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Google Analytics Launches Unified App and Web Analytics Tracking

By: Becca Heacox    August 29, 2019

As part of Google’s objective to help companies move toward a more cohesive measurement approach, they launched a new property type for beta testing in Google Analytics (GA) called App + Web. This property type allows marketers to combine data from their website and their mobile app in a single property, unifying metrics and dimensions for a more complete cross-platform view. Historically, brands have had to create separate properties for web and app platforms, making reporting and analysis cumbersome since it required the analyst to pull data from multiple properties in GA. Now, GA users can set up web and app tracking in a single property, allowing for more seamless analysis between platforms.

Although this change seems minor, the implications are very useful to marketers attempting to better understand the full picture of their customers’ digital shopping behavior. This is even more important in our mobile-centric world. In Google and Verto’s Mobile Shopping Journey study, they identified 46% of mobile shopping includes at least one transition between the mobile site and the app.

This new property type allows marketers to seamlessly track this transition from app to website (and vice versa), revealing how the platforms are working together to convert users into customers. New flexible funnel reporting helps to identify steps that are key to making this conversion, and lets marketers identify where users drop off in the process. Flexible path analysis takes this one step further, showing the actions the user took between the funnel steps to help explain the “why” behind why they dropped off or didn’t complete a conversion.

Even if your company doesn’t have a mobile app, utilizing the App + Web Property type for your website measurement could still prove useful since enhanced tracking is available that allows you to record interactions like scroll-depth, outbound links, site search, embedded YouTube videos and file downloads without additional tracking code. The flexible funnel and pathing reports mentioned above are also available in this new property type. To learn more about the release and how to get started using this new property type, see Google’s blog post.