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I'm currently comparing 'New Users' on GA to 'Downloads' on the Play store and I'm seeing about a 30% difference - I appreciate dashboards like GA are not a perfect science, however, this is obviously way outside any reasonable tolerance. I've also cross-validated with other analytics tools such as Facebook and this appears to be in line with what Google play sites. What could be causing GA to be so massively out?

Thanks in advance!

Hazzamataza
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  • that figure might be correct... i have seen that spike as people tend to share apps from one phone to other using ShareIt or any other app sharing tool. Perfect way to calculate users is using in-app login etc if available. – Amod Gokhale Nov 28 '17 at 10:58
  • This was my initial thoughts, but Facebook analytics should be reporting the same thing as GA. The fact that Facebook is close to Google play (about 100k out, which I could believe is attributed to the point you make) makes me still think that GA is doing something weird... – Hazzamataza Nov 28 '17 at 14:43

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There are many possible reasons:

  • Many devices have more than one user (eg people who have a home and work account on the device)
  • People share apps using methods other than Play downloads (P2P sharing, other app stores, etc)
  • People reset their id on the device to prevent ad tracking etc. Looks like a new user, but no new download

These are just a few possibilities.

Nick Fortescue
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  • Thanks, Nick. These are all my initial assumptions - until I cross-checked against Facebook. If this was true, then Facebook analytics should be seeing the same thing as GA. On a side note: the difference between Facebook analytics and play is about 100k (opposed to over a million I'm seeing on GA) - this I think can be reasonably attributed to the points you outline above. – Hazzamataza Nov 28 '17 at 14:42
  • Out of curiousity, when you say GA do you mean the old fashioned Google Analytics or Google Analytics for firebase? ( https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/ ). I know an awful lot of development work has gone into GA for firebase recently, so if you aren't using that I'd be curious if you get better results with that – Nick Fortescue Nov 28 '17 at 16:35
  • In fact firebase is now explicitly recommended over using the old GA SDK: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/android/v4/ – Nick Fortescue Nov 28 '17 at 16:37
  • I was referring to the 'old fashioned GA' but I also have the Firebase SDK on the app - both of these appear to be consistent with one another but inconsistent compared to Google Play/Facebook. Absolutely baffled by this! – Hazzamataza Nov 29 '17 at 15:02
  • I did find this though... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38331910/how-event-first-open-in-firebase-analytic-count – Hazzamataza Nov 29 '17 at 15:29