What's new with Analytics?

Krista Seiden

Firebase Analytics

Here at Firebase, we know that the first step in making improvements in your app is knowing how your users are interacting with it: what parts they love, where they're having trouble, and what features are sadly underutilized. This is why we built Google Analytics for Firebase from the ground up to be a complete mobile analytics solution, with free and unlimited app analytics designed specifically for the way mobile apps are built.

Now, if you were paying close attention to the last paragraph, you may have noticed that the product formerly known as Firebase Analytics is now called "Google Analytics for Firebase." Don't worry; it's the same analytics product you know and love -- and we'll talk more about the name change in a bit.

Over the last year, we've made a number of improvements to Google Analytics for Firebase, including adding StreamView, which gives you an impression of how users are interacting with your app at this very moment, and DebugView, which allows you to see in precise detail what analytics events (and errors!) might be happening on a test device.

This year at Google I/O, we were thrilled to announcea number of new improvements and enhancements that make using analytics even better. In case you missed those presentations (which you can also watch on YouTube), let's give you a quick summary of what's new with Google Analytics for Firebase.

Custom Parameter Reporting

With Google Analytics for Firebase, you're allowed to submit up to 25 custom parameters alongside any events that you record in your app. For instance, if you were submitting a end_of_round event in a game, you could submit a user_score or premium_coins_earned parameter along with that event. By analyzing these different parameter values, you could then ensure that your game had the high score distribution or general payout rate that you were expecting.

But up until now, it's been impossible to see the results of most of these custom event parameters without first exporting your data to BigQuery and doing the analysis there. Being able to view summaries of these event parameters directly in the Firebase console has been our most common feature request since analytics first launched last year. So we're very pleased to announce that we've taken our first big steps in making these reports available to you.

To get started with custom event parameters in Firebase, you'll need to let Google Analytics for Firebase know what parameters you're interested in. You can do this by going to the specific event in the Firebase console and clicking the "Add event parameters" button in the interface. From there, you can specify a parameter, note whether it's a number or a string, and add units of measurement, if applicable.

Once you've done that, you'll start seeing these parameter summaries directly in the console. We'll show you sums and averages for numeric values, and a list of your most popular values for strings.

Like other analytics reports available in Google Analytics for Firebase, you can filter these reports by user properties or audiences to get a better sense of how different users are interacting with your app in different ways.

Currently, you can specify up to 50 different event parameters for which you'd like to generate summary reports.

Free Storage Tier in BigQuery

Of course, if you want to analyze a greater number of custom event parameters, or want to do more sophisticated analysis than what's available from the Firebase console, you can export your Google Analytics data directly into BigQuery, Google's data warehouse in the cloud. Analyzing your data in BigQuery is a very powerful way of running all sorts of ad hoc queries or custom analysis on your data, and we want to encourage all our developers to try it out.

To assist you on your journey, we've now added a free tier of storage in BigQuery -- 10 GB of data to be exact -- for every project using Google Analytics for Firebase. Combine this free storage tier with the 1 TB of free monthly query usage that you get from BigQuery, and you can do an awful lot of BigQuery analysis for a relatively little amount of money. And with the new analytics report templates in Data Studio, making stylish reports on custom parameters (or anything else you can measure in BigQuery) is a cinch.

Firebase and AdMob

We've made some major enhancements in the way Firebase and AdMob communicate with each other. Much like milk and cookies¹, mixing Firebase and AdMob together results in an exciting new flavor combination that complements the strengths of both products!

By linking your AdMob account to Firebase, your app will automatically record analytics events associated with AdMob (along with mediated ad units) just like any other analytics event. This gives Google Analytics for Firebase the ability to create reports on ad impressions, clicks, and exposure time, broken down by important characteristics such as screen, ad format or ad unit. This makes it easier than ever before to see which ads are most effective in your app, where you're earning the most ad dollars, or which ads your users spend the most time viewing.

Linking your AdMob and Firebase accounts together also gives you a more complete picture of where you're making money in your app. Both the APRU reports on the dashboard and the Lifetime Value metrics in the Attribution reports will now include revenue generated from AdMob advertising, as well as in-app purchases.

This can help you gain a much more complete understanding of how your app is doing from a revenue standpoint, and help you more accurately gauge which growth campaigns are bringing you users who are earning you the most revenue.

Automatic Screen Tracking

If, like me, you enjoy spending your free time reading the latest Firebase Release Notes, you might have noticed that a few months ago, Firebase started adding screen tracking support to the events that it was recording. This month, we're taking the first steps towards adding screen tracking reports in Google Analytics for Firebase, by showing you the top three screens your users are spending time on. You can find this information in the User Engagement section of the Firebase Dashboard.

