Analytics Blog: Firebase

Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features

November 9, 2017

If you use Google Analytics for Firebase to measure your apps, you'll notice something familiar today: a new look and feel that's more consistent with your Google Analytics experience.

These new elements echo some of the changes we made to Google Analytics earlier this year — the updates should help bridge the gap for anyone who uses both Google Analytics and Google Analytics for Firebase. We've also added new reports and cards that will make the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard more timely and helpful.

Real-Time Data

We are now providing you with more real-time information throughout Google Analytics for Firebase to give you a better read on what’s happening in your app.

Inside the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard, you’ll now find a real-time card, much like the one on the Google Analytics Home. It shows details on the number of active users in the past 30 minutes. You'll also see the top conversion events logged by the app. You can configure these conversions so you can track app events that are most important to your team.

The new Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard

Google Analytics for Firebase has a brand new stability card that reports on data from Firebase Crash Reporting and Firebase Crashlytics. It displays the percentage of users who have not had their app crash, so you can see just how stable your app is.

Latest Release

The new Latest Release report lets app developers track the adoption and stability of new app versions within a few hours of release.

The report also contains a real-time card with an app version filter that lets you see which users have adopted the latest version of a release and know whether any versions have crashed in the past 30 minutes. It also lets you measure your users’ level of engagement.

Same Great Analytics

The updated experience is more consistent with Google Analytics, but one thing hasn't changed: Google Analytics for Firebase users still get the same great app-centric reporting and analysis they're used to for Android and iOS. Our engineers are working on developments and new features we'll share in the months to come.

To see the new look and updated features, check out your Firebase project now. (Don't have one yet? Sign up!)

Posted by Sukriti Singal, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Better A/B Testing with Firebase

November 7, 2017

Earlier this year, the Google Optimize and Firebase teams worked together to bring A/B testing functionality to Firebase. Last week, at the Firebase Dev Summit, we announced that A/B testing is now available in beta to all app developers.

This post originally appeared on The Firebase Blog.

Announcing Better A/B Testing with Firebase

If you're like most app developers, you know that small changes can often make a big difference in the long term success of your app. Whether it's the wording that goes into your "Purchase" button, the order in which dialogs appear in your sign-up flow, or how difficult you've made a particular level of a game, that attention to detail can often make the difference between an app that hits the top charts, or one that languishes.

But how do you know you've made the right changes? You can certainly make some educated guesses, ask friends, or run focus groups. But often, the best way to find out how your users will react to changes within your app is to simply try out those changes and see for yourself. And that's the idea behind A/B testing; it lets you release two (or more!) versions of your app simultaneously among randomly selected users to find out which version truly is more successful at getting the results you want.

And while Firebase Remote Config did allow you to perform some simple A/B testing through it's "random percentile" condition, we've gone ahead and added an entirely new experiment layer in Firebase that works with Remote Config and notifications to make it quick and easy to set up and measure sophisticated A/B tests. Let's take a quick tour of how it works!

Getting to Know the New A/B Testing Feature

With the new A/B testing feature, you can create an A/B test that will allow you to play with any combination of values that you can control through Remote Config. Setting up an A/B test allows you to define how the experiment will behave in a number of different ways, including determining how many of your users are involved with the experiment at first…

…how many variants you want to run, and how your app might behave differently for each variant…

...and what the goal of the experiment is.

Different experiments might have different desired goals, and A/B testing supports a number of common outcomes, like increasing overall revenue or retention in your app, reducing the number of crashes, or increasing the occurrence of any event you're measuring in Google Analytics for Firebase, such as finishing your in-app tutorial.

Once you've defined your A/B test, Firebase takes over by delivering these different variations of your app to randomly-selected members of your audience. Firebase will then measure your users' behavior over time, and let you know when an experiment appears to be performing better, based on those goals you've defined earlier. Firebase A/B testing measures these results for you with the same Bayesian statistical models that power Google Optimize, Google's free testing and personalization product for websites.

Using A/B Tests for Better Onboarding: A Case Study

Fabulous, a motivational app for building better habits, recently made improvements to their app's onboarding by using Firebase A/B testing. When the user first starts an app, Fabulous shows them how to complete a habit, presents them with a letter about forming better habits, and then asks them to commit to a simple routine. The team suspected that if they removed a few steps from this onboarding process, more people might complete it.

Some of the screens a typical user encounters when first using Fabulous.

