Tag Archives: Firebase Analytics

What’s new from Firebase at Google I/O 2017

Originally posted on the Firebase Blog by Francis Ma, Firebase Group Product Manager

It's been an exciting year! Last May, we expanded Firebase into our unified app platform, building on the original backend-as-a-service and adding products to help developers grow their user base, as well as test and monetize their apps. Hearing from developers like Wattpad, who built an app using Firebase in only 3 weeks, makes all the hard work worthwhile.

We're thrilled by the initial response from the community, but we believe our journey is just getting started. Let's talk about some of the enhancements coming to Firebase today.

Integrating with Fabric

In January, we announced that we were welcoming the Fabric team to Firebase. Fabric initially grabbed our attention with their array of products, including the industry-leading crash reporting tool, Crashlytics. As we got to know the team better, we were even more impressed by how closely aligned our missions are: to help developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. Over the last several months, we've been working closely with the Fabric team to bring the best of our platforms together.

We plan to make Crashlytics the primary crash reporting product in Firebase. If you don't already use a crash reporting tool, we recommend you take a look at Crashlytics and see what it can do for you. You can get started by following the Fabric documentation.

Phone authentication comes to Firebase

Phone number authentication has been the biggest request for Firebase Authentication, so we're excited to announce that we've worked with the Fabric Digits team to bring phone auth to our platform. You can now let your users sign in with their phone numbers, in addition to traditional email/password or identity providers like Google or Facebook. This gives you a comprehensive authentication solution no matter who your users are or how they like to log in.

At the same time, the Fabric team will be retiring the Digits name and SDK. If you currently use Digits, over the next couple weeks we'll be rolling out the ability to link your existing Digits account with Firebase and swap in the Firebase SDK for the Digits SDK. Go to the Digits blog to learn more.

Introducing Firebase Performance Monitoring

We recognize that poor app performance and stability are the top reasons for users to leave bad ratings on your app and possibly churn altogether. As part of our effort to help you build better apps, we're pleased to announce the beta launch of Performance Monitoring.

Firebase Performance Monitoring is a new free tool that helps you understand when your user experience is being impacted by poorly performing code or challenging network conditions. You can learn more and get started with Performance Monitoring in the Firebase documentation.

More robust analytics

Analytics has been core to the Firebase platform since we launched last I/O. We know that understanding your users is the number one way to make your app successful, so we're continuing to invest in improving our analytics product.

First off, you may notice that you're starting to see the name "Google Analytics for Firebase" around our documentation. Our analytics solution was built in conjunction with the Google Analytics team, and the reports are available both in the Firebase console and the Google Analytics interface. So, we're renaming Firebase Analytics to Google Analytics for Firebase, to reflect that your app analytics data are shared across both.

For those of you who monetize your app with AdMob, we've started sharing data between the two platforms, helping you understand the true lifetime value (LTV) of your users, from both purchases and AdMob revenue. You'll see these new insights surfaced in the updated Analytics dashboard.

Many of you have also asked for analytics insights into custom events and parameters. Starting today, you can register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports. Learn more about custom parameter reporting.

Firebase for all - iOS, games, and open source

Firebase's mission is to help all developers build better apps. In that spirit, today we're announcing expanded platform and vertical support for Firebase.

First of all, as Swift has become the preferred language for many iOS developers, we've updated our SDK to handle Swift language nuances, making Swift development a native experience on Firebase.

We've also improved Firebase Cloud Messaging by adding support for token-based authentication for APNs, and greatly simplifying the connection and registration logic in the client SDK.

Second, we've heard from our game developer community that one of the most important stats you monitor is frames per second (FPS). So, we've built Game Loop support & FPS monitoring into Test Lab for Android, allowing you to evaluate your game's frame rate before you deploy. Coupled with the addition of Unity plugins and a C++ SDK, which we announced at GDC this year, we think that Firebase is a great option for game developers. To see an example of a game built on top of Firebase, check out our Mecha Hamster app on Github.

Finally, we've taken a big first step towards open sourcing our SDKs. We believe in open source software, not only because transparency is an important goal, but also because we know that the greatest innovation happens when we all collaborate. You can view our new repos on our open sourceproject page and learn more about our decision in this blog post.

