Firebase Analytics provides comprehensive in-app behavioral and
marketing analytics that's built in directly to the Firebase SDK.
With Firebase Analytics you can gain powerful insights into your app's usage and
marketing performance as well as use your analytics data with other Firebase features.
As a Firebase developer the Firebase SDK can collect basic app
usage data for you automatically without the need to write any additional code.
Default event tracking lets you better understand basic interactions such as:
how many times your app was opened,
how often in-app purchases were made, and how many users were active during a
certain period of time. Firebase then expands your data by bringing in
proprietary demographic and interest information to present a holistic view
of your users. Beyond the automated features Firebase Analytics gives you
powerful but easy-to-use building blocks like Events, Conversions, User Properties
and Audiences. Firebase Events help you understand what is happening in your app.
While default events are captured automatically you can add your own
custom events to better understand even the most detailed interactions. What you
measure using events is completely up to you. But don't worry if you don't know
where to start.
Suggested events will help you measure key interactions and business drivers.
From the event reports you can see how many times each event occurred, the value
of each event, and the number of users that triggered them. Many default and
suggested events also have enhanced reports to help you explore your data
further. And if you're a Big Query customer you can export your full event
data directly for even more detailed analysis. Different events naturally have
different levels of importance.
In Firebase, your most important events are called Conversions. In addition to
reporting in the Event section, conversion events are highlighted in the
Attribution section. Attribution bridges the gap between your marketing efforts
and your critical in-app activity showing you which sources generated the most new
users, conversions, revenue, and lifetime value. Use the Funnels section to visualize
a sequence of events. For example, you can see how many users triggered each of the
specific events in a series to create an account, or how many triggered each of
the set of events that led up to a purchase. Events are important but they
can't tell the whole story.
Firebase User Properties give you a better understanding of the types of
users spend time in your app. Many user properties are available
automatically including age, gender, device, app version, and operating system.
You can also create your own custom user properties. For example, let's say you
want to keep track of a user's favorite sports team. Set that as a user property
and then use that information to filter your reporting across Firebase. When you
create custom properties be sure to never include personally identifiable
information such as names, Social Security numbers, or email addresses even
in hashed form. From the Audience's section you can even combine your event
end user property information using conditions into segmented groups of
users called Firebase Audiences. With an audience you can drill down and perform
deep analysis on each of these groups. For example, you might want to look at
metrics for just your users from a specific country who have reached a
certain achievement level in your app. Audiences make measuring these complex
combinations easy.
But audiences aren't just about analytics. They also let you take action across Firebase
and many other Google solutions acting as highly contextual targeting
information. A Cohort is the set of users who started doing the same thing
at the same time. The retention cohort looks at users who began using your app
during a certain date range to see whether users acquired on one date
continue using the app at a greater rate than users acquired on another date.
All this is just the beginning. As you explore Firebase Analytics you'll find
many other ways to use analytics data to improve your app and grow your business.
To learn more about Firebase Analytics, visit the Help Center and
Developer documentation.