Faced a problem that Play Market does not give utm after installing the ad. I did everything according to the tutorial on getting utm through reciver - the tests work out everything and the receiver works. But if you upload it to the product and the user installs it from advertising in the play market, and not from the site or Google search (of course, from advertising), then the receiver does not work after installation. As I understand it, utm will be transmitted only if the user installs the application using the advertising link from the site or search. Is it even possible to receive utm when a user installs an application for advertising within the Market?
I tried the com.android.installreferrer: installreferrer: 2.2 library, it pulls when installing campaign - goole-play. Now the question is - will it pull utm normally or will it be the same as with the receiver? A very interesting topic - nowhere is there a clear answer, so I asked this question here)
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I'm measuring the number of installs for my application, on both iOS and Android, through Facebook Analytics. This has been setup with Facebook SDK to enable install tracking. It seems to be working fine and I'm able to follow the number of installs.
My problem is that when I look at the number of installs I get from iTunes Connect (App Units) and Google Play (Total Installs), they don't match the numbers from Facebook Analytics. Both iTunes Connect and Google Play register on average 15% more installs than Facebook Analytics. Can anyone help me to get an understanding of why this is happening and what I can do about it? If not, which of these numbers are more reliable?
Thank you for your time and your help!
App Units on iTunes Connect App Analytics are the actual "purchases"/downloads. Bus some users might never even open your app. That's why it's possible that App Units might be higher than the numbers from Facebook. I assume at least for iOS that Facebook can only send information on the first launch of the app, not on the actual install.
Facebook Analytics for installation are not real time, some time they reflect on backend within 1 hour.
Apps are though installed, though counts are getting reflected on iTunes and but when user open app then only that count gets reflect on Facebook / Google analytics.
We have a Play Store button on our landing page which has a link tagged with all the required UTM parameters to track installs from the Play Store. So if a visitor clicks on the Play Store button (using a web browser) goes to the web version of the Play Store and installs to his device from there, we should be able to track that install as coming from the web version of our landing page.
However, our data looks sketchy. Tracking less installs than we actually see on Mixpanel.
And then we found this article It says: "Again, attributing installs based on the install referrer using direct links to Google Play does not work if a user chooses to open the measurement URL with a web browser (instead of the Google Play Store app)."
Anybody knows if this is correct? And if yes, what's a comprehensive way to track Play Store installs (source, medium etc)
Yes, this is correct - your app won't get tracking params if your user does not open the Google Play Store app.
If you want to track user's installation source, try some 3rd-party solutions, like Branch.io (free) or Flurry (well, at least Flurry used to do that and used to be free, not sure about now) for example.
Basically, the way they work is that they collect so-called fingerprint of the user (IP, browser, time of the click, device info etc) and then compare it with the data that their SDK sends from within your app (after the user has successfully installed and launched it).
I'm not trying to promote any of those solutions, we are just happen to be using Branch on our production app and it works quite well for us.
Also, you can try to set those link to target market:// links instead of http links (this one would force the Play Store app to open), but I would not recommend that solution as it could cause problems with people who have Google Play Services missing.
market:// links look like these one:
market://details?id=your.package&referrer=utm_stuff...
EDIT:
If you want to keep all your data in one place (let's say, Analytics) - you could pass those utm tracking params into your Branch links and collect/send them manually to Google Analytics (and Play Store - they are connected) using CampaignTrackingReceiver class
The facts:
My company has developed an Android app.
My company has NOT developed an iOS version to this app in anyway.
I have created a Google Analytics account, opened a mobile app tracking ID, and connected it to my Android app using the SDK (this was not done by me, rather by our developer).
Our app launched and has some users according to both our Google Analytic's account and the Google Play Developer Console account.
In the Google Analytics if I examine the operating systems of my users my operaiting split is:
Android - 91.69%
Macintosh - 8.05% (Macintosh 10.10)
iOS - 0.26% (iOS 8.1.2)
How is this possible? We haven't developed for iOS.
This is so-called referral spam. I won't go into details here as there're lots of good sources on the net about the issue(e.g. this, this and this one).
I've handled this issue like this:
Go to your app view in the Google Analytics.
Open the 'Admin' tab.
Click on 'View settings'.
There will be section called 'Bot Filtering', check the 'Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders' option.
From now on Google will remove the spam hits from their analytics. This solution has two issues, though:
Historical data will not be affected by this option, i.e. spam hits which were made in the past will remain in your data, Google will only filter your future hits.
Google promises to remove hits from known bots, which means that the time from the new bot appearance to the moment when it will be included in the Google filter list can be indefinitely long. I use this solution for the last week though and didn't find any new bots breaking through the filter.
I have successfully implemented the Facebook SDK and AppEvents to report installation of my Android app. I have verified that it registers the last install data in the dashboard, and I see thousands of fb_mobile_activate_app events in my App Events tab on Facebook.
I have been running a paid campaign on the app, however, even after over 24 hours since adding the SDK, I am getting reports of 0 installs. Since I am basing my budget on how the ads perform, it seems odd to not have any data.
Is there something I am missing here?
Be sure you have your goal point to a Facebook app, and never have to paste in your Google Play URL.
If your mobile app campaigns previously used a Google Play or iTunes link, you'll need to recreate your campaigns to utilize the install tracking via the Facebook Mobile SDKs.
Suppose I have a wifi network with a walled garden that prevents users from accessing Internet unless an authentication procedure is performed via browser.
Suppose I have an application on Google Play that automates this process for inexperienced people. And suppose 95% of users are inexperienced and unwilling to perform SMS-OTP authentication on a site that is not optimized for mobile.
Scenario
A person asks a clerk how to connect to internet using Android. The clerk suggests the person to download the Android app, but the person responds he has no Internet access because he has no 3G data plan.
Possible workaround
The walled garden portal detects the device running Android by user agent and says: "Would you like to download an APK from our internal network without having to go to Google Play?". The user accepts, unlocks unknown sources and installs the app.
Question
In this scenario, if a user downloads an APK of a Google Play-available application, signed with same key, on his device, will the installed application be linked to Play and subject to updates? And I mean without using a Market linker app.
That's my old answer, don't read it, just skip to the edit portion:
Short answer is no!
I'm sure there're geeky ways around to link an app to its Google Play
variant, but your scenario of non-geeky customers I reckon the best
option is to program the network to allow Android mobile access
(checking the user agent) to play.google.com (maybe even from the
redirection website auto-launch the google play link direct to said
app).
edit:
I'm thinking a bit more on this problem and I would like to change my answer to "I don't know" (what a horrible answer). But I would like to propose a test that you can do it yourself.
The reason I'm changing the answer is because I remember now apps like Titanium and they do link the app to the Play whenever restoring a backup. Of course, Titanium needs root, but that's because it's messing with other apps, not its own.
So in light of what I discusse I'll suggest you a simple test:
build an app, anything, Hello world!
Upload this app to Google Play and make it active
Wait a few hours for Google servers to make it available
Manually flash the same build version (with exact same signing key, etc) to a device.
Reboot the device (to be sure the system will read through installed applications and do communication with Google Play)
Go to Google Play on the device and check if it shows the app
It's possible that the app have the same package name and signed with the same key, the Google Play on the device itself will recognise it as the same and link it.