this is more of a logic question. So I’m building up an app that requires 30 days trial period mechanism. What would be the right way to do this?
I’m relying on Flutter/Firebase to do this!
This is how I’m planning to do it but not sure if that is correct way to do it
Adding the field named “free_trial” (boolean) in the firebase and setting it to true initially
Now I need to make that field false once the user crossed the 30 days trial period! How to do this logic?
Let's assume, this is a registration page and once the user signed up, there will be a field inserted in the firebase database which would be "free_trial" and it will be initially set to true
CollectionReference users = FirebaseFirestore.instance.collection('users');
users.add({
"free_trial": true
});
How to make it false once the user has crossed 30 days period. What logic/algorithm would be required to achieve this? like fetching today date and then checking against registration date (something like this)
Any help would be appreciated
A better approach would be to store the free_trial_expiration timestamp and derive whether the user is still in their free trial from that. That way you won't have to change any value when their free trial expires, you just have to check whether they are still in their free trial in your queries.
If you do want to set a field after a certain time period, you can do that with Cloud Functions. The two most common approaches are to either:
Periodically check all potentially expired documents (e.g. all documents that have "free_trial": true, and update the ones that have expired, OR
Create a Cloud Task for each trial user (tasks are quite cheap), and set that task to trigger another Cloud Function when the trial period expires, so that you can update that specific document.
For more on these approaches, also see:
Is there any TTL (Time To Live ) for Documents in Firebase Firestore
How to create an auto delete mechanism for firestore? (deleting data after time period)
Can a Firestore query listener "listen" to a cloud function?
Maybe this repo link would help you.
Related
I have a mobile app which plays audio tracks. It uses Firebase Analytics to record events such as 'track names' played. Within the Firebase 'StreamView' one can access trending events and see which are the most popular tracks being played at any given moment. I would like to gain access to this list to and use it within my app to display a list of "tracks being played now".
I've looked into gaining access to Analytic trending event data and think Firebase Cloud Functions may provide a method of extracting the information I need. However, I'm not certain this is the correct, or easiest, method.
Could someone let me know whether extracting trending events is possible and, if so, point me in the correct direction?
Thanks
EDIT - Actually, there is a much better and easier way to get access to real-time events that have occurred in your app over the last 30 minutes. You can do so using the Google Analytics Data API.
Using the API you can filter through the event data for the past 30 mins, and inspect relevant custom dimensions on the play_track event for the track that was played (or provide a custom dimension filter to further specify the event data you get back).
This would be the ideal way to achieve what you're looking for. You might still want to use Cloud Firestore if you'd like to keep a longer record of trending tracks being played (e.g. in the last hour, last 24 hours, etc... though). Also note that the API is still in alpha.
-- END OF EDIT
Other Solutions
Option 1 - Use Cloud Firestore
This is probably the easiest solution - you can create a record of which tracks are being played whenever the event occurs by creating a simple collection in Cloud Firestore, and updating records for tracks being played there. It would require additional effort in logging and retrieving which tracks are played beyond just using Google Analytics, but should be straightforward to implement.
Note you'll probably want to check out the Firestore pricing guide first before selecting this option.
Option 2 - Using Firebase Cloud Functions
You can trigger a Cloud Function each time a play_track event is logged. The event will need to be marked as a conversion event in order for it to trigger a Cloud Function, and within the Cloud Function you can access the event parameters to identify which track is being played, and over time maintain a record somewhere for which tracks are being played to determine the most trending tracks. To maintain state you could use something like Firestore to keep track of which "tracks" are being played at the moment.
A couple of caveats about this approach:
You'll want to check out the Cloud Functions for Firebase pricing guide to make sure it falls within an acceptable range for your needs.
Cloud Functions triggers for analytics events currently only works for Android and iOS apps (no support for web apps).
Google Analytics triggers for Cloud Functions is currently in beta.
Option 3 - Using BigQuery for your analytics data
This option requires a bit more effort to setup, but you can export your Google Analytics data to BigQuery, and query the generated intraday tables to see which tracks are trending as well as a lot more additional insights.
The caveat with this approach are that you'll also need to check the pricing guide for using BigQuery to make sure it falls within your needs, and you'll need to make a call to execute the query and retrieve the list of tracks (or get a cached result).
I am using firebase for my mobile Android and iOS app and I want to send push notifications based on specific user properties that I set (push notifications topics don't work for my use case).
So now when I set a user property in via the app it takes forever for that change to be propagated. For example, I do have a property club which was set to a value x. I can successfully send push notifications to those users. Now when I change the value to club = y and this change will take forever to go through. Which means that all notifications sent to club = x will still be received on those devices.
To set user properties I use the firebase_analytics plugin for flutter as follows:
FirebaseAnalytics analytics = FirebaseAnalytics();
analytics.setUserProperty(name: 'club', value: 'some value')
Since I am using the user properties to set notification settings this delay is not acceptable. Does anyone know how to make this work with firebase? Or are there any guarantees at least after which amount of time these user properties get updated?
I don't want to use other services such as OneSignal etc. but stay in the firebase ecosystem completely if possible.
Per the Analytics doc
Note: Once the property is registered, it can take several hours for data collected with the property to be included in reports. When the new data is available, the user property can be used as a report filter or audience definition.
Which is what I assume is the cause for your delay.
Topics would be the way to go, but since as you mentioned it is not viable, you could set custom claims for the user and filter it that way as mentioned here but performance might not be great since you have to retrieve all your users first.
You could create a club collection in Firestore and for each clubName document have a toNotify subcollection containing the userIds as document name. In this context users would remove themselves from the previous clubName and create a new doc in the newClubName.
Keep in mind this has the potential of causing quite a lot of read operation depending on the frequency you send notifications and the size of the your userbase.