Dynamic Hosting with Cloud Functions for Firebase

In March, we launched Cloud Functions for Firebase, which lets you run custom backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTP requests. This lets you do things like send a notification when a user signs up or automatically create thumbnails when an image is uploaded to Cloud Storage.

Today, in an effort to better serve our web developer community, we're expanding Firebase Hosting to integrate with Cloud Functions. This means that, in addition to serving static assets for your web app, you can now serve dynamic content, generated by Cloud Functions, through Firebase Hosting. For those of you building progressive web apps, Firebase Hosting + Cloud Functions allows you to go completely server-less. You can learn more by visiting our documentation.

Firebase Alpha program and what's next

Our goal is to build the best developer experience: easy-to-use products, great documentation, and intuitive APIs. And the best resource that we have for improving Firebase is you! Your questions and feedback continuously push us to make Firebase better.

In light of that, we're excited to announce a Firebase Alpha program, where you will have the opportunity to test the cutting edge of our products. Things might not be perfect (in fact, we can almost guarantee they won't be), but by participating in the alpha community, you'll help define the future of Firebase. If you want to get involved, please register your interest in the Firebase Alpha form.

Thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, feedback. The Firebase community is the reason that we've been able to grow and improve our platform at such an incredible pace over the last year. We're excited to continue working with you to build simple, intuitive products for developing apps and growing mobile businesses. To get started with Firebase today, visit our newly redesigned website. We're excited to see what you build!

Join us live on May 23rd as we announce the latest Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick innovations


What: Google Marketing Next keynote live stream
When: Tuesday, May 23rd at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.
Duration: 1 hour
Where: On the Inside AdWords Blog


Be the first to hear about Google’s latest marketing innovations, the moment they’re announced.

Watch live as my team and I share new Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick innovations designed to improve your ability to reach consumers, simplify campaign measurement and increase your productivity. We’ll also give you a sneak peek at how brands are starting to use the Google Assistant to delight customers.

Register for the live stream here.

Until then, follow AdWords on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for previews of what's to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Source: Inside AdMob


AdMob is “leveling up” your business with new app monetization innovations

Yesterday, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced important updates to AdMob that could help you unlock new business with rewarded video formats and free, unlimited and real-time analytics reporting. These features will help you monetize your games more effectively by helping you keep your players engaged with more immersive ads and by giving you a faster understanding of how they are interacting with your game.


Over the last year, developers embraced AdMob’s platform to mediate rewarded video ads to nine leading rewarded networks, including TapJoy which we announced yesterday. And we’re not stopping there. AdMob developers around the world now have access to Google’s own video advertising demand from Google AdWords, significantly increasing the breadth and scale of rewarded demand available. That means AdMob now offers a single platform solution including mediation, demand, and reservations. And for those publishers currently using either IronSource or Mopub, adaptors are now available to add Google demand.

Our native ads have also seen tremendous growth over the last year as a way for developers to deliver rich, immersive ad experiences. For developers building their games in Unity, a popular gaming engine, we will shortly be releasing a plugin that supports native ads and native ad mediation on both iOS and Android. This will expand AdMob’s platform and network support for Unity developers beyond banner, interstitial, and rewarded ads available today.

We are also investing in better measurement tools for developers by bringing the power of Firebase Analytics to more game developers with a generally available C++ SDK and an SDK for Unity.

C++ and Unity developers can access Firebase Analytics stream view for real-time player insights
Here’s what developers have to say about rewarded ads in AdMob:
"Implementing AdMob rewarded ads helped us not just monetize non-spending users but increase overall revenue of the game, including IAP revenue. Also, AdMob mediation made it easy to compare our ad performance across ad networks." - Somin Oh, Ad Monetization Manager @ JoyCity
If you haven’t tried AdMob rewarded ads yet, here’s how you can get started. We’re hosting a series of Hangouts on Air around rewarded demand and mediation. During these session we will share best practices to implement and optimize the format and highlight key areas that AdMob rewarded can help you be successful in, including:

  • Access the scale of Google’s video demand: With AdWords’ global presence and advertiser base, AdMob publishers will benefit from geographically diverse demand.
  • Diversified demand with rewarded mediation: Help ensure that there’s always an ad available to show, and that the ad shown is the most valuable to you.
  • User-friendly ad formats: Clear guidance to users at all touch points, including opt-out option for full user control over ad experience.
  • Great User Experiences: AdMob provides highly engaged ads such as landscape and portrait video formats in rewarded ads where there is no incentivization of the download giving a clear value exchange for the user.
  • Popular Game Engine Support: New integrations with Cocos2d-x and Unity game engines allow you to seamlessly support rewarded ads in your games. 

