It's been an exciting year! Last May, we expanded Firebase into our unified app platform, building on the original backend-as-a-service and adding products to help developers grow their user base, as well as test and monetize their apps. Hearing from developers like Wattpad, who built an app using Firebase in only 3 weeks, makes all the hard work worthwhile.
We're thrilled by the initial response from the community, but we believe our journey is just getting started. Let's talk about some of the enhancements coming to Firebase today.
In January, we announced that we were welcoming the Fabric team to Firebase. Fabric initially grabbed our attention with their array of products, including the industry-leading crash reporting tool, Crashlytics. As we got to know the team better, we were even more impressed by how closely aligned our missions are: to help developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. Over the last several months, we've been working closely with the Fabric team to bring the best of our platforms together.
We plan to make Crashlytics the primary crash reporting product in Firebase. If you don't already use a crash reporting tool, we recommend you take a look at Crashlytics and see what it can do for you. You can get started by following the Fabric documentation.
Phone number authentication has been the biggest request for Firebase Authentication, so we're excited to announce that we've worked with the Fabric Digits team to bring phone auth to our platform. You can now let your users sign in with their phone numbers, in addition to traditional email/password or identity providers like Google or Facebook. This gives you a comprehensive authentication solution no matter who your users are or how they like to log in.
At the same time, the Fabric team will be retiring the Digits name and SDK. If you currently use Digits, over the next couple weeks we'll be rolling out the ability to link your existing Digits account with Firebase and swap in the Firebase SDK for the Digits SDK. Go to the Digits blog to learn more.
We recognize that poor app performance and stability are the top reasons for users to leave bad ratings on your app and possibly churn altogether. As part of our effort to help you build better apps, we're pleased to announce the beta launch of Performance Monitoring.
Firebase Performance Monitoring is a new free tool that helps you understand when your user experience is being impacted by poorly performing code or challenging network conditions. You can learn more and get started with Performance Monitoring in the Firebase documentation.
Analytics has been core to the Firebase platform since we launched last I/O. We know that understanding your users is the number one way to make your app successful, so we're continuing to invest in improving our analytics product.
First off, you may notice that you're starting to see the name "Google Analytics for Firebase" around our documentation. Our analytics solution was built in conjunction with the Google Analytics team, and the reports are available both in the Firebase console and the Google Analytics interface. So, we're renaming Firebase Analytics to Google Analytics for Firebase, to reflect that your app analytics data are shared across both.
For those of you who monetize your app with AdMob, we've started sharing data between the two platforms, helping you understand the true lifetime value (LTV) of your users, from both purchases and AdMob revenue. You'll see these new insights surfaced in the updated Analytics dashboard.
Many of you have also asked for analytics insights into custom events and parameters. Starting today, you can register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports. Learn more about custom parameter reporting.
Firebase's mission is to help all developers build better apps. In that spirit, today we're announcing expanded platform and vertical support for Firebase.
First of all, as Swift has become the preferred language for many iOS developers, we've updated our SDK to handle Swift language nuances, making Swift development a native experience on Firebase.
We've also improved Firebase Cloud Messaging by adding support for token-based authentication for APNs, and greatly simplifying the connection and registration logic in the client SDK.
Second, we've heard from our game developer community that one of the most important stats you monitor is frames per second (FPS). So, we've built Game Loop support & FPS monitoring into Test Lab for Android, allowing you to evaluate your game's frame rate before you deploy. Coupled with the addition of Unity plugins and a C++ SDK, which we announced at GDC this year, we think that Firebase is a great option for game developers. To see an example of a game built on top of Firebase, check out our Mecha Hamster app on Github.
Finally, we've taken a big first step towards open sourcing our SDKs. We believe in open source software, not only because transparency is an important goal, but also because we know that the greatest innovation happens when we all collaborate. You can view our new repos on our open sourceproject page and learn more about our decision in this blog post.
In March, we launched Cloud Functions for Firebase, which lets you run custom backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTP requests. This lets you do things like send a notification when a user signs up or automatically create thumbnails when an image is uploaded to Cloud Storage.