Screen tracking reporting works behind the scenes by automatically logging a screen_view event whenever a screen transition occurs. These events are then combined on the server to paint a more complete picture of the user's journey throughout your app. And just like any other event, you can view them in StreamView or DebugView, or analyze them through BigQuery. If you would like to customize these events -- for instance, you're a game developer who has multiple "screens" all within the same ViewController -- you can do so with by setting these events manually on the client.

More Attribution Partners!

You can already use Google Analytics for Firebase for attribution tracking, which helps you learn not just which ad networks are sending you users, but which ones are sending you valuable users that you care about the most. And we're pleased to announce a new integration with DoubleClick Digital Marketing that will include attribution tracking for DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Bid Manager. Add this to the 50+ third-party advertising networks (and growing!) that we've integrated into our system, and Firebase can help you make better decisions around where to spend your advertising dollars with true cross-network attribution data.

New Name, Same Great Product

We're rebranding Firebase Analytics as Google Analytics for Firebase to make it clear that this is our recommended apps analytics solution for all mobile apps moving forward. But under the hood, you'll still be using the Firebase Analytics SDK with its event-driven model to generate all of your analytics data.

If you're using the old Google Analytics Services SDK in your existing apps, don't worry; it's not going anywhere. But we encourage you to start adding the Firebase SDK in future releases. Using the Firebase SDK will give you access to the latest reports in Google Analytics for Firebase and to new functionality as it becomes available. If you're a long-time Google Analytics fan, you can use Google Tag Manager to automatically send your events data to those reports as well. If you need more help on this topic, we wrote a blog post a few months back that covers a few strategies on how to get both these analytics libraries working together in your app. Give it a read sometime!

Try it Today!

We're thrilled to be bringing you these improvements to Google Analytics for Firebase -- they should be already available in the Give it a read sometime today (check out the demo project for an example!). If you haven't yet added analytics to your product, you can find all the documentation you need here to get started. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

^{1. Or chili and mango, which Steve Ganem assures me is delicious, but sounds weird to me.↩}

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Five Firebase I/O Sessions I'm Excited About

Todd Kerpelman

Developer Advocate

Over the last few weeks, I've had many of you approach me with questions like, "Hey Todd! I'm super excited to be going to I/O this year! What sessions should I go to?" And my answer has always been the same: "Who are you, and how did you get into my apartment?"

But yeah, I can understand that picking sessions at I/O can feel overwhelming. Between the VR awesomeness and the new Android O stuff, Google I/O has a lot to offer. And while the Firebase VR Data Viewer is still a work-in-progress, there's still plenty of great Firebase content for you to check out this year.

Of course, asking me to pick my favorites among all the sessions is like asking me to pick my favorite child -- I love all of them equally¹. But with that said, here's a few Firebase sessions that I'm certainly looking forward to next month:

Supercharging Firebase Apps with Machine Learning and Cloud Functions -- This combines two of the most intriguing (for me, anyway) technologies happening in cloud-land. First, you've got Cloud Functions for Firebase, which essentially allows you to run server-side code based on events happening within your app, and then there's Machine Learning, which is still basically, "We're living in the future" kind of wizardry as far as I'm concerned. Combine them together, and you can pull off some really cool features to enhance your mobile app. Or, in this case, a giant crowdsourced game.

Firebase Analytics: Overview and Updates -- Apparently, launching StreamView wasn't enough for the Analytics team. They've got a whole bunch of other new features popping up, including what might be the most commonly-requested feature since they launched last year. (No, it's not changing all the fonts to Papyrus. That's just my most-requested feature.) What is it? You'll just have to swing by the session to find out.

Zero to App: Develop with Firebase -- This is one of our most popular sessions from last year, and it's been brought back for 2017! We're gonna bring up four Firebase engineers for a realtime cross-platform app development deathmatch! But… uhhh... without the "death" part. HR wouldn't allow it. I've been told this year, there will be some Cloud Functions involved and possibly some other new twists and turns to keep things interesting. Will they end up with a real app by the end of the session? Or will Mike be unable to compile his code because he forgot a semicolon? Only time will tell!

AdMob and Firebase Analytics: Better Together -- Remember those Reese's commercials from the 80's, when people apparently walked around with open jars of peanut butter all the time? Well, this talk is a little like that, but instead of resulting in a delicious candy, you end up with some solid ad-driven analytics-backed monetization strategies for your app. Which you can then use to go and buy your own peanut-butter cups.