It’s been a privilege to meet so many of you at GDC and learn about the amazing games that you’re all building. We are committed to continuing on this journey with you to build a smart monetization platform for you to grow long-term gaming businesses.

Make sure to stay connected on all things AdMob, follow our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

The AdMob Team

Source: Inside AdMob


“Level up” your gaming business with new innovations for apps

Originally shared on the Inside AdMob Blog
Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Product Director, Mobile Advertising, Google. Last played Fire Emblem Heroes for Android

Mobile games mean more than just fun. They mean business. Big business. According to App Annie, game developers should capture almost half of the $189B global market for in-app purchases and advertising by 20201.

Later today, at the Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I look forward to sharing a series of new innovations across ad formats, monetization tools and measurement insights for apps.

  • New playable and video ad formats to get more people into your game
  • Integrations to help you create better monetization experiences 
  • Measurement tools that provide insights about how players are interacting with your game
Let more users try your game with a playable ad format

There’s no better way for a new user to experience your game than to actually play it. So today, we introduced playables, an interactive ad format in Universal App Campaigns that allows users to play a lightweight version of your game, right when they see it in any of the 1M+ apps in the Google Display Network.

studio.justad.mobi-Management-studio-test_ad.php-browser&saved&id=703423(Nexus 5X)_nexus5x-portrait.png
Jam City’s playable ad for Cookie Jam

Playables help you get more qualified installs from users who tried your game in the ad and made the choice to download it for more play time. By attracting already-engaged users into your app, playables help you drive the long-term outcomes you care about — rounds played, levels beat, trophies won, purchases made and more.

"Jam City wants to put our games in the hands of more potential players as quickly as possible. Playables get new users into the game right from the ad, which we've found drives more engagement and long-term customer value." Josh Yguado, President & COO Jam City, maker of Panda Pop and Cookie Jam.

Playables will be available for developers through Universal App Campaigns in the coming months, and will be compatible with HTML5 creatives built through Google Web Designer or third-party agencies.

Improve the video experience with ads designed for mobile viewing

Most mobile video ad views on the Google Display Network are watched on devices held vertically2. This can create a poor experience when users encounter video ad creatives built for horizontal viewing.

Developers using Universal App Campaigns will soon be able to use an auto-flip feature that automatically orients your video ads to match the way users are holding their phones. If you upload a horizontal video creative in AdWords, we will automatically create a second, vertical version for you.

Cookie Jam horizontal video and vertical-optimized video created through auto-flip technology

The auto-flip feature uses Google's machine learning technology to identify the most important objects in every frame of your horizontal video creative. It then produces an optimized, vertical version of your video ad that highlights those important components of your original asset. Early tests show that click-through rates are about 20% higher on these dynamically-generated vertical videos than on horizontal video ads watched vertically3.

Unlock new business with rewarded video formats, and free, unlimited reporting

Developers have embraced AdMob's platform to mediate rewarded video ads as a way to let users watch ads in exchange for an in-app reward. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are bringing Google’s video app install advertising demand from AdWords to AdMob, significantly increasing rewarded demand available to developers. Advertisers that use Universal App Campaigns can seamlessly reach this engaged, game-playing audience using your existing video creatives.

We are also investing in better measurement tools for developers by bringing the power of Firebase Analytics to more game developers with a generally available C++ SDK and an SDK for Unity, a leading gaming engine.

002-v1-entryPoint_v2.png
C++ and Unity developers can now access Firebase Analytics for real-time player insights

With Firebase Analytics, C++ and Unity developers can now capture billions of daily events — like level completes and play time — to get more nuanced player insights and gain a deeper understanding of metrics like daily active users, average revenue per user and player lifetime value.

This is an exciting time to be a game developer. It’s been a privilege to meet so many of you at GDC 2017 and learn about the amazing games that you’re all building. We hope the innovations we announced today help you grow long-term gaming businesses and we look forward to continuing on this journey with you.

Until next year, GDC!

1 - App Monetization Report, November 2016, App Annie
2 - More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically video, Google Internal Data
3 - Google Internal Data

“Level up” your gaming business with new innovations for apps

Mobile games mean more than just fun. They mean business. Big business. According to App Annie, game developers should capture almost half of the $189B global market for in-app purchases and advertising by 20201.