Today, in an effort to better serve our web developer community, we're expanding Firebase Hosting to integrate with Cloud Functions. This means that, in addition to serving static assets for your web app, you can now serve dynamic content, generated by Cloud Functions, through Firebase Hosting. For those of you building progressive web apps, Firebase Hosting + Cloud Functions allows you to go completely server-less. You can learn more by visiting our documentation.
Our goal is to build the best developer experience: easy-to-use products, great documentation, and intuitive APIs. And the best resource that we have for improving Firebase is you! Your questions and feedback continuously push us to make Firebase better.
In light of that, we're excited to announce a Firebase Alpha program, where you will have the opportunity to test the cutting edge of our products. Things might not be perfect (in fact, we can almost guarantee they won't be), but by participating in the alpha community, you'll help define the future of Firebase. If you want to get involved, please register your interest in the Firebase Alpha form.
Thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, feedback. The Firebase community is the reason that we've been able to grow and improve our platform at such an incredible pace over the last year. We're excited to continue working with you to build simple, intuitive products for developing apps and growing mobile businesses. To get started with Firebase today, visit our newly redesigned website. We're excited to see what you build!
Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, Google AMP Specialist
From conception, the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project has had a clear goal --- to make the mobile web experience better and faster for users. This extends beyond content to creating a user-first approach to advertising as well.
To realize this vision, the AMP team created an advertising solution that follows four core principles:
Ads in AMP are delivered using the amp-ad component. Using this component you can configure your ads in a number of ways such as the width, length, layout mode and ad loading strategy. Different ad networks might allow even more options.
Here is an example of an DoubleClick responsive ad implementation in AMP:
<amp-ad width="414" height="457" layout=”responsive” type="doubleclick" data-slot="/35096353/amptesting/image/flex"> </amp-ad>
The type attribute informs the amp-ad component which ad platform to use. In this case we want DoubleClick and therefore the type value is doubleclick. For above the fold responsive ad implementation please use layout="fixed-height" instead and limit the ad height so users will get a fast loading content-focused experience from the very start.
type
doubleclick
layout="fixed-height"
Any attributes starting with data- in amp-ad are ad platform-specific attributes, including the data-slot attribute in the snippet above. Each ad platform will have different attributes available to configure. For example, compare the above DoubleClick example with another AMP ad example that uses the Rubicon platform:
data-
data-slot
<amp-ad width=320 height=50 type="rubicon" data-method="smartTag" data-account="14062" data-site="70608" data-zone="335918" data-size="43"> </amp-ad>
For more amp-ad implementation examples, please check out AMP By Example. You can also check out the amp-ad documentation for the complete list of supported ad networks and their configuration semantics.
The team is also developing newer, better ways to bring the benefits of AMP to the ads ecosystem with initiatives like AMP for Ads and AMP Ad Landing Pages. These solutions will enable advertisers to design creatives and ad landing pages that are more consistent with the AMP experience publishers are bringing to users. We believe this will bring us closer to the goal of making the entire mobile web experience faster and better for everybody.
Originally posted on Google Analytics blog
In the digital world, whether you’re writing stories for your loyal readers, creating creative content that your fans love, helping the digital community, or providing items and services for your customer, understanding your audience is at the heart of it all. Key to unlocking that information is access to tools for measuring your audience and understanding their behavior. In addition to making your page load faster, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provides multiple analytics options without compromising on performance.
You can choose to use a solution like amp-pixel that behaves like a simple tracking pixel. It uses a single URL that allows variable substitutions, so it’s very customizable. See the amp-pixel documentation for more detail.
The amp-analytics component, on the other hand, is a powerful solution that recognizes many types of event triggers to help you collect specific metrics. Since amp-analytics is supported by multiple analytics providers, this means you can use amp-analytics to configure multiple endpoints and data sets. AMP then manages all of the instrumentation to come up with the data specified and shares it with these analytics solution providers.
