I don’t know about you guys but the whole of User Segmentation felt weird to write for me (I don’t have enough traffic for some real feedback. Tell me if you despise me for it).
It is however, a new season and it’s time to bang out some beautiful never-before explained guides once again… Except for the official documents, but let’s be real here. The reason you’re here is that those are an utter pain to read.
Here we are, Firebase Analytics is huge. It’s got more features than your typical analytics service. You’d be tempted to ignore most of them, but don’t do that. Please. You’re missing out on some real potential.
We’re gonna go through each tool one by one in just enough detail you need to know: a fine level that’s not too empty but not too overwhelming either.
Firebase also updates quite frequently, adding new stats and tools. I’ll be keeping this guide up-to-date so feel free to come back whenever new features roll out!
Dashboard
Your typical analytics stats where you’ll find your active users, user engagement, demographics, ad-revenue, and all those stats with all the graphs and figures. Pretty much your 20-second daily check to see if your app’s performing well.
Events
Events that happen in your app, generated either by Firebase itself or by you when you log custom events (which I’ll be doing a quick tutorial on pretty soon).
Use this to observe what your users are doing more frequently in your app and realise what features you spent so many sleepless nights on, have become a total waste of your time.
Audiences
Create user segments to find out how many of your users fall under certain properties and conditions, and/or target them with other Firebase features like Cloud Messaging, A/B Testing, and Customised In-App Experiences. (Perhaps User Segmentation was a good decision after all).
Attribution
A fancy name for conversion events which are key events that lead to your users getting into your app and keeping engaged at it such as first_open and in_app_purchase.
Funnels
Flows of events you can create to observe in even more detail how your users move through your app and complete series of events. (Serieses, Sirie, what actually is the plural of “series”?)
Cohorts
A fancy name for user retention, or how well you keep your users after they first try out your app.
Stream View
A more real-time view of your users and events occurring in the last 30 minutes.
Latest Release
Here you find out how many of your users are adopting your newest update and whether or not your new update is causing a crashfest.
Debug View
When events in your app occur, the device doesn’t send them immediately to the Firebase Console. It gathers them and sends them at hourly rates to save battery.
When you set a device to debug mode (which you do through an adb command), it sends these events immediately allowing you to observe these events happening in real-time as you develop your app, and you see this real-time debug data in Debug View.
adb shell setprop debug.firebase.analytics.app <package_name>
To set a device to debug mode, run this command on your adb terminal. (Be aware that if your computer is currently attached to more than one device, use the -s <device_id> property to target your intended device.
User Properties
Properties defined in your app’s code to split them into segments which you can use to target them with other Firebase services, or categorise them into audiences to either analyse or target.
Conclusion
Firebase Analytics is pretty powerful, but you can only use it to it’s fullest when you apply these different tools given to it.
Like I said, I’ll be keeping this guide up-to-date as new features roll out, so feel free to come back at anytime!