Later today, at the Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I look forward to sharing a series of new innovations across ad formats, monetization tools and measurement insights for apps.

  • New playable and video ad formats to get more people into your game
  • Integrations to help you create better monetization experiences 
  • Measurement tools that provide insights about how players are interacting with your game
Let more users try your game with a playable ad format

There’s no better way for a new user to experience your game than to actually play it. So today, we introduced playables, an interactive ad format in Universal App Campaigns that allows users to play a lightweight version of your game, right when they see it in any of the 1M+ apps in the Google Display Network.

Jam City’s playable ad for Cookie Jam

Playables help you get more qualified installs from users who tried your game in the ad and made the choice to download it for more play time. By attracting already-engaged users into your app, playables help you drive the long-term outcomes you care about — rounds played, levels beat, trophies won, purchases made and more.

"Jam City wants to put our games in the hands of more potential players as quickly as possible. Playables get new users into the game right from the ad, which we've found drives more engagement and long-term customer value." Josh Yguado, President & COO Jam City, maker of Panda Pop and Cookie Jam.

Playables will be available for developers through Universal App Campaigns in the coming months, and will be compatible with HTML5 creatives built through Google Web Designer or third-party agencies.

Improve the video experience with ads designed for mobile viewing

Most mobile video ad views on the Google Display Network are watched on devices held vertically2. This can create a poor experience when users encounter video ad creatives built for horizontal viewing.

Developers using Universal App Campaigns will soon be able to use an auto-flip feature that automatically orients your video ads to match the way users are holding their phones. If you upload a horizontal video creative in AdWords, we will automatically create a second, vertical version for you.

Cookie Jam horizontal video and vertical-optimized video created through auto-flip technology

The auto-flip feature uses Google's machine learning technology to identify the most important objects in every frame of your horizontal video creative. It then produces an optimized, vertical version of your video ad that highlights those important components of your original asset. Early tests show that click-through rates are about 20% higher on these dynamically-generated vertical videos than on horizontal video ads watched vertically3.

Unlock new business with rewarded video formats, and free, unlimited reporting

Developers have embraced AdMob's platform to mediate rewarded video ads as a way to let users watch ads in exchange for an in-app reward. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are bringing Google’s video app install advertising demand from AdWords to AdMob, significantly increasing rewarded demand available to developers. Advertisers that use Universal App Campaigns can seamlessly reach this engaged, game-playing audience using your existing video creatives.

We are also investing in better measurement tools for developers by bringing the power of Firebase Analytics to more game developers with a generally available C++ SDK and an SDK for Unity, a leading gaming engine.

C++ and Unity developers can now access Firebase Analytics for real-time player insights

With Firebase Analytics, C++ and Unity developers can now capture billions of daily events — like level completes and play time — to get more nuanced player insights and gain a deeper understanding of metrics like daily active users, average revenue per user and player lifetime value.

This is an exciting time to be a game developer. It’s been a privilege to meet so many of you at GDC 2017 and learn about the amazing games that you’re all building. We hope the innovations we announced today help you grow long-term gaming businesses and we look forward to continuing on this journey with you.

Until next year, GDC!

Posted by: Sissie Hsiao, Product Director, Mobile Advertising, Google
Last played Fire Emblem Heroes for Android
1 - App Monetization Report, November 2016, App Annie
2 - More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically video, Google Internal Data
3 - Google Internal Data

Source: Inside AdMob


How Using Firebase Can Help You Earn More

Are you a developer building the next great app? Do you wish you could better analyze your app and its users, so you can monetize without compromising the overall user experience? If so, you’re at the right place!

Not only can these questions be addressed simultaneously, but there is already a solution in place: Firebase. Firebase can help you build your app, understand and grow your user base, and link with AdMob to help you better monetize.

Developing your app

Firebase can provide a Realtime Database, Authentication, Cloud Messaging, Storage, Hosting and Crash Reporting to aid you in developing your app. Forget about infrastructure - you can focus on building your masterpiece and leave the operations to Firebase.