So they ran an A/B test where some users didn't see the letter, others didn't see the request to commit to a simple routine, and others skipped both of those steps. The Fabulous team found that by removing both of these steps from the onboarding process, there was a 7% improvement in the rate of users completing the onboarding flow. More importantly, they confirmed that this shorter onboarding experience didn't have any impact on their app's retention.

Test Your Notifications, Too!

You also have the ability to A/B test your app notification messages through the Firebase Notifications console. You can try out different versions of your notification message and see which ones lead to more users opening up your app from that notification, or which messages lead to users performing some intended goal within your app, like making a purchase.

Getting Started

A/B testing is available in beta to all Firebase developers starting today. If you're excited to get started, you should make sure that your app is wired up to use Remote Config and/or Firebase Cloud Messaging, and that you've updated these libraries to the latest and greatest versions. You can always find out more about A/B testing in our documentation, or check out the A/B Test Like a Pro video series we've been building.

Then, head on over to the Firebase Console and start making your app better — one experiment at a time!

Posted by Todd Kerpelman, Google Firebase team

Firebase Analytics Gets New Features and a Familiar New Name

May 17, 2017

Can it be just a year since we announced the expansion of Firebase to become Google's integrated app developer platform at I/O 2016? That Firebase launch came complete with brand new app analytics reporting and features, developed in conjunction with the Google Analytics team.

Now, at I/O 2017, we're delighted to announce some exciting new features and integrations that will help take our app analytics to the next level. But first, we’d like to highlight a bit of housekeeping. As of today, we are retiring the name Firebase Analytics. Going forward, all app analytics reports will fall under the Google Analytics brand.

This latest generation of app analytics has always, and will continue to be, available in both the Firebase console and in Google Analytics. We think that unifying app analytics under the Google Analytics banner will better communicate that our users are getting the same great app data in both places. In Firebase and related documentation, you'll see app analytics referred to as Google Analytics for Firebase. Read on to the end of this post for more details about this change.

One other note: The launches highlighted below apply to our latest generation of app analytics – you need to be using the Firebase SDK to get these new features.

Now let’s take a look at what’s new.

Integration with AdMob
App analytics is now fully integrated with AdMob. Revenue, impression and click data from AdMob can now be connected with the rest of your event data collected by the Firebase SDK, all of it available in the latest Google Analytics app reports and / or in the Firebase console.

For app companies, this means that ad revenue can be factored into analytics data, so Analytics reports can capture each app’s performance. The integration combines AdMob data with Analytics data at the event level to produce brand new metrics, and to facilitate deep dives into existing metrics. You can answer questions like:

What is the true lifetime value for a given segment, factoring in both ad revenue and purchase revenue?
How do rewarded ads impact user engagement and LTV?
On which screens are users being exposed to advertising the most or the least?

With this change, you can now have a complete picture of the most important metrics for your business ― all in one place.

Custom parameter reporting
"What's the average amount of time users spend in my game before they make their first purchase?" Many of you have asked us for the ability to report on specific data points like these that are important to your business.

Custom parameter reporting is here to make that possible. You can now register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports.

If you supply numeric parameters you’ll see a graph of the average and the sum of that parameter.
If you supply textual parameters you’ll see a breakdown of the most popular values.

As with the rest of your Analytics reports, you can also apply Audience and User Property filters to your custom parameter reports to identify trends among different segments of your userbase.

To start using custom parameter reporting for one of your events, look for it in the detail report for that event. You'll see instructions for setting things up there.

Integration with DoubleClick and third-parties – Now in Beta
We're also pleased to announce a new integration with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Firebase-tracked install (first open) and post-install events can now easily be imported back into DoubleClick as conversions.

This is a boost for app marketers who want a clearer view of the effect their display and video marketing has on customer app behavior. Advertisers can make better decisions (for all kinds of ads, programmatic included) as they integrate app analytics seamlessly with their buying, targeting and optimization choices in DoubleClick.

We also know that some of you use advertising platforms beyond AdWords and DoubleClick, so we continue to invest in integrating more third-party networks into our system. (We're now at 50 networks and growing). The goal: to allow app data from all your networks to come together in Google Analytics, so you can make even better advertising choices using all the data you collect. Learn more.

Real-time analytics for everyone
Google Analytics pioneered real-time reporting, so we know how important it is for our customers to have access to data as it happens. That’s why we’re so excited by the real-time capabilities we’ve introduced into our latest app reports. To refresh an announcement we made in March: StreamView and DebugView are now available to the general public. These features allow you to see how real-world users are interacting and performing with your app right now.