Recently started exploring the Firebase data via the Data Studio Firebase connector. I'm doing some custom reports based on the user_engagement event to compare with data we previously reported on in Flurry.
When looking at some DAU figures they are pretty close but on MAU they tend to get inflated. (Saw this behavior first on the Firebase Events Report Template). Digging into it a little more we do have a pattern where users frequently reinstall the app which generates a new app_instance_id. So as I fallback I'm using the resettable_device_id but then there's the situation advertising tracking is disabled on device resulting in a zeroed value. (Or for a brief period in January nulled out values, not sure if this was client or part of the Firebase link)
Currently thinking something roughly following the logic below, falling back to app_instance_id if the advertising identifier was not set. What approaches would be worth looking into to have a reliable user identifier for metrics reporting? (In future will be calling the setUserID to utilize our own identifier but looking to match up historical data)
IF(user_dim.device_info.resettable_device_id is not null,
IF(user_dim.device_info.resettable_device_id = '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000', user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id, user_dim.device_info.resettable_device_id),
user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id
) as unique_user_identifier,
Thanks in advance.
Simpler way to deal with the cases where a resettable_device_id is not available:
IF(user_dim.device_info.limited_ad_tracking, user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id, user_dim.device_info.resettable_device_id) as unique_user_identifier
According to Firebase Analytics docs (https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317517#active-users), the active number of users is the number of unique users who initiated sessions on a given day. Also according to the docs, every time a session is started an event with session_start name is sent. I am trying to get that metric using BigQuery's export, but my query is giving me different results (15636 on BigQuery, 14908 on FB analytics)
I have also tried converting to different timezones to see if that might be the issue, but no matter which timezone I try I never get the same (or similar) results
Which query should I run to get the same results I get on Firebase Analytics dashboard for active users?
My query is
SELECT EXACT_COUNT_DISTINCT(user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id)
FROM table_date_range([XXXXX.app_events_], timestamp('2016-11-26'), timestamp('2016-11-29'))
WHERE DATE(event_dim.timestamp_micros) = '2016-11-27'
AND event_dim.name ='session_start'
Thanks
Update
After #djabi's answer I changed my query to use user_engagement rather than session_start and it works much better now. Still some minor differences though (they range from under ten to under 50 out of 16K, depending on the date).
I have tried once again using different timezones by playing around with DATE(date_add(event_dim.timestamp_micros,1,'hour')) but I never got the exact number I get on Firebase Analytics dashboard.
The new numbers are good enough to be considered statistically acceptable, but wondering if anyone has a suggestion to improve the query and get exact results?
The current query is:
SELECT
COUNT(*) AS active_users
FROM (
SELECT
COALESCE(user_dim.user_id, user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id) AS user_id
FROM
TABLE_DATE_RANGE([XXXXX.app_events_], TIMESTAMP('2016-11-24'), TIMESTAMP('2016-11-29'))
WHERE
DATE(event_dim.timestamp_micros) = '2016-11-25'
AND event_dim.name ='user_engagement'
GROUP BY
user_id )
Note: At the moment we are not sending user_id, so the COALESCE will always return the app_instance_id, in case anyone was going to suggest that could be the problem
You need to wait for full 3 days for data from offline devices to be uploaded. Your query correctly filter the events based on the event timestamp and you pull data from 3 days but that is only day and half from today and that is enough for all data to be uploaded. Try including 3 days from yesterday.
Also try using user_engagement event instead of session_start. I believe active user count is based on user_engagement and not on session_start events.
Also FB reports take a bit to process so you wight want and check the FB reports the next day.
FB reports are done on the time zone on the account and events are timestamped in UTC so the day in FB reports is different from UTC calendar day. You want to control for that discrepancy as well to get matching numbers.
Sessions are by-default measured after user activity of 10 seconds in the respective app which you can change. Try changing the sessions start time count to the least number possible and then you may arrive at a number closer to what you are expecting.
For Android stats I used:
user_dim.device_info.resettable_device_id
instead of
user_dim.app_info.app_instance_id
and it produced better results.
How can I delete an Analytics Event from Firebase?
While I am testing I wrote some events in Firebase Analytics. Firebase by default orders all events alphabetically. So these testing events interrupts with original events.
I could arrange them by count to push all the testing events to last. But it makes difficult to find the main events since those are not alphabetically sorted.
I didn't find any options in Firebase dashboard to delete a event. Is there a way to delete the old events from firebase?
There is currently no way to delete events once they are logged into Firebase Analytics that I am aware of. However, the events will drift out of the default view (which is set to "last 30 days") as time goes on, or you can switch the time period to a shorter time. As you mentioned, you can also click a column header to sort by some other value or "add filter" to filter by an audience or user property.
You can create a new Firebase project if you want to start from scratch. It's also a fairly common practice to use one project for experimentation and validation of your analytics implementation and then to switch to your production Firebase project when everything looks good.
It is not possible to delete analytics events AFAIK, but on some views you can set up the time interval with the filter at the right-top corner to limit the listed events. In the audience set up you need to rely on typing, I am afraid.
As of 31 May 2018, there is an API for this. Doesn't delete individual events, but you should be able to use it to delete all the events collected by a particular app instance:
User Deletion API v3 (UserDeletion.userDeletionRequest)
It was introduced in this blog post and the intended purpose (user privacy) is described here (last paragraph).
Unfortunately, based on my own question, no one seems to have figured out how to get it to work :(
EDIT
Turns out that, according to Google, this API does delete events (which technically is what the OP was asking), but since the aggregate total remains visible on the Firebase console, it won't help with the OP's specific use case.
As Steve Ganem suggested the simplest thing you can do to reset the Firebase Analytics data is to register new Firebase project and that in your app. You can also keep the old project around for debugging/development.