4

Our Android app has a lot of different settings. We want to simplify it and only keep visible the most used ones and hide the other in some advanced mode. In order to do this, we need to know what are the settings mostly used by our users. So we need to find a way to get statistics of the app usage.

The app contains Google Analytics (GA), so the natural choice would be to use GA for this. However, it seems that GA is more suited to track events, not constant settings in the app. In other words, with GA we could easily track when the user changes one setting's value, by tracking the click on the setting. But not what is the state of the setting.

All our settings are saved as shared preference, and it's basically a key/value pair pattern. There is no private information. Is there any easy way to get those key/values pairs sent to us and gathered so that we can easily see how most people configure our app, what settings are used and what are very little used?

Using GA, it seems that the only way to do this would be to use "custom dimensions". However, those are limited to 20 key/value. We need much more than this.

Is there a way in GA or in another 3rd party SDK to track such app usage statistics?

Thank's in advance for your insights!

BradleyDotNET
  • 60,462
  • 10
  • 96
  • 117
gpo
  • 3,388
  • 3
  • 31
  • 53

1 Answers1

1

  1. Google Analytics Events should be workable for what I hear you describing because there are 4 parameters for every event. For example, if you want to track a a gender setting that is currently set to female and changing to male, you could send the following event parameters:

    ('Gender','Female','Male',1)

    Track the change from male to female as:

    ('Gender','Male','Female',1)

    Then in GA reports you could see that the unique event count for the first combination is, say, 50, and the combination for Gender, Male, Female is 30 then more people are switching from female to male than the other way around.

    If you want to track a setting with more than 2 options, then just keep the same pattern.

    ('SETTING NAME','CURRENT SETTING','CHANGED TO SETTING',1)

  2. If for whatever reason this doesn't work for you, Flurry also does free mobile app analytics and there events are setup differently. They use 2 parameters but the second can be up to 10 key-value pairs.

EDIT - I strongly recommend against using Flurry to track events because they are hard/impossible to report on in aggregates.

Alison S
  • 1,759
  • 1
  • 14
  • 28