Analyze your audience

At the heart of Firebase is a 100% free analytics solution built specifically mobile apps. With unlimited reporting on up to 500 distinct events, you can set up multiple measurements to know exactly what your users are doing in your app, how they’re engaging with your app, and what they love most about your app. With this data, you can focus your efforts to drill down and sustain the best features of your app, while at the same time improve newly surfaced areas of needs.

Grow your audience

After you’ve launched your app, Firebase can help you grow and re-engage users with powerful growth features. Using Firebase Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics. Dynamic Links can survive the app install process and take users to relevant content whether they're a brand-new user or a longtime customer. There is also the Firebase Invites feature, an out-of-the-box solution for app referrals and sharing, which lets your existing users easily share your app, or their favorite in-app content, via email or SMS. Finally, Firebase can also track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard and Firebase Audiences can also be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. For example In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.

Monetize your product

With AdMob by Google, Firebase can also help you monetize your app by linking your Firebase Analytics with monetization. By combining these two products, you gain deep insights into usage data, which you can then use to optimize your user experience and monetize your app. Do your users have trouble progressing past certain levels? Help them progress with Rewarded Video. Are certain users spending all day endlessly scrolling through your content? Help them discover other cool apps with Native Express. Do a few users spend heavily on your IAPs and you want to keep their experience ad free? Segment them with Firebase, and exclude them from the ad experience.

Want to learn more? 

Check out the above video, where Andrew Brogden, Mobile Ads Developer Relations and David East, Developer Advocate, walk you through what benefits there are to using AdMob and Firebase together, and how to get your Android and iOS projects set up with both SDKs.

Ready to start exploring the true power of Firebase and AdMob? Sign up for a Firebase account and an AdMob account and link the two accounts.

Stay tuned for our next blog on Firebase in the coming weeks, where we will deep dive even further on user behavior analytics (of which you now have deep insights thanks to Firebase) and how this can help you increase those 5-star reviews!

Until next time, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

Posted by Alex Fan, Business Development Executive, Mobile Partnerships.

Source: Inside AdMob


Live from the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin: Firebase, six months after I/O

Posted by Francis Ma, Firebase Product Manager

Originally posted to the Firebase blog

Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.

We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:

Improve App Quality to Deliver Better User Experiences

Firebase Crash Reporting comes out of Beta and adds a new feature that helps you diagnose and reproduce app crashes.

Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.

Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.

Firebase Test Lab for Android supports more devices and introduces a free tier.

We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.

Illustration of Firebase Crash Reporting

Make Faster Data Driven Decisions with Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics now offers live reporting, a new integration with Google “Data Studio”, and real-time exporting to BigQuery.

We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:

  1. Real-time uploading of conversion events
  2. Real-time exporting to BigQuery
  3. DebugView for validation of your analytics instrumentation
  4. StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as we receive it

To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. As well, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.

Build Better Games using Firebase

Firebase now has a Unity plugin!

Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.

Integrate Firebase Even Easier with Open-Sourced UI Library

FirebaseUI is updated to v1.0.

FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.

Learn More via Udacity and Join the Firebase Community

We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.

Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.

Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!

Using BigQuery and Firebase Analytics to understand your mobile app

Originally posted on Google Cloud Platform Blog Posted by Sara Robinson, Developer Advocate

At Google I/O this May, Firebase announced a new suite of products to help developers build mobile apps. Firebase Analytics, a part of the new Firebase platform, is a tool that automatically captures data on how people are using your iOS and Android app, and lets you define your own custom app events. When the data's captured, it’s available through a dashboard in the Firebase console. One of my favorite cloud integrations with the new Firebase platform is the ability to export raw data from Firebase Analytics to Google BigQuery for custom analysis. This custom analysis is particularly useful for aggregating data from the iOS and Android versions of your app, and accessing custom parameters passed in your Firebase Analytics events. Let’s take a look at what you can do with this powerful combination.

How does the BigQuery export work?


After linking your Firebase project to BigQuery, Firebase automatically exports a new table to an associated BigQuery dataset every day. If you have both iOS and Android versions of your app, Firebase exports the data for each platform into a separate dataset. Each table contains the user activity and demographic data automatically captured by Firebase Analytics, along with any custom events you’re capturing in your app. Thus, after exporting one week’s worth of data for a cross-platform app, your BigQuery project would contain two datasets, each with seven tables:


Diving into the data


The schema for every Firebase Analytics export table is the same, and we’ve created two datasets (one for iOS and one for Android) with sample user data for you to run the example queries below. The datasets are for a sample cross-platform iOS and Android gaming app. Each dataset contains seven tables — one week’s worth of analytics data.