StreamView visualizes events as they flow into our app reporting to give you a sense of how people around the world are using your app, right down to the city level. Then Snapshot lets you zoom-into a randomly selected individual user’s stream of events. And DebugView uses real-time reporting to help you improve your implementation – making it easy for you to make sure you’re measuring what you want how you want. DebugView is a terrific tool for app builders that shows you events, parameters and user properties for any individual development device. It can also highlight any events that contain invalid parameters.

Same product, familiar new name
As mentioned above, we're rebranding Firebase Analytics to make it plain that it's our recommended app analytics solution, and is fully a part of the Google Analytics family.

Our latest reports represent a new approach to app analytics, which we believe better reflects the way that users interact with apps. This means that these reports have different concepts and functionality when compared to the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics.

If you're used to using the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics, don’t worry: they're not going anywhere. But we recommend considering implementing the Firebase SDK with your next app update so you can start getting the latest features for app analytics.

Good data is one thing everyone can agree on: developers and marketers, global firms and fresh new start-ups. We've always been committed to app-centric reports, because analytics and data are the essential beginning to any long-term app strategy. We hope that these new features will give you more of what you need to build a successful future for your own apps.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

November 10, 2016

"All genuine learning comes from experience" - John Dewey

Earlier this year we introduced Firebase: a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It includes tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. There are many resources available to learn Firebase, from documentation, guides and free training courses (Android and iOS) we created, to advice from the Firebase community. However, there is nothing quite like learning through practical experience. To address this we’ve launched a fully functional Firebase Demo Project, available to everyone from today (get access here).

The Demo Project includes data from Flood It! (Android and iOS), a real puzzle game in which you have to flood the whole game board with one color in less than the allowed steps. Therefore, the data in the Firebase demo project is typical of what you might see for a gaming app with in-app purchases. It includes the following kinds of information:

Analytics: Attribution data, key events, cohorts and funnel reporting. This includes data about first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more.
Remote Config: The parameters that control the app experience as well as the conditions which define which users receive which parameter values.
Test Lab: The automated test results from running the app on numerous device/OS combinations for quality assurance purposes.
Crash: Details on various crashes which have occurred in the app, including callstacks and device information.
Notifications: The notification campaigns that were sent to users to re-engage them. This includes data about the number of messages sent, opened and the number of conversions attributed to each campaign.

Firebase Demo Project: Analytics Dashboard

"Since the launch of Firebase we have been excited to continually build hands-on experience with its many features. Especially with the freely included and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps, Firebase Analytics. The Firebase Demo Project has helped our team do just that and similar to what we've done with the Google Analytics Demo Account, we've incorporated the Firebase Demo Project within our training programs. This plays a critical part in helping our clients maximise their familiarity with Firebase." - Ben Gott, Analytics Director, Periscopix

Self-Learning

The Demo Project is useful for exploring Firebase features and reports. Here are a few things you can do with it:

View all standard Analytics reports populated with real data from the Flood It! app
Dissect Analytics reports by applying a variety of filters
See which ad campaigns are driving the most valuable users to the app
Track crashes and their impact on end users, and understand the steps that led to them
See the full notifications funnel for notifications sent from the Firebase Console
View Remote Config parameters to see how values are varied based on targeting parameters, especially feature flags and percent targeting for staging and Analytics audience targeting for customization
See test results from testing the app on real physical and virtual devices in the Firebase Test Lab

Education Programs
If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Firebase then we encourage you to use the Demo Project within your course. For example, you can create practical exercises that students can complete using the Demo Project.

Access the Demo Project
You can get access to the Demo Project and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help, or have ideas to make the Demo Project more useful, please share it with the Google Analytics Community. We hope the Demo Project gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Firebase.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla & Steve Ganem, Google Analytics team

App-First Analytics with Firebase Analytics

May 20, 2016

While Firebase Analytics is separate from Google Analytics for mobile apps, both solutions were built by the same team to ensure Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, the Google Analytics 360 Suite, and Firebase Analytics work together seamlessly. Below, we’ve cross-posted a deep dive into Firebase Analytics from the Firebase blog so you can learn more about the exciting app analytics capabilities available in Firebase. If you’d like to understand more about how Google Analytics products work with Firebase Analytics, check out our Analytics 360 and Google Analytics overviews.

