Firebase

With iOS and Android containers available for Google Tag Manager, it’s tempting to add GTM as an integration into an existing Firebase setup for your apps. It’s also a fine way to get acquainted with Firebase in the first place, as it has a plethora of features to make application development easier.

Furthermore, with the advent of App + Web, there’s even more incentive to integrate your app with Firebase.

Adding Google Tag Manager is basically one extra dependency, and even if the feature set at the moment isn’t too spectacular, I’d be surprised if things like custom templates wouldn’t make their way to mobile at some point.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing short (and sometimes a bit longer) bite-sized tips for my #GTMTips topic. With the advent of Google Analytics: App + Web and particularly the opportunity to access raw data through BigQuery, I thought it was a good time to get started on a new tip topic: #BigQueryTips.

For Universal Analytics, getting access to the BigQuery export with Google Analytics 360 has been one of the major selling points for the expensive platform. The hybrid approach of getting access to raw data that has nevertheless been annotated with Google Analytics’ sessionization schema and any integrations (e.g. Google Ads) the user might have enabled is a powerful thing indeed.

Update 7 October 2020: BigQuery Export can now be configured via the property settings of Google Analytics: App + Web, so you don’t need to follow the steps in this article. Check out Charles Farina’s guide for how to do this.

Here’s yet another article inspired by the fairly recent release of Google Analytics: App + Web properties. This new property type surfaces Firebase’s analytics capabilities for websites as well, when before they were restricted to mobile apps only (see my guides for iOS and Android).

A while ago, I published an article on how to build an Android application, and bundle it with Firebase. The purpose of that article, and the one you are reading now, is to slowly introduce the world of mobile app development and Firebase, given the latter is getting more and more traction as Google’s go-to analytics platform.

After finishing work on the Android guide, I immediately started working on its counterpart for iOS, and that’s the one you’re reading now.

With the release of Google Analytics: App + Web, Firebase is suddenly all the rage. The new App + Web property can combine data from your website and mobile apps, as long as the latter uses Google Analytics for Firebase, formerly known as Firebase Analytics.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps of creating an extremely simple Android application, and we’ll then create a Firebase project, and for good measure add Google Tag Manager to the mix.

Google recently released a new version of Google Analytics called App + Web. Clumsy name aside, this really is for all intents and purposes Google Analytics V2 or Firebase Analytics for the Web. We’re not talking about a charming way to do roll-up reporting between Google Analytics for Firebase and Universal Analytics, nor are we talking about an enhancement to Universal Analytics.

No, we’re talking about a new measurement model for web traffic, which has the convenience of being compatible with Google Analytics for Firebase, which you might already have running in your apps.

Thanks to the intrepid detective work of Jørn Reidel and Ahmed Marof, it looks like one of the big hurdles for doing a full migration from using the legacy Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager SDKs to the latest Tag Manager + Firebase SDK is now a non-issue.

The issue is, of course, Product-scoped Custom Dimensions or more specifically the lack of support thereof. Until now, I’d been holding against recommending the migration to anyone with Enhanced Ecommerce tracking set up simply because the documentation didn’t mention the possibility of sending these custom definitions to Google Analytics.