To use amp-analytics, include the component library in your document's <head>:
<head>
<script async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>
And then include the component as follows (for these examples, make sure to specify your own account number instead of the placeholder):
<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics"> <script type="application/json"> { "vars": { "account": "UA-YYYY-Y" }, "triggers": { "defaultPageview": { "on": "visible", "request": "pageview", "vars": { "title": "Name of the Article" } } } } </script> </amp-analytics>
The JSON format is super flexible for describing several different types of events and it does not include any JavaScript code which could potentially lead to mistakes.
Expanding the above example, we can add another trigger, clickOnHeader:
clickOnHeader
<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics"> <script type="application/json"> { "vars": { "account": "UA-YYYY-Y" }, "triggers": { "defaultPageview": { "on": "visible", "request": "pageview", "vars": { "title": "Name of the Article" } }, "clickOnHeader": { "on": "click", "selector": "#header", "request": "event", "vars": { "eventCategory": "examples", "eventAction": "clicked-header" } } } } </script> </amp-analytics>
For a detailed description of data sets you can request, as well as the complete list of analytics providers supporting amp-analytics, check out the amp-analytics documentation. You can also see more implementation examples in the Amp By Example site.
If you want to conduct a user experience experiment on your AMP pages, such as an A/B test, you can use the amp-experiment element. Any configurations done in this element will also be exposed to amp-analytics and amp-pixel, so you can easily do a statistical analysis of your experiment.
There are still plenty of ongoing developments for AMP analytics to help you gain insights as you AMPlify the user experience on your site. Visit the AMP Project roadmap to see a summary of what the team is cooking up. If you see some features missing, please file a request on GitHub.
Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer
Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.js that provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.
The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.
Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.
Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:
The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.
Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.
If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:
/contact
/contact/
/contact?hl=en
/contact/index.html
The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.
Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.
It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.
If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.
The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.
In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.
All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fields get sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.
Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).
Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Manager users who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.
Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.
Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.
If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.
To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.
Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.
Originally posted on Google Apps Developers blog
Posted by Romain Vialard, a Google Developer Expert and developer of Yet Another Mail Merge, a Google Sheets add-on.
Google Apps Script makes it easy to create and publish add-ons for Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms. There are now hundreds of add-ons available and many are reaching hundreds of thousands of users. Google Analytics is one of the best tools to learn what keeps those users engaged and what should be improved to make an add-on more successful.
Add-ons run inside Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms where they can display content in dialogs or sidebars. These custom interfaces are served by the Apps Script HTML service, which offers client-side HTML, CSS, and JS with a few limitations.
Among those limitations, cookies aren’t persistent. The Google Analytics cookie will be recreated each time a user re-opens your dialog or sidebar, with a new client ID every time. So, Analytics will see each new session as if initiated by a new user, meaning the number of sessions and number of users should be very similar.
Fortunately, it’s possible to use localStorage to store the client ID — a better way to persist user information instead of cookies. After this change, your user metrics should be far more accurate.
Add-ons can also run via triggers, executing code at a recurring interval or when a user performs an action like opening a document or responding to a Google Form. In those cases, there’s no dialog or sidebar, so you should use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol (see policies on the use of this service) to send user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers via the UrlFetch service in Google Apps Script.
A Client ID is also required in that case, so I recommend using the Apps Script User properties service. Most examples on the web show how to generate a unique Client ID for every call to Analytics but this won’t give you an accurate user count.
You can also send the client ID generated on client side to the server so as to use the same client ID for both client and server calls to Analytics, but at this stage, it is best to rely on the optional User ID in Google Analytics. While the client ID represents a client / device, the User ID is unique to each user and can easily be used in add-ons as users are authenticated. You can generate a User ID on the server side, store it among the user properties, and reuse it for every call to Analytics (both on the client and the server side).
In add-ons, we usually rely on event tracking and not page views. It is possible to add different parameters on each event thanks to categories, actions, labels and value, but it’s also possible to add much more info by using custom dimensions & metrics.
