Sometimes it’s hard to keep tabs on your business data. For example, it might be summer and you might be on holiday at the beach. But you feel the pressing urge to check up on your business. What are you going to do!
Well, if you use Google Analytics, and you have an Android device, keeping tabs on your business performance is easy! Just use the Google Analytics Android App! Let’s take a look at it.
Download the Google Analytics App from the Google Play store.
First, let me be clear about the purpose of the app: you should use this app to keep tabs on your key business metrics. This is not an app for analysis. It’s a way for you to stay up to date AND be alerted when key performance indicators change dramatically.
Overall it’s a great way for business owners, marketers and analysts to monitor metrics from anywhere AND
As you’d expect, you can access all of your Google Analytics accounts and profiles from the app. All you need to do is log in and thy appear.
I should mention that this includes WEB profiles and Mobile App profiles. If you don’t know the difference please see this post about Mobile App Tracking.
There are three sections to the App: Real Time, Dashboard, Automatic Alerts and Custom Reports
Real Time Report
Ok, this is the COOLEST part of the app. It may not be the most useful, but it is, by far, the coolest. You can watch real time data, from your website OR your mobile app, in the Google Analytics app.
You can view real time data for your website or mobile app in the Google Analytics Android app.
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Why would you need real time reporting on your mobile device? A few different reasons:
1. To check if your site is working
2. To monitor the effects of a new campaign
3. To impress your friends at a party (fire up the app and then surf to your site on a computer)
The real time data is the same data you get in the standard real time reports. It contains the active users, top pages and top referral sources.
Dashboard
The Dashboard is configurable and contains many customized graphs.
Like any dashboard, the Google Analytics Android App Dashboard can be customized to contain key business metrics.
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There are a few different ways that you can customize the graphs. You can choose the time period of the trend (days, weeks or even months), if the trend should include today, and the granularity (which for some reason is named Sample Interval.). You can also change the metrics.
You can customize many parts of the Dashboard report in the Google Analytics Android app.
If you want to segment a metrics you can apply any of the advanced segments in your account. This includes all the standard advanced segments (like traffic sources, new vs. returning visitors, etc) as well as the custom segments that you create (like high-value visits, etc.)
They key to using your dashboard is understanding trends and having some expectations around the data. If you’re responsible for site performance then you will know if a trend is OK or not OK. The dashboard helps you understand things you expect.
But what about things that you don’t expect?
Automatic Alerts
The automatic alerts help you recognize any good or bad changes in your data. This report is basically the Intelligence alerts from the standard Google Analytics interface. If you’ve never used intelligence, it’s a tool that automatically detects changes in your data and alerts you to those changes.
Use the Automatic Alerts report to identify surprise changes in metrics.
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Bounce rate up 50%? You’ll get an alert!
Conversion rate down 20%? You’ll get an alert!
Visits from India drop 45%? You’ll get an alert!
Clicking on an event provides a trend of the alert metic and dimension so you can get an idea of how abrupt the change was AND if you need to freak out.
You can even share data alerts directly from the app.
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If you do need to freak out you can use the Share this alert button to have someone else freak out with you.
Custom Alerts
If there are some things that are just absolutely critical, and you don’t want to depend on an automatic alert, you can configure a custom alert in the standard GA and it will appear here.
Configure custom alerts in the standard Google Analytics UI and they will appear in your app.
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You can click on your custom alerts, just like your automatic alerts, and share them with other people. I should note that you can share in all different ways, including Tweeting your alerts to the world :)
If you don’t have any custom alerts set up, why not check out these custom alerts that can save your ass? :)
So there you have it. A new way to access your data and keeps tabs on your online business, all from your Android phone. It’s everything you want (key metrics and some smart intelligence) without a lot of bloat.
Is it available yet? I don’t see it in the “Play Store.”
I can’t find the app in the Market.
I’ve been dying to get my hands on this for a long time.
That’s good news!
Where can I get it? The Play store doesn’t seem to have anything besides third-party apps (and I don’t want to give them my data).
Several of us have been trying to find this app, and it doesn’t appear to exist yet? Do you have a link to the app in Google Play?
Looks really cool, but
When this app will be on the Google Play store?
Can’t wait to get my hands on this! Not having any luck finding this on the Market. Is it out yet?
Can’t find it on Google Play. URL?
What’s the link to download the app?
Looks very interesting Justin, but I tried to look on the Play store and couldn’t find it. What’s the name of the app ?
Thanks !
LOVE The realtime analytics, makes much more sense on a mobile device. Now imagine you purchasing a wall mount, a Nexus 7 and put it up on your office wall. Nice!
The dashboard is okay, however it couldn’t report on my most important metric (as I’m in the advertising/e-commerce business): Price-per-transaction for paid traffic. You can select it, but it gives an error.
Would be even nicer, if you could filter a graph on source/medium. Instead of having to define custom segments.
@Soren: Thanks for the error report. That should not be happening. You can apply a segment to the graphs. When you set up the graph just choose to apply an advanced segment.
Hi Everyone, the app should now be available in the Google Play Store. Please see the link at the top of this post.
Installed it last night. Thanks again for pointing it out.
Unfortunately it is very limited- just numbers but no specifics. What I would really like to know is not only how many visits but from where (specifically) they came from. Segments help me know the medium/source of a visit but not what website, search engine, or even keyword generated the visit.
Maybe this feature will come later. Until then the data is just “interesting” but not actionable