iPhone Google Analytics - identifying unique users

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iPhone Google Analytics - identifying unique users

Hi there,

I'm in the process of adding Google Analytics to my iPhone app, but I'm not at all experienced with Analytics. One thing I would like it to tell me is how many unique people are using the app.

Suppose one user were to use her iPhone app on ten different wireless networks, would Google Analytics iOS SDK interpret this as ten different users? What identifies a unique user - the device ID, an IP address?

Thanks for any help! Tristan

My understanding is that Apple won't allow applications to collect identifying data from the iPhone, so it would be impossible to uniquely identify the user.

Johnus 2010-09-14 03:34:14

Do you mean that's it's impossible to tell that different page views logged by Google Analytics were not performed by the same user?

Tristan 2010-09-14 05:52:09

Have a look at the Google Analytics iOS SDK docs http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/iphone/ . The two types of data you're getting out is "pageviews" and "events". Have a look into the interfaces available to you to see what data you can get out.

Johnus 2010-09-16 03:06:36

If the one phone uses the app from two different networks, it still counts as one user.

It would seem the iOS Analytics SDK just sends a cookie (not actually stored in [NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage]) with the request to identify that it's the same person.

edit: Turns out this is wrong. Our google analytics profile has twice as many "absolute unique visitors" as we have devices. We haven't released the tracked version yet.

edit2: It appears that when you delete the app, then reinstall it, Analytics will count two absolute unique visitors. When you simply install a new version over an old one however, Analytics will only count one absolute unique visitor.

Tristan 2010-09-21 00:44:03

How about... the same user installing the app on his iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPhone 4? I guess each of those would count as a unique user despite using one account... But I haven't got the exact facts. However my guess would be in that direction.

Jonny 2010-10-15 01:05:20

Jonny: Yes, I'm certain that's the case. Maybe there's a way to make them count as the same visitor, but certainly Analytics doesn't do that by default.

Tristan 2010-10-16 01:56:24

ansaurus

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iPhone Google Analytics - identifying unique users

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