Nowadays, nobody doubts the usefulness of Google Analytics in the world of Online Marketing. Website administrators have been able to better understand the profile of the users visiting them, segment, monitor traffic, and even improve their website’s usability. Many professions have emerged around this tool, such as SEO manager and UI engineering. In the offline world, gathering this kind of data costs millions of euros and is almost always based on distant approximations or statistics.

Google Analytics was born in 2005, revolutionizing the world of web statistics. For unknown reasons, Marketing departments in Spain and Latin America took many years to adopt this powerful tool, even though, by then, the web was already an essential element for marketing products and services.

Today, exactly the same thing is happening: the mobile applications are an extremely important element in many companies’ marketing, their commercial potential is almost unlimited, and nothing is done to monitor user interactions or how they handle information. The options offered on mobile are very similar to those offered on the web.

Indeed, Google Analytics for mobile applications has existed since 2011, for both iOS and Android. It’s an extremely powerful tool that Sozpic integrates into applications where understanding the customer, their preferences, and how they interact is essential. Google Analytics for mobile applications shouldn’t be confused with the Google Analytics mobile app, which was released a few months ago and simply lets you check the data obtained from Analytics, whether web or mobile. Nor should it be confused with the statistics offered by Google Play in the developer console, since these only refer to downloaded applications.

New Mobile App Analytics

The new Mobile App Analytics is designed to measure the entire lifecycle of the mobile application (from the moment the user discovers the app until they uninstall it). This allows for the creation of more useful and engaging user experiences through decisions based on data gathered at each stage of the application’s lifecycle:

Below we’ll see the sections that will be available in the new reports, but they will only be available for applications using SDK v2.0.

New and active users: Shows the number of new and active users the app has, as well as the number of people who delete it.

Traffic Sources: Shows visitors coming from Google Play, other parallel app marketplaces, or advertising campaigns like AdMob, with which there’s a close relationship (I’ll write about the new AdMob another day)

Different information about the mobile device: You’ll be able to get data such as the device model they use, the operating system version, the screen resolution they use, and the language it’s set to. As well as how often it’s used. Data that lets you get to know your potential user better.

User behavior: Just like web-oriented Analytics, you can check the new user-to-returning user ratio, as well as how often the application is used and the engagement level of each segmented group. This new visualization is very interesting and useful, since it shows at a glance visitor loyalty and how to interact with the application.

Flow : Shows the screens and paths users take when using applications. There are differences from web Analytics; for example, different colors are used to represent different interactions.

Bugs: You’ll be able to detect bugs and when they occur. This is very useful for developers since it lets them know exactly where the problem is.

App ecommerce : Shows the number of purchases and the revenue generated by purchases in the app. A useful feature that will give a boost to online stores in mobile applications. Unfortunately, although AdMob is integrated for advertisers (meaning they can see the traffic that results from their ads), it still isn’t integrated for publishers (meaning a website that shows ads in its mobile app can’t tell when an ad was clicked).

In summary, this is a major change in what Google Analytics offers. Google is betting heavily on mobile. Steps are being taken toward optimizing the mobile experience. Google has already published its “mobile style guide” anticipating what mobile SEO will become.