Programming

Google Analytics Allows Web App and Traditional Web Reporting in Same View

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Google Analytics is now enabling the ability to see web and app data in the same reporting view.

Now Google Analytics customers can see all data they send to one Google Analytics property in a single reporting view, regardless of the collection method used based on where the data comes from. If data is sent from the web and from a mobile app to one property, both data sets appear in reports.

To isolate data from one source (for example to only see web data in a report) users can set up a filter to customize what they see. Other tools can be used to isolate each data set, including customizations in standard reports, dashboards, custom reports, and secondary dimensions.

Google Analytics has also added some new app-specific fields to the analytics.js JavaScript web collection library, including screen name, app name, app version, and exception tracking. These changes allow the JavaScript tracking code to take advantage of the app tracking framework to more accurately collect data on web apps.

Until this change, some metrics and dimensions used different names in app views and in web views, even though they presented the exact same data. Now, all metric, dimensions, and segment names are the same, regardless if they’re used for web or app data. This gives a clear and consistent way to analyze and refer to all of Google Analytics data.

To some things up, visitors are now users and visits are sessions. The Visitors web metric and Active Users app metric are now unified under the same name - Users. And Visits are now referred to as Sessions everywhere in all of Google Analytics.