Our customers often ask whether standard Apple Analytics would be enough for their iOS app. Or could Firebase and included Google Analytics work for them. Why do they need to get other analytics services which are paid (and sometimes are quite costly)?

Example. Recently one of our customers asked whether it would be possible to do the following analytics using just Apple and Google analytics tools: who viewed which screens, who added which items to favorite, which screens, buttons, and functionality are most and least popular?

We easily replied to our client and will explain it in this article. Continue reading to find out what Apple and Google analytics are capable of and what’s missing. And which other mobile app analytics platforms can fill that gap.

Apple Analytics

This platform is only for apps distributed in the App Store. It helps to get an understanding of how users discover and interact with the app. The platform supports measuring and evaluating:

• User acquisition
  • First-time app downloads (or App Units), breakouts by territory, source, device, specific time period are available.
  • Conversion rate, the ratio of App Units to Impressions.
  • Campaign performance. Campaign links allow tracking performance of marketing channels that you use and your marketing creatives.
• User engagement
  • Active devices and sessions. You can filter this data by different dimensions such as campaign, territory, device.
  • Retention rate helps to get an idea of whether users enjoy their initial app experience. Also, possible to filter by different dimensions such as App Version, Source Type, Campaign.
    Sales per paying user (sales include app or in-app purchases).
• Sales and Trends
  • In-app purchases include consumables, non-consumables, auto-renewable subscriptions, and non-renewable subscriptions.
  • Sales. In the Sales section, you can track your total sales across all apps, in-app purchases, and bundles you offer, including applicable taxes. Refunds are excluded from the total. Note that totals are calculated when a transaction is initiated by the customer, not when the payment was successfully collected.
• Financial reports show total Units sold, Total Proceeds, and Total Estimated Proceeds (for payments that have not yet been transferred to your bank)

You can find more detailed information on the metrics in the official documentation.
As you can see, Apple Analytics gives an idea of how users discover your app in the Store and which of your apps or in-app subscriptions are the most popular, however, there is not much information on user behavior in the app or their conversion path outside the App Store.

Firebase

It is Google’s mobile platform for developers, and thus it includes Google Analytics. GA integrated across Firebase features provides app owners with unlimited reporting for up to 500 distinct events. Some most common events are collected automatically. If other data is needed, it is possible to log custom events.
Automatically collected events include:

• Ad-related events (exposure, impression, click, query, reward)
• App events (first open, update, reset, remove, session start)
• Sales events (in-app purchase, subscription convert, subscription renew, subscription cancel, refund)
• Notification events (receive, open, dismiss)
• Screen view

Additional recommended events (need to be implemented by app developers):

• Join group, login, search, select content, share, sign up, begin and complete tutorial

Additional events recommended for eCommerce:

• Add payment and shipping info, add to cart/wishlist, begin checkout, purchase, refund, view/select item, view cart, remove from cart, view/select promotion

Besides events, Firebase SDK logs user properties, attributes that describe segments of your userbase. Predefined user dimensions include age, gender, language, interests, app store, app version, country, device brand/category/model, OS version.

Firebase allows doing funnel visualization, cohort analysis, and A/B testing.

Google Analytics gives quite solid basic understanding of how people use your app, and you can perform even deeper custom analysis by linking Analytics data to BigQuery.

As you can see, this platform is helpful for many analytics tasks, however, it lacks connection with main Ad Networks. Basically, it only supports Google Ads. It is not connected with Facebook or Snapchat, for example. This means that you can’t accurately track installs and in-app actions sources to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. To do that, you need to use platforms providing attribution tools. Moreover, the funnel visualization is not detailed enough, and setting up custom analysis might consume significant resources, so this also makes app owners seek other analytics solutions.

Adjust

Adjust is a great tool for mobile app attribution. It helps to see the entire user’s journey: from where they arrive and how they interact with the app. Each user is tied with the ad they interacted with, which gives you full transparency for your media performance across different channels. Adjust partners with over 2000 advertising networks, including Facebook, Google, Twitter. It allows companies to track the entire user conversion pathways, not just capturing touchpoints that resulted in installs.

Adjust allows to track an unlimited number of in-app events that you can tailor to your conversion goals (ex., sign-ups, level-ups, purchases). You can also evaluate user LTV and do cohort analysis to segment users by creative, location, install date, and other criteria.

With Adjust Audience Builder you can perform dynamic audience segmentation, upload lists to ad network partners with just one click and do retargeting very accurately.

Another distinctive feature of adjust is fraud prevention capabilities that protect you from fraudulent and malicious activity. This helps to avoid drains of the budget, inability to identify best performing channels, data inaccuracy, and consequent bad marketing decisions.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is less effective for attribution, however, it’s great for product analytics. You get the opportunity to track everything what users do inside the app, including button press, scrolls, and other actions, so you can see product usage and feature activation, and what stops users from using your product.
Mixpanel has tools to satisfy different needs of app marketers:

• Insights. Quick segmentation and visualization of the data.
• Impact analysis helps to understand whether your launches, campaigns, or tests deliver results.
• User profiles, allows you to get to know your users better.
• Flows. Visualization of users’ flow through your product. With this tool you can see what path users take to your goal action (ex., “purchase”), why do they convert and not, and decide how to guide better those who don’t convert. You can also compare paths of free and paid users to get an idea of how to drive more upgrades.
• Cohort Analysis to compare how different groups of users behave.
• Funnels. This tool helps to increase conversion rates across the entire funnel by identifying which users drop off, where, and why.
• Retention helps to track whether new users are coming back.

We described the platforms that we’ve already integrated for our customers. There are quite many other vendors, such as Appsflyer, Amplitude, Kochava, Branch. They all are pretty similar with little differences that can result in a perfect match for your business. For example, Branch doesn’t offer functionality for building and integrating audiences, it is more simplistic and is rather good for general attribution. At the same time, it is more cost-effective than Appsflyer, which offers more advanced features and is more reliable and user-friendly.

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Need advice on which app analytics provider is best for you and how to set it up for your campaigns? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.