Understanding multi-device user behavior in a single view
April 17th, 2014 | Published in Google Analytics
In this constantly connected world, users can interact with your business across many digital touchpoints: websites, mobile apps, web apps, and other digital devices. So to help you understand what users do in the increasingly diverse digital landscape, we’re enabling the ability to see web and app data in the same reporting view.
Here’s a bit more detail on this change:
Analyze app and web data in the same reporting view
Now you can see all data you send to one Google Analytics property in a single reporting view, regardless of the collection method you use of where the data comes from. If you send data from the web and from a mobile app to one property, both data sets appear in your reports.
If you want to isolate data from one source, like if you only want to see web data in your reports, you can set up a filter to customize what you see. You can also use other tools to isolate each data set, including customizations in standard reports, dashboards, custom reports, and secondary dimensions.
If you don’t send web and app data to the same property, this change doesn’t affect your data or your account.
Measure web apps
We’ve 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, so you can more accurately collect data on your web apps.
Benefit from consistent dimension & metrics names
Until today, 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 you a clear and consistent way to analyze and refer to all of your Google Analytics data.
Visitors are now users and visits are sessions:
There are two big changes to the names in Google Analytics: First, the Visitors web metric and Active Users app metric are now unified under the same name, Users. And second, Visits are now referred to as Sessions everywhere in all of Google Analytics.
We’ll be making these changes starting today, and rolling them out incrementally over the next week. Visit our developer site for more information on these changes:
- Read the full list of dimension and metric names
- App / Screen Tracking developer guide
- Exception Tracking developer guide
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Product Manager