The following query will return some basic user demographic and device data for one day of usage on the iOS version of our app:

SELECT
  user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id,
  user_dim.device_info.device_category,
  user_dim.device_info.user_default_language,
  user_dim.device_info.platform_version,
  user_dim.device_info.device_model,
  user_dim.geo_info.country,
  user_dim.geo_info.city,
  user_dim.app_info.app_version, 
  user_dim.app_info.app_store,
  user_dim.app_info.app_platform
FROM
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_20160601]

Since the schema for every BigQuery table exported from Firebase Analytics is the same, you can run any of the queries in this post on your own Firebase Analytics data by replacing the dataset and table names with the ones for your project.

The schema has user data and event data. All user data is automatically captured by Firebase Analytics, and the event data is populated by any custom events you add to your app. Let’s take a look at the specific records for both user and event data.

User data


The user records contain a unique app instance ID for each user (user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id in the schema), along with data on their location, device and app version. In the Firebase console, there are separate dashboards for the app’s Android and iOS analytics. With BigQuery, we can run a query to find out where our users are accessing our app around the world across both platforms. The query below makes use of BigQuery’s union feature, which lets you use a comma as a UNION ALL operator. Since a row is created in our table for each bundle of events a user triggers, we use EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT to make sure each user is only counted once:
SELECT
  user_dim.geo_info.country as country,
  EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT( user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id ) as users
FROM
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_20160601],
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_20160601]
GROUP BY
  country
ORDER BY
  users DESC

User data also includes a user_properties record, which includes attributes you define to describe different segments of your user base, like language preference or geographic location. Firebase Analytics captures some user properties by default, and you can create up to 25 of your own.

A user’s language preference is one of the default user properties. To see which languages our users speak across platforms, we can run the following query:

SELECT
  user_dim.user_properties.value.value.string_value as language_code, 
  EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT(user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id) as users,
FROM
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_20160601],
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_20160601]
WHERE
  user_dim.user_properties.key = "language"
GROUP BY
  language_code
ORDER BY 
  users DESC

Event data


Firebase Analytics makes it easy to log custom events such as tracking item purchases or button clicks in your app. When you log an event, you pass an event name and up to 25 parameters to Firebase Analytics and it automatically tracks the number of times the event has occurred. The following query shows the number of times each event in our app has occurred on Android for a particular day:

SELECT 
  event_dim.name,
  COUNT(event_dim.name) as event_count 
FROM
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_20160601]
GROUP BY 
  event_dim.name
ORDER BY 
  event_count DESC

If you have another type of value associated with an event (like item prices), you can pass it through as an optional value parameter and filter by this value in BigQuery. In our sample tables, there is a spend_virtual_currency event. We can write the following query to see how much virtual currency players spend at one time:

SELECT 
  event_dim.params.value.int_value as virtual_currency_amt,
  COUNT(*) as num_times_spent
FROM
  [firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_20160601]
WHERE
  event_dim.name = "spend_virtual_currency"
AND
  event_dim.params.key = "value"
GROUP BY
  1
ORDER BY 
  num_times_spent DESC

Building complex queries


What if we want to run a query across both platforms of our app over a specific date range? Since Firebase Analytics data is split into tables for each day, we can do this using BigQuery’s TABLE_DATE_RANGE function. This query returns a count of the cities users are coming from over a one week period:

SELECT
  user_dim.geo_info.city,
  COUNT(user_dim.geo_info.city) as city_count 
FROM
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()),
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
GROUP BY
  user_dim.geo_info.city
ORDER BY
  city_count DESC

We can also write a query to compare mobile vs. tablet usage across platforms over a one week period:

SELECT
  user_dim.app_info.app_platform as appPlatform,
  user_dim.device_info.device_category as deviceType,
  COUNT(user_dim.device_info.device_category) AS device_type_count FROM
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()),
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
GROUP BY
  1,2
ORDER BY
  device_type_count DESC

Getting a bit more complex, we can write a query to generate a report of unique user events across platforms over the past two weeks. Here we use PARTITION BY and EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT to de-dupe our event report by users, making use of user properties and the user_dim.user_id field:

SELECT 
  STRFTIME_UTC_USEC(eventTime,"%Y%m%d") as date,
  appPlatform,
  eventName,
  COUNT(*) totalEvents,
  EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT(IF(userId IS NOT NULL, userId, fullVisitorid)) as users
FROM (
  SELECT
    fullVisitorid,
    openTimestamp,
    FORMAT_UTC_USEC(openTimestamp) firstOpenedTime,
    userIdSet,
    MAX(userIdSet) OVER(PARTITION BY fullVisitorid) userId,
    appPlatform,
    eventTimestamp,
    FORMAT_UTC_USEC(eventTimestamp) as eventTime,
    eventName
    FROM FLATTEN(
      (
        SELECT 
          user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id as fullVisitorid,
          user_dim.first_open_timestamp_micros as openTimestamp,
          user_dim.user_properties.value.value.string_value,
          IF(user_dim.user_properties.key = 'user_id',user_dim.user_properties.value.value.string_value, null) as userIdSet,
          user_dim.app_info.app_platform as appPlatform,
          event_dim.timestamp_micros as eventTimestamp,
          event_dim.name AS eventName,
          event_dim.params.key,
          event_dim.params.value.string_value
        FROM
         TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:android_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()),
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([firebase-analytics-sample-data:ios_dataset.app_events_], DATE_ADD('2016-06-07', -7, 'DAY'), CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
), user_dim.user_properties)
)
GROUP BY
  date, appPlatform, eventName

If you have data in Google Analytics for the same app, it’s also possible to export your Google Analytics data to BigQuery and do a JOIN with your Firebase Analytics BigQuery tables.


Visualizing analytics data


Now that we’ve gathered new insights from our mobile app data using the raw BigQuery export, let’s visualize it using Google Data Studio. Data Studio can read directly from BigQuery tables, and we can even pass it a custom query like the ones above. Data Studio can generate many different types of charts depending on the structure of your data, including time series, bar charts, pie charts and geo maps.

For our first visualization, let’s create a bar chart to compare the device types from which users are accessing our app on each platform. We can paste the mobile vs. tablet query above directly into Data Studio to generate the following chart:
From this chart, it’s easy to see that iOS users are much more likely to access our game from a tablet. Getting a bit more complex, we can use the above event report query to create a bar chart comparing the number of events across platforms:
Check out this post for detailed instructions on connecting your BigQuery project to Data Studio.

What’s next?

If you’re new to Firebase, get started here. If you’re already building a mobile app on Firebase, check out this detailed guide on linking your Firebase project to BigQuery. For questions, take a look at the BigQuery reference docs and use the firebase-analytics and google-bigquery tags on Stack Overflow. And let me know if there are any particular topics you’d like me to cover in an upcoming post.

How to Build Your App Growth Strategy With Firebase and AdMob

Making money from your app is a great feeling and we’re glad AdMob can help! But maybe you find yourself hopping out of AdMob to perform other activities like analyzing app analytics or refining your app code. We hear you. All this back and forth can be time-consuming. Discover how Firebase can be your single Android, iOS, and mobile web development platform for a unified experience.

Save time by linking your AdMob app to a Firebase project

If you already have an AdMob account, it’s easy to link your app to a Firebase project. Learn how to do this for both Android and iOS apps. Once linked, you can take advantage of other critical app services within Firebase including real-time storage, crash reporting, and authentication without spending time searching for and accessing these services elsewhere. It’s all right there for you to use!

Monetize smarter with Firebase Analytics

You could be earning more with more engaged and active users on your app. Firebase offers powerful analytics capabilities to help you make more intelligent monetization decisions. With Firebase insights on active users, demographics, and in-app purchase revenue, smarter monetization decisions can be made to show the right segment of users the most relevant ads. Use the “Audiences” feature in Firebase to define groups of users with common attributes and analyze in-app activity. By segmenting users, you can identify where you want to position and test specific ad formats for better revenue performance.

Help grow your users with Firebase

Firebase not only helps you build and monetize your app, but it also enables you to grow your audience with in-product notifications, dynamic links that behave across all device types, app indexing so that your app makes it to top search results, and more. It’s a complete solution with services across your app’s lifecycle.

Ready to start exploring Firebase?

Sign up for a Firebase account and link your AdMob app.

Posted by Ameeti Mishra, App Partnerships Specialist, AdMob.

