools are the most valuable and which mobile analytics platforms you might want to use:

-2Firebase | P a g e by - Mixpanel - Apsee Analytics Tools Features Platforms Supported Price Crash reporting Deep linking performance Firebase by Google In-app purchase data iOS, Android Free/Paid Attribution Segments Engagement Funnels Mixpanel iOS, Android Free/Paid Retention A/B Testing Touch Heatmaps User Session Recordings Appsee Crash Reporting iOS, Android 14-day free trial/Paid Action Cohorts Retention Analytics Sessions and Events Retention iOS, Android, Windows Localytics Free/Paid Attribution Mobile, BlackBerry Uninstall Tracking Segmentation Notifications iOS, Android, Windows Countly User Profiles Free/Paid Mobile, BlackBerry Engagement Funnels

3 | P a g e 3. Firebase Analytics Google acquired Firebase in 2014 and quickly integrated it into its platform. Firebase is Google’s new unified mobile app platform that includes a whole suite of mobile app tools to get any app developer quickly up and running. Firebase Analytics is specifically designed for mobile applications, it is like , but it does not focus on-screen views and page views. Instead, Firebase Analytics informs developers how users are engaging with applications. At the heart of Firebase is Google Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics solution. Analytics integrates across Firebase features and provides you with unlimited reporting for up to 500 distinct events that you can define using the Firebase SDK.

4 | P a g e 3.1 Why Firebase Analytic? • Built into Firebase, Google’s platform for mobile developers • Free and unlimited solution for mobile app analytics • Integrated feature of Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform • Automatic measurement of “first-open” and other key events • Event-based data model • Out of the box Notification Solution

4. Does it work? Google Analytics helps you understand how people use a mobile application. The SDK automatically captures several events and user properties and 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 through the Firebase console. Analytics helps you understand how your users behave, so you can make informed decisions about how to market your app. If you need to perform custom analysis or join your data with other sources, you can link your Analytics data to BigQuery, which allows for more complex analysis like querying large data sets and joining multiple data sources.

5 | P a g e Below are few events, which are captured by default:

1. App open — when the user opens the app for the first time

2. user_engagement

3. App_clear_data — you can know when the user clears their app data

4. app_remove — UNINSTALL analysis!!! Now know which users removed the app, reach out to them for feedback and more

5. notification_foreground — when a user receives a notification when the app is in the foreground and a lot more push related data

5. More on Firebase Analytics With Firebase Analytics, a mobile app will be equipped to capture the user’s footprints in the application. Based on the captured data from Firebase analytics, below can be measured: - Granular level analysis of User’s area of interest for the available features in the app - Events and impressions analysis on different sections of the mobile application

6 | P a g e - User’s session-based analysis - Number of hits in a section, which will let us know the favourite area of a User - Detailed analysis of Demographic data and app usage pattern - User’s location-based logging

5. Conclusion

App growth on the playstore without advanced data segmentation & analysis is impossible. The new segmentation & funnels seem like a step in the right direction. Overall, it seems that Google has paid attention to the needs of app developers and Firebase is a good mixture of the right ingredients.

7 | P a g e 6. References: https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/

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