Shipping Santa Tracker: Carefully Rolling Out a Feature to a Million Users -- What happens when you've essentially got one day to launch an app to millions of people around the world with a whole slew of features that you've never really tested before in front of a large audience? You would think "mass chaos and hysteria", but in Santa Tracker land, things were as smooth a baby elf's bottom. Come by and listen to Sam and Dan tell you how they were able to pull it off. I know it's an early session, but they promised me there'd be costumes. So that might be worth rolling out of bed for.

So there ya go! Five Firebase sessions you should definitely keep an eye on. Not able to make it to I/O in person? Don't worry! All of our presentations will be available either in the livestream that day, or in the Firebase YouTube channel a few days later.

---

1. Well, except you, Janice. Are you really going to use emacs over vim? You're breaking your mother's heart. 

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Working Closer with Google Cloud Platform

James Tamplin

Product Manager

Since expanding Firebase to become Google's mobile application development platform at Google I/O last year, our amazing community of developers has created over 1 million Firebase projects.

We're thrilled so many of you use and trust us. While Firebase is a full suite of products for building and growing apps, we know that some apps need more than we offer out-of-the-box. That's why we're bringing Firebase much closer to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to serve even the most demanding applications, whether you're a new startup or a large enterprise.

Product Integrations

Firebase already shares the same account and billing system as GCP, so you can attach Firebase services to your GCP project and vice-versa. This makes for powerful combinations, such as exporting raw event data from Firebase Analytics into BigQuery for ad-hoc analysis. Starting today, we're beginning to share products too.

First, Firebase developers have been asking for ways to extend their app's functionality without spinning up a server, and Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you do just that. Cloud Functions is our new event-driven serverless compute offering that enters public beta today. The infrastructure is shared between Cloud and Firebase, allowing you to invoke a function or access resources from throughout the Cloud/Firebase ecosystem. For more information, read the announcement on the Firebase blog and Cloud blog.

Next, we're bringing Firebase Storage closer to Cloud Storage. Firebase Storage launched 10 months ago, and lets you easily upload and download files from your device directly to Cloud Storage. Previously we gave you a single bucket for your files. Now we're fully aligning the two products and letting you use any Cloud Storage bucket, from any global region and from any storage class, all straight from the Firebase SDK. To reflect this alignment we're renaming the product Cloud Storage for Firebase. Read more in our blog post.

Stay tuned for more product integrations in the future as Firebase continues to provide direct client-side access to GCP infrastructure through our iOS, Web, and Android SDKs.

Streamlined Terms of Service

We love lawyers almost as much as developers, so we're extending GCP's Terms of Service to cover several Firebase products. This makes Firebase and Cloud simpler to evaluate and use together. Products to be covered include: Authentication, Hosting, Storage, Functions, and Test Lab. Our streamlined Terms of Service will take effect soon.

The Big Picture

Firebase brings together the best of Google on mobile -- whether that's Google's flagship advertising solutions like AdMob and AdWords, or Google's analytics expertise in the form of Firebase Analytics.

Google Cloud Platform lets you to benefit from the institutional knowledge Google has developed from almost two decades of running global-scale computing infrastructure.

By bringing together the ease-of-use of Firebase with the full-range of GCP infrastructure offerings, we're better able to serve you up and down the stack. If you're a startup using Firebase to quickly get to market, you can now easily scale into a full public cloud. If you're an existing business running on GCP who wants to ship a mobile app, we've got you covered too.

We can't wait to see what you build with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform!

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Build your “earn” strategy when developing your app with Firebase

Ameeti Mishra

Scalable Acquisitions App Partnerships Specialist

Successful apps turn into successful revenue generating businesses when the right business model is built into the core app development strategy from the very beginning. Since Firebase is designed to help app developers at every part of their lifecycle, from creating high-quality apps to growing and monetizing their app traffic, let’s take a peek at what monetization concepts you could be thinking about now.

• Figure out your ideal app monetization strategyMonetization comes in many flavors including, in-app purchases, subscriptions, ads and more. When thinking about in-app ads, they may or may not make sense for your app depending on what value your app is providing and what motivates your audience. Make sure you experiment with different monetization options to decide which one works best for you. You may consider A/B testing different options and assessing click through rates. Read about all your monetization options to help you make smart decisions early on when building your app.

• Here’s how you can use AdMob to increase your revenueAdMob is the key ingredient within Firebase that can help app developers make money. It offers insights on ad revenue performance and user engagement, while providing access to multiple ad networks to make sure the ads you plan to show your users are valuable to them.

Ready to start exploring AdMob?

Sign up for an AdMob account and link it to your Firebase project.