Cross-posted from the Firebase blog by Russell Ketchum, Group Product Manager:
Welcome, current and new Firebase developers! There's a lot to discover with the Firebase platform -- more than we could possibly explain in a single blog post. So over the next several weeks, we'll be sharing posts focusing on each of the individual features of Firebase. For our first post, we wanted to let you know about Firebase Analytics -- the free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile developers.

Analytics are at the heart of successful apps, so when we expanded Firebase to help mobile developers build better apps and grow successful businesses, we thought it was important to build an analytics solution that serves the needs of all app developers, from two-person startups to large, established companies.

Meet Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics tool built from the ground up for mobile apps. Firebase Analytics is at the core of the Firebase platform, providing the insights you need to build successful apps.

All your app analytics in one place.
Firebase Analytics helps you understand what your users are doing in your app. It has all of the metrics that you’d expect in an app analytics tool (average revenue per user (ARPU), active users, retention reports, event counts, etc.) combined with user properties like device type, app version, and OS version to give you insight into how users interact with your app.

Collecting all of this data is simple and works right out of the box. When you add Firebase to your app, key events are measured automatically – including first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more. With up to 500 distinct event types (each with up to 25 key-value pair parameters), you can measure additional suggested and custom events that are unique to your app with just a few lines of code.

Some events are more important to you than others, so with conversion tracking you can define the most important events that happen in your app (like purchasing an item, or sharing your app with others) and create funnels just for these events to discover where users drop out of the process.

But Firebase Analytics helps you analyze more than just user behavior. It also provides a rich set of data that helps describe your users – data like geographic information, demographics, and interests that can help you better tune your app and refine your marketing activities.

While standard demographic data is helpful, it’s also important to understand user properties specific to your app. Firebase Analytics lets you define custom user properties for all of your users. For example, your fitness app can record a user's favorite exercise or your music app can record your user's favorite genre. Firebase Analytics is also integrated with BigQuery, Google’s fully-managed data warehouse, so you can export your raw Firebase data and join it with custom data for additional analysis.

Smarter, more effective app marketing.
Understanding user behavior is just one important part of Firebase Analytics -- you also need to understand how your advertising and marketing activities influence those behaviors. Firebase Analytics can automatically link user behaviors within your app to a traffic source so you know where your valuable users are coming from. It works with Google AdWords and more than 20 other major ad networks without having to install any additional SDKs, making it easy to understand the ROI of your marketing and advertising spend. You can also import Firebase Analytics conversion events directly into Google AdWords, so you can bid on specific user events that happen in your app with just a few clicks.

Firebase Analytics makes all of Firebase better.
Firebase Analytics is designed to make your analytics data actionable. You can use the Audiences feature to create a segment of users based on their event data and user properties. For example, an audience of people who have added items to their cart but haven't made a purchase. Or, an audience of classical music fans who have listened to more than 200 songs.

You can then use these audiences in conjunction with other Firebase features, like Remote Config, which allows you to change the look-and-feel of your app just for a specific audience. Want to create a customized home screen for users who have subscribed to your newsletter or have reached a certain level in your fitness app? You can do that directly from the Firebase console using Remote Config and Audiences in Firebase Analytics.

Firebase Analytics Audiences also works with Notifications, allowing you to send in-app notifications to any audience that you've defined. So, if you've just added a new set of armor to your game's in-app storefront, you can notify only the users who have purchased in-game items in the past. In addition, when your Firebase account is linked to AdWords, you can use audiences to re-engage lapsed users with ad campaigns. To learn more about the app analytics capabilities in Firebase Analytics, check out our video:
While Firebase works well as a standalone tool, the true power of Firebase Analytics lies in the customer insight it brings to other Firebase capabilities - insight that helps you grow, develop, and earn with your mobile app.

Posted by Russ Ketchum, Group Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics and Firebase teams

Welcome to Firebase: Introducing the next generation of Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 for Mobile Apps

May 19, 2016

Google Tag Manager is known for making it easy to deploy and manage analytics, remarketing, conversion tracking, and other types of tags across your websites and apps. And with the introduction of Firebase – Google’s new platform for mobile developers across iOS and Android – using Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 to configure your in-app measurement has never been easier or more powerful!

Yesterday at Google I/O, we announced that we’re expanding Firebase to become a unified mobile developer platform designed to make it easier than ever to build apps using Google’s products and services – and Google Tag Manager is one of these services! The latest version of Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 for mobile apps has been designed to work with Firebase and to extend its capabilities for both developers and marketers.

