Hey folks… I work for a boutique design company and we are working on an iphone and android app for a client. This is a 2 part inquiry. I would greatly appreciate any helpful input if you have experience with the below.
Download Analytics
We know what Apple does not really provide any stats on the download. Does anyone have any input on what Android Market provides?
Is there any way to obtain details like the where the user came from when they land on the download page and how many complete the download etc? Perhaps a 3rd party software?
Ideally we could find something that would help us maximize advertising for the app.
User Activity Analytics
In addition to know what happens at the point of download, we would like to know what happens once the user has the app itself. So we are looking for something similar to Google Analytics in that respect.
You should look at “Google Analytics SDK for Android”.
On every Market installation, built-in Market App fires a special intent which includes some information on how the user got to your app in Market at the first place. Through specially crafted referral link to Market Website, through AdMob campaign, etc.
This intent may be processed by your code (you would have to send the data to your server in order to see it), or you could just use a standard java package provided as part of Google Analytics SDK, and it will track the stats through reqular Google Analytics UI.
Also, you could write your custom code that will “create” a trackable user actions inside the app. These actions will be accumulated by Google Analytics package and then sent to Google server from time to time (or when you explicitly call special method to flush accumulated stats).
Then in your regular GA account you will be able to create a special “site” representing your app and it will show the stats generated by your app.
Overall, in the first version of my app I decided not to use GA SDK and just track the data requests to my server, so I could know the number of active installations. However, I may include GA in the subsequent versions b/c it is convenient for me and also I think there is a way to code it so it does not really tax user’s network so it will not cost user any extra battery juice or extra network traffic.
You should really take a moment and read the docs for Google Analytics SDK, it explains well all the details about tracking app stats
Thanks a bunch for the input on an Andorid version.
But what about the iphone version? I need decent tracking of incoming traffic to the download to maximize advertising. My research is proving it is not available and that is a real headache.