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Importing the Mobile Ads SDK with Firebase

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Andrew Brogdon

DPE for Mobile Ads

The transformation of Firebase into a unified mobile platform brought with it new Gradle artifacts and CocoaPods that mobile developers can use to import the Mobile Ads SDK. With these additions, there are now several alternatives for each platform. Thanks to your feedback, we wanted to share a little more information about which ones we recommend and what libraries they include, so here's a quick run-down.

Android & Gradle

firebase-ads (recommended)

This is the best way to get the Mobile Ads SDK into your project. With the firebase-ads artifact, you get everything you need to load and display ads from AdMob, DFP, or AdX, plus Firebase Analytics built in. You'll also be ready to add the client components for any other Firebase services you want to use, like firebase-crash or firebase-config. Unless you have a specific need to use the SDK without Firebase, this is your jam.

If you'd like to see a screencast of how to get up and running with AdMob using firebase-ads, check out this episode of the Firecasts series:

play-services-ads

For those not using Firebase, this Gradle artifact contains the Mobile Ads SDK on its own. You'll get the client code for AdMob, DFP, and AdX, but no Firebase services.

play-services

This is the full Google Play services client, also without Firebase. This gives you not only the Mobile Ads SDK, but all the other Google Play services SDKs as well: Maps, Drive, Fit, and so on. Since you're probably not using every API that Play services offers, it's better to import them individually. If you need mobile ads and Play games, for example, just include play-services-ads and play-services-games.

play-services-ads-lite

The SDK team developed this new Gradle artifact for a very specific use-case. It contains a slimmed-down version of the Mobile Ads SDK designed to work only on devices that have Google Play services installed. If reducing app size is extremely important for you, this can help lessen the impact of the Mobile Ads SDK, but it won't be able to load and display ads on devices that don't have Play services. Make sure you're intimately familiar with your app's install base before considering this tradeoff, and see the Lite SDK guide for more details.

iOS & CocoaPods

Firebase/AdMob (recommended)

This is the Firebase CocoaPod for AdMob and the Mobile Ads SDK. While it's labelled as "AdMob," this pod gives you the iOS client code for DFP and AdX as well. You'll get everything you need to load and display ads from all three sources, plus Firebase Analytics built in. This CocoaPod is also easy to combine with any other Firebase pods your app needs, like Firebase/Crashand Firebase/Database. For most developers, this is the one you want.

The Firecasts series has an episode that shows how to import AdMob and Firebase into an app using Firebase/AdMob, so check that out for a detailed screencast:

Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK

For developers not yet using Firebase, this pod contains just Mobile Ads SDK. You get everything necessary to show ads from AdMob, DFP, and AdX, but no Firebase services.

GoogleMobileAds

This is an older, alternate CocoaPod for the Mobile Ads SDK that should no longer be used. Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK is the better choice if you aren't using Firebase.

More Info

If you've got questions about Firebase and the best ways to get started, the Firebase support page also has a bunch of options that can help. If you've got technical questions about the Mobile Ads SDK itself, you're welcome to stop by the SDK support forum.

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Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

James Tamplin

Product Manager

Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.

Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!

Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:

• Developer experience matters. Ease-of-use, good documentation, and intuitive APIs make developers happy.
• Work across platforms. We’ll support you whether you’re building for iOS, Web, or Android.
• Integrate where possible. Firebase has one SDK, one console, and one place to go for documentation and support. You can mix-and-match any of our features and, where it makes sense, data flows between them to help you do more, faster.

Introducing Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:

Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.

Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.

Develop Faster with Messaging, Storage, Config

To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.

Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.

One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.

Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.

In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.

Introducing Test Lab and Crash Reporting

We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.

When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.

Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.

Grow Your App with Notifications, Dynamic Links, and More

After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.

Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.

Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.

Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.

Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.

AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.

Monetize Your App With AdMob

To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.

Introducing a New Console, Documentation, and SDK

Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.

We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.

Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.

You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.

Finally, we’re announcing the beta launch of a new C++ SDK. You can find the documentation and getting started guides here.

Announcing New Pricing Plans

We’re excited to announce that most of these new products, including Analytics, Crash Reporting, Remote Config, and Dynamic Links, are free for unlimited usage.

For our four paid products: Test Lab, Storage, Realtime Database, and Hosting, we’re announcing simpler pricing. We now offer:

• A free plan with generous limits
• A fixed-rate plan for early-stage startups who need a predictable monthly price
• A metered pay-as-you-go plan that scales with the largest apps

Some Things Stay the Same

Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.

If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.

More to Come

As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.

Get Started!

All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.

We can’t wait to hear what you think!

Posted by James Tamplin & Francis Ma, Firebase Product Leads

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