For example, the Yet Another Mail Merge add-on is mostly used to send emails, and we have added many custom dimensions to better understand how it is used. For each new campaign (batch of emails sent), we record data linked to the user (e.g. free or paying customer, gmail.com or Google for Work / EDU user) and data linked to the campaign (e.g. email size, email tracking activated or not). You can then reuse those custom dimensions inside custom reports & dashboards.
Once you begin to leverage all that, you can get very insightful data. Until October 2015, Yet Another Mail Merge let you send up to 100 emails per day for free. But we’ve discovered with Analytics that most people sending more than 50 emails in one campaign were actually sending 100 emails - all the free quota they could get - but we failed to motivate them to switch to our paid plan.
As a result of this insight, we have reduced this free plan to 50 emails/day and at the same time introduced a referral program, letting users get more quota for free (they still don’t pay but they invite more users so it’s interesting for us). With this change, we have greatly improved our revenue and scaled user growth.
Or course, we also use Google Analytics to track the efficiency of our referral program.
To help you get started in giving you more insight into your add-ons, below are some relevant pages from our documentation on the tools described in this post. We hope this information will help your apps become more successful!:
Romain Vialard profile | website
Romain Vialard is a Google Developer Expert. After some years spent as a Google Apps consultant, he is now focused on products for Google Apps users, including add-ons such as Yet Another Mail Merge and Form Publisher.
Posted by Jonathan Beri, Product Manager
Today, we’re announcing that CocoaPods will be the primary channel to acquire Google SDKs for iOS. CocoaPods is a popular, free dependency manager for iOS that significantly simplifies the process of importing libraries and frameworks into Xcode. And it will help you manage your dependencies between our various libraries.
While there was a small but growing number of official Google Pods, as well as a few Pods written by other iOS developers, it was often difficult for developer to find the right SDK. With today’s announcement, some of our key libraries, like Google Cloud Messaging and the Google Maps SDK for iOS can now be found on the public CocoaPods service. Going forward, new iOS SDKs will be packaged and documented as Pods and published on cocoapods.org. You can find the full list of Google Pods and all supporting documentation at developer.google.com/ios/cocoapods.
If you haven't used CocoaPods yet, now is a great time to give it a try. Add GoogleAnalytics to a Podfile to start counting new users. Or pod install your way to adding AdMob ads in your app. And check out pod try, a CocoaPods plugin that allows you to quickly launch our demo projects.
GoogleAnalytics
pod install
pod try
For more iOS developer protips and to learn more about Google’s iOS SDKs, please check out the Route 85 video series from Todd Kerpelman. We look forward to all the great Google-powered iOS apps you will create!
Posted by Jason Titus, Senior Director of Engineering
This morning, we kicked off our 8th annual Google I/O conference, joined by 5,600 developers at Moscone Center, 530 I/O Extended communities around the world, and millions via the I/O Live stream. This year’s event is focused on delivering incredible experiences on mobile and helping developers build successful businesses through these key themes: Develop, Engage, and Earn.
During the keynote, we had a number of announcements that covered the evolution of the mobile platform, tools for Android, iOS, and Web developers, and the push towards more immersive mobile experiences with VR. Here’s a closer look at the news:
Google Analytics users can use the Core Reporting API to save time by building dashboards and automating complex reporting tasks. This API exposes over 250 data points (dimensions and metrics), and new data is added every few months. For many developers, it can be difficult to keep their applications up to date with all the latest data.
To make things easier, today we are launching the new Google Analytics Metadata API to simplify data discovery. The Metadata API contains all the queryable dimensions and metrics included in the Core Reporting API. We’ve also added attributes for each dimension and metric, such as the web or app name, full text description, grouping, metric calculations, deprecation status, and whether the data is queryable in segments. You can check out at a live Metadata API response here.
You now have programmatic access to generate the same list of dimensions and metrics we use to generate our public documentation.
When you create tools to query the Core Reporting API, you can use the Metadata API to automatically update your user interfaces. For example, Analytics Canvas, a popular third-party Google Analytics data extraction tool, uses the Metadata API to keep its query building interface up to date.
