We’re in the era of mobile, where there are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide and these numbers are increasing very rapidly. Most of the mobile subscribers are using mobile apps for either shopping or for accessing social networking sites or playing games or listening online songs and etc.
There were 300,000+ applications downloaded 10.9 billion times in 2010 [December 2010] only as per research by IDC. There are so many mobile apps in the market whether it’s for iPhone or Android or Blackberry or Symbian based mobile phones and Windows OS based smart phones.
There are so many mobile development companies or mobile developers who build mobile applications but after wards they don’t know the effectiveness of their application in terms of how many persons actually using it after downloading, what’s bounce rate, from which mobile handset your application is being accessed and so many factors. For that you should start tracking application using web analytics tool i.e. Google Analytics. Here I’m going to explain google analytics implementation for following mobile applications.
- Android
- iPhone
- Blackberry
Android Application Tracking through Google Analytics in just 3 Steps
Step 1 - Firstly you’ll have to download Google Analytics SDK for Android, You can download it from here, then extract file and add libGoogleAnalytics.jar to your application’s /libs directory. And add the below permissions to your application’s AndroidManifest.xml manifest file:
- <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.INTERNET” />
- <uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE” />
Step 2 - You’ll have to setup new web property in google analytics, most likely fake profile but with full URL likehttp://myapp.mywebsite.com, then note down UA number of your tracking code and looks like UA-xxxxx-yy.
Step 3 – Implementing google analytics in android application, you can track below activities as per your android application,
- Page View Level
- Event Level
- Custom Variable
- Ecommerce Tracking
For Instance, We’ve implemented page view level and event tracking of google analytics for My Music Player android app. It has 3 to 4 different tabs i.e. Albums, Artists, Songs and Playlist. We’ve implemented page view level implementation for tracking page view details of different tabs / pages as with reference to below image.
Google Analytics Tracking for Android Application
Page view level implementation
Through page view level implementation of application, you can get idea about unique page views of your application’s pages as like traditional website, like unique page view for setting section or help section.
For getting page view level information you’ll have to implement below standard code to across all the tabs or classes or pages of your application, as like we implement google analytics for website.
tracker = GoogleAnalyticsTracker.getInstance();
// Start the tracker in manual dispatch mode…
tracker.startNewSession(“UA-YOUR-ACCOUNT-HERE”, this);
Replace your UA account number with “UA-YOUR-ACCOUNT-HERE” in above code.
// …alternatively, the tracker can be started with a dispatch interval (in seconds).
//tracker.startNewSession(“UA-YOUR-ACCOUNT-HERE”, 20, this);
You can also set tracker for dispatching interval by adding seconds in above code.
Event tracking implementation
Through event tracking implementation, you can get idea about which actions i.e. play, pause or stop has been taken in your android application through applying event tracking in google analytics.
For Instance, we’ve implemented event tracking for tracking which action has been taken in My Music Player App i.e. play or pause or stop or share it with Facebook or Twitter with reference to below image.
For event tracking implementation, you’ll have to add below code across the classes or functions of where buttons are called
tracker.trackEvent(
“Clicks”, // Category, i.e. Player Buttons
“Button”, // Action, i.e. Play
“clicked”, // Label i.e. Play
77); // Value,
Tracking Tabs / Pages / Classes of Application
If you want to track different sections / tabs of your application, then you should tracker.trackpaview function over the sections. You can see the below example,
// tracker.trackPageView(“/help”); to track someone looking at the help screen.
// tracker.trackPageView(“/setting”); to track someone looking at the settings screen.
// tracker.trackPageView(“/Now Playing”); to track someone using a now playing screen.
<h3>Dispatching Interval</h3>
if you haven’t called automatically dispatch event tracker then you should implement below manually dispatch tracker at the end of the event tracking code. You can see the below example of it.
// manually start a dispatch, not needed if the tracker was started with a dispatch interval.
tracker.dispatch();
Implementation of Stop Session
You can terminate the session if you don’t need it longer. It’s necessary to add below code on destroy class for terminating the session.
// Stop the tracker when it is no longer needed.
tracker.stopSession();
Google Analytics Reports for Android Applications
After google analytics implementation for android application successfully, you can view the analytics report for your application in your google analytics account. You can see the Top content Section report that includes bounce rate and unique page views for the android application in below image.
Google Analytics Report
Google Analytics for Android
Reference Link:
http://www.tatvic.com/blog/android-application-tracking-through-google-analytics/
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