Unified in-app instrumentation
At the heart of Firebase is Firebase Analytics – a free and unlimited analytics product designed specifically for mobile apps. But Firebase Analytics is more than an analytics product, it’s a unified way for developers to measure anything and everything that’s happening in an app from key business drivers to detailed user interaction. This creates a single source of truth for in-app activity that you can share with other Firebase features and Google products. For Tag Manager, this makes Firebase Analytics the new data layer, which means that anyone who is using Firebase Analytics is ready to start using Tag Manager without recoding.

To get started with Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, simply sign-up for Firebase, sign in to Tag Manager to setup a new Firebase container, and then add both Firebase Analytics and Google Tag Manager to your app. Everything that you’re measuring with Firebase Analytics is ready for use in Tags, Triggers, and Variables in Tag Manager.

Dynamic app measurement
Firebase Analytics makes it easy to measure what’s happening in your app. But what happens if you mislabeled an event or forgot to add a critical parameter? By adding Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 to your app, you can make changes to your measurement setup without having to wade into the app update process.

As experienced marketers know, without tag management, even the most basic tagging changes can take a lot of time and effort, require coordination between marketing and development teams, and pull resources away from other projects. With Tag Manager and Firebase, you’re able to decouple your measurement changes from your build cycles – and by doing so, streamline how your development and marketing teams work together.

One SDK, many options

While Firebase aims to make it easier than ever to build apps and measure user behavior, it’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Developers and marketers often choose to use multiple solutions from multiple vendors in their apps. Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 can help make sense of these disparate tools.

With Firebase Analytics, it’s easy to measure what’s happening in your app – without limiting you to a single toolset. Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 let you take your data and send it to various other analytics tools both at Google – such as Google Analytics – and with other partners. We’re thrilled to announce tag vendor partnerships with several of the leading app attribution solutions including Kochava, Tune, adjust, AppsFlyer, Apsalar, and more. Google Tag Manager has long been heralded for its commitment to being vendor agnostic for web measurement and is excited to extend that same commitment to mobile apps. And our partners are excited too!

"We have always been passionate about supporting developers by making sure Kochava is always integrated with the best tools. That's why we're so excited to provide out-of-the-box support for Google Tag Manager via Firebase."
- Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava

If you don’t see the partner you’re looking for, don’t fret. We’re continually adding additional partners through our Vendor Tag Template Program.

Get started at your convenience
If you’re already using Google Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 for mobile apps don’t worry, your existing containers and the current SDKs will continue to work just the way they are. But as with any major feature release, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of Google Tag Manager for mobile apps – and Firebase along with it – at your earliest convenience. That way, you can be sure to make the most of your mobile tag management experience.

Ready for Google Tag Manager? Learn more and get started today!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Introducing Firebase Analytics

May 18, 2016

We’re excited to highlight Google’s next step in mobile app development: Firebase, a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It comes with new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. The Firebase platform also comes with Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps.

Firebase Analytics is now Google’s recommended solution for mobile app analytics. It’s user and event-centric and comes with unlimited app event reporting, cross-network attribution, and postbacks. If you’re using Google Analytics for mobile app reporting today, you may want to consider adding Firebase and Firebase Analytics to your app to take advantage of some of its powerful new capabilities.

Google Analytics will continue to support our mobile app analytics functionality and we’ve built a number of ways for clients to use Firebase Analytics with Google Analytics or with Analytics 360 for best-in-class analytics capabilities. If you have both web and app properties, we recommend using Google Analytics for your web analytics and Firebase Analytics for your app analytics.

Many clients may want to keep the app analytics functionality they currently enjoy with Google Analytics in addition to implementing Firebase Analytics. This type of dual implementation is made easy with Tag Manager - allowing you to implement Firebase and then use Tag Manager to send your app data into Google Analytics.

Stay tuned for more detail on Firebase Analytics and enhancements to Google Tag Manager that make mobile app analytics faster and easier than ever.

Happy mobile app analyzing!

Posted by Russ Ketchum, Group Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics and Firebase teams

Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce.

Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features

Better A/B Testing with Firebase

Firebase Analytics Gets New Features and a Familiar New Name

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

App-First Analytics with Firebase Analytics

Welcome to Firebase: Introducing the next generation of Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 for Mobile Apps

Introducing Firebase Analytics

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