According to James Standen, founder of Analytics Canvas, "In the past, keeping Analytics Canvas up to date with the Google Analytics API dimensions and metrics required a lot of manual updating to our application. The new Metadata API automates this process, saving us time, and giving our users direct access to all the great new data the instant it's available. Users love it!"
To increase data transparency, we’ve also published a new data deprecation policy for dimensions and metrics. New data we release will be announced on our changelogs and automatically added to the Metadata API. Data we decide to remove will be marked as deprecated in the Metadata API, allowing developers to gracefully remove these values from their tools.
Our goal was to make this API super easy to use. To get started, take a look at our resources:
Questions? Comments? Simply want to share in the excitement? Join the analytics developer community in our Reporting API Developer forum.
Over the past year we’ve added many new features to Google Analytics. Today we are releasing all of this data in the Core Reporting API.
We're most excited about the ability to query for custom dimensions and metrics using the API.
Developers can use custom dimensions to send unique IDs into Google Analytics, and then use the core reporting API to retrieve these IDs along with other Google Analytics data.
For example, your content management system can pass a content ID as a custom dimension using the Google Analytics tracking code. Developers can then use the API to get a list of the most popular content by ID and display the list of most popular content on their website.
We've added more mobile dimensions and metrics, including those found in the Mobile App Analytics reports:
Some examples of questions this new data can answer are:
If you are sending Google Analytics multiple currencies, you now have the ability to access the local currency of the transactions with this new data:
We added new time-based dimensions to simplify working with reporting data:
Sample queries:
Finally, we've added two new traffic source dimensions, including one to return the full URL of the referral.
Sample query: the top 10 referrers based on visits (using full referrer).
For a complete list of the new data, take a look at the Core Reporting API changelog. For all the data definitions, check the Core Reporting API Dimensions and Metrics explorer. As always, you can check out this new data directly within our Query Explorer tool.
Cross-posted with the Google Analytics Blog and the Google Apps Developer Blog
Many people have been asking for a simple way to put Google Analytics data into a Google Spreadsheet. Once the data is inside a Google Spreadsheet, users can easily manipulate Google Analytics data, create new visualizations, and build internal dashboards.
So today we released a new integration that dramatically reduces the work required to put Google Analytics data into any Apps Script supported product, such as Google Docs, Sites, or Spreadsheets.
Here’s an example of Google Analytics data accessed through Apps Script and displayed in a Google Spreadsheet.
We know that a popular use case of this integration will be to create dashboards that automatically update. To make this easy to do, we’ve added a script to the Spreadsheets script gallery that handles all this work - no code required. The script is called Google Analytics Report Automation (Magic).
This script is a great template for starting your own project, and we’ve had many internal Google teams save hours of time using this tool. Here’s a video demoing how to build a dashboard using this script:
You can find this script by opening or creating a Google Spreadsheet, clicking Tools -> Script Gallery and searching for “analytics magic”.
Of course many developers will want to write their own code. With the new Analytics – Apps Script integration, you can request the total visitors, visits, and pageviews over time and put this data into a spreadsheet with just the following code:
// Get Data. var results = Analytics.Data.Ga.get( tableId, startDate, endDate, 'ga:visitors,ga:visits,ga:pageviews', {‘dimensions’: ‘ga:date’}); // Output to spreadsheet. var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().insertSheet(); sheet.getRange(2, 1, results.getRows().length, headerNames.length) .setValues(results.getRows()); // Make Sandwich.
To get started now, read our Automated Access to Google Analytics Data in Google Spreadsheets tutorial. Also check out the Google Analytics Apps Script reference docs.
Are you ready to start building solutions using Google Analytics and Google Apps Script?
We’d love to hear new ways you use this integration to help manipulate, visualize and present data to solve business problems. To encourage you to try out this integration, we are giving out Google Analytics developer t-shirts to the first 15 developers to build a solution using both APIs.
To be eligible, you must publish your solution to either the Chrome Web Store or the Spreadsheets Script Gallery and include a description of a business problem the script solves. We’ll then collect these scripts and highlight the solutions in an upcoming blog post. After you publish your script, fill out this form to share what you’ve built.
We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with this integration.
