Understanding Google Analytics for Firebase
Introduction:
Google introduced Firebase as its new set of tools for the mobile app developer to build, grow, and monetize their apps. Along with it was Firebase Analytics, which integrates very well into these new tools and services that Firebase provides. It really caters to this mobile-centric world of applications. The confusion with this introduction was that Google already has its analytics suite called Google Analytics, which works very well with mobile apps. Let's take a look at how Firebase can be used to measure analytics of our mobile apps.
Go to http://firebase.google.com, the official page of Google’s Firebase Suite.
Firebase is actually a suite of different tools that will help mobile app developers develop, grow, and earn more money with their mobile apps.
We all know analytics are important for building a successful application, which is why there are so many kinds of analytics tools for app developers to use. There is in-app behavioral analytics that measure who your users are, what they are doing, and so on. And then there is attribution analytics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your advertising in other growth campaigns, not to mention push notification analytics and crash reporting. But quite often this work is being done by a completely different analytics library, which means you have reports living in various tools across the web and trying to understand trends across these different reports, much less get them to talk to each other, isn’t always easy.
This problem is solved by using Google Analytics for Firebase. Its build from ground up to provide all of the data that mobile app developers need in one easy place.
It gives you free and unlimited logging and reporting without any quota, any sampling and no paid tier to worry about. Simply by installing the Firebase SDK, analytics automatically starts providing insight into your app.
- You can see what the demographic information of your users are,
- How regularly they use your app,
- How much time they spend there, and
- How much they have spent on your app.
But not all apps are alike, but you can get detailed information about what your users are up to by logging events specific to your app. These can include common events that Google Analytics for Firebase has already defined, like when your users add an item to their cart. And then there is support for custom events you create yourself, like when a user completes a workout in your fitness app, or when they take in your photo app. Buts it's not just about seeing what your users are doing, it's also about discovering who your users are. So in addition to demographic information, you can discover how your different users behave differently by setting custom user properties. Have a music app and want to find out whether your classical music fans are browsing more albums than your jazz fusion bands? That's the kind of data you can easily break out, thanks to custom user properties.
Google Analytics for Firebase doesn’t just measure what’s happening inside your app. It lets you combine your behavioral reporting, what your users are doing, with attribution reporting, or what growth campaigns are bringing people to your app in the first place. So if you want to know which ad campaign are bringing you the users who spend the most money, or are sharing the app with their friends, or have unlocked the last level in your game and are ready for the sequel, you can do all of that in Google Analytics for Firebase.
Once you have all of this information, you can take action on it using Audiences. Google Analytics for Firebase gives you the power to build up groups of users, or audiences, out of just about anything you can measure in your app.
Want to target users in India who have visited the sports section of your in-app store? It’s as easy as a few clicks in the Firebase console.
Once your app has built up this audience, you can then send them notifications, using Firebase Notifications, or you can modify their in-app experience, using Firebase Remote Config. Or you can target them through Adwords, Google’s ad platform. And then, because that impact can be measured using Google Analytics, you can confirm you are getting the outcomes you expect.
Google Analytics for Firebase already comes with a dashboard that lets you view answers for common questions. But if you need more specialized analysis, You can export all of your data into BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse in the cloud, where you can run super fast SQL queries to slice and dice this data however you’d like.
You can even combine it with other analytics data that you might be capturing. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of what Google Analytics for Firebase can do for you.
Summary:
Hope this article gives you a better understanding of why you should be using Google Analytics for Firebase in your mobile app. I would recommend using Firebase Analytics for your mobile apps if you want to track them. Some of the success stories of Firebase users say that using Firebase, they were able to consolidate and measure important metrics within a unified platform. They say it relieves the burden of data analysis and allows them to take actions where it really counts.