Source: Inside AdMob


Introducing Firebase Remote Config

Posted by Todd Kerpelman, Firebase Developer Advocate and Safa Alai, Remote Config Product Manager

Turning a great app into a successful business requires more than simply releasing your app and calling it a day. You need to quickly adapt to your user’s feedback, test out new features and deliver content that your users care about most.

This is what Firebase Remote Config is made for. By allowing you to change the look and feel of your app from the cloud, Firebase Remote Config enables you to stay responsive to your user’s needs. Firebase Remote Config also enables you to deliver different content to different users, so you can run experiments, gradually roll out features, and even deliver customized content based on how your users interact within your app.

Let's look at what you can accomplish when your wire up your app to work with Remote Config.

Update your app without updating your app

We've all had the experience of shipping an app and discovering soon afterwards that it was less than perfect. Maybe you had incorrect or confusing text that your users don't like. Maybe you made a level in your game too difficult, and players aren't able to progress past it. Or maybe it was something as simple as adding an animation that takes too long to complete.

Traditionally, you'd need to fix these kinds of mistakes by updating those values in your app's code, building and publishing a new version of your app, and then waiting for all your users to download the new version.

But if you've wired up your app for Remote Config in the Firebase platform, you can quickly and easily change those values directly in the cloud. Remote Config can download those new values the next time your user starts your app and address your users' needs, all without having to publish a new version of your app.

Deliver the Right Content to the Right People

Firebase Remote Config allows you to deliver different configurations to targeted groups of users by making use of conditions, which use targeting rules to deliver specific values for different users. For example, you can send down custom Remote Config data to your users in different countries. Or, you can send down different data sets separately to iOS and Android devices.

You can can also deliver different values based on audiences you've defined in Firebase Analytics for some more sophisticated targeting. So if you want to change the look of your in-app store just for players who have visited your store in the past, but haven't purchased anything yet, that's something you can do by creating Remote Config values just for that audience.

Run A/B Tests and Gradual Rollouts

Remote Config conditions also allow you to deliver different values to random sets of users. You can take advantage of this feature to run A/B tests or to gradually rollout new features.

If you are launching a new feature in your app but aren't sure if your audience is going to love it, you can hide it behind a flag in your code. Then, you can change the value of that flag using Remote Config to turn the feature on or off. By defining a "My New Feature Experiment" condition that is active for, say, 10% of the population, you can turn on this new feature for a small subset of your users, and make sure it's a great experience before you turn it on for the rest of your population.

Similarly, you can run A/B tests by supplying different values to different population groups. Want to see if people are more likely to complete a purchase if your in-app purchase button says, "Buy now" or "Checkout"? That's the kind of experiment you can easily run using A/B tests.

If you want to track the results of these A/B tests, you can do that today by setting a user property in Firebase Analytics based on your experiment. Then, you can filter any of your Firebase Analytics reports (like whether or not the user started the purchase process) by this property. Watch this space for news on upcoming improvements to A/B testing.

A Fabulous Improvement in Retention

Many of our early partners have already been using Firebase Remote config to test out changes within their app.

Fabulous, an app from Duke University's designed to help people adopt better lifestyle habits, wanted to experiment with their getting started flow to see which methods were most effective for getting their users up and running in their app. They not only A/B tested changes like images, text, and button labels, but they also A/B tested the entire onboarding process by using Remote Config to determine what dialogs people saw and in what order.

Thanks to their experiments with Remote Config, Fabulous was able to increase the number of people who completed their onboarding flow from 42% to 64%, and their one-day retention rate by 27%.

Research has shown that an average app loses the majority of their users in the first 3 days, so making these kinds of improvements to your app's onboarding process -- and confirming their effectiveness by conducting A/B tests -- can be crucial to ensuring the long-term success of your app.

Is Your App Wired Up?

When you use remote config Remote Config, you can supply all of your default values locally on the device, then only send down new values from the cloud where they differ from your defaults. This gives you the flexibility to wire up every value in your app to be potentially configurable through Remote Config, while keeping your network calls lightweight because you're only sending down changes. So feel free to take all your hard-coded strings, constants, and that AppConstants file you've got sitting around (it's okay, we all have one), and wire 'em up for Remote Config!

Firebase Remote Config is part of the Firebase platform and is available for free on both iOS and Android. If you want to find out more, please see our documentation and be sure to explore all the features of the Firebase SDK.