We're using Firebase for analytics on our mobile apps. But Firebase only appears to report on active users for 1, 7 and 28-day rolling periods. These are not the industry standard reporting metrics I'm looking for.
We also have a web app, where we're counting unique active users in Google Analytics, and we'd like to be able to compare (and combine) MAUs from our apps in firebase with web MAUs calculated in GA.
Is this possible without BigQuery?
If no, how much will BigQuery cost us?
It seems crazy to have to purchase BigQuery for this purpose alone. Any help is appreciated.
Is [it] possible [to get MAU] without BigQuery?
If the intervals in the analytics reports in the Firebase console don't suit your needs, you will have to roll your own. There is nothing built into Firebase for custom intervals. Most developers use BigQuery for such custom reporting, especially since this is quite easy to do by tweaking the default Data Studio template.
If no, how much will BigQuery cost us?
If you have a look at the BigQuery pricing page, you'll see that this is quite involved making it hard to answer without knowing your exact amount of data. In general: if you store and process more data (i.e. have more users in your app or more reports), you will pay more. Luckily there is now a BigQuery sandbox, which allows you to process significant data without paying (even without entering a credit card). This gives you an option to try BigQuery, before committing to it.
Related
Need some help with accessing historical data for Firebase Crashlytics and Events data in BigQuery.
We have linked BigQuery to firebase and we are able to get only last 2 months of data in BigQuery at this moment.
Can you please suggest a way to get the data since the inception of the app?
Firebase doesn't keep the events data indefinitely which makes this feature not feasible at the moment.
Currently, your data will start being exported since the moment you enable the BigQuery connection, i.e. you can't access your historical data.
If you think this feature would be useful for you and for other people, I encourage you to request it in this link.
I hope it helps
I'm trying to use the Google Analytics Management API to automate the management of a large amount of GA Properties, which is what it's for according to the docs.
However, I'm having trouble with a lot of settings, that it seems like are not available through the API. The expected format of a GA property resource is quite limited in the fields you can set, and it seems to not allow specifying other fields.
Specifically, I am interested in setting the "Advertising features", aka whether to enable the Demographics and Interest Reports:
When updating this setting through the GA UI, the field within the request seems to be called demographicsEnabled, but I cannot set or retrieve this value when using the Management API.
How can I set this and other values through the Management API, or other means? If only a small fraction of the settings for a property can be set through the API, that seems kinda useless for managing large accounts, as the docs claim you can do - so I assume there has to be a way I'm just not seeing here.
How can I set this and other values through the Management API, or other means?
You cant the management api is very limited in what fields you are able to update. Unfortunately unlike a number of other google apis documentation it doesn't actually tell you which fields are writeable. I will mention that to the team.
If only a small fraction of the settings for a property can be set through the API, that seems kinda useless for managing large accounts, as the docs claim you can do - so I assume there has to be a way I'm just not seeing here.
The API was not intended for managing large accounts IMO. It was probably only intended for getting information about what accounts a current user has access to.
What i suggest that you do is create a feature request asking for the ability to update the fields that you are trying to update. The team is normally very open to those types of requests.
Link it here and i will be happy to bring it to the teams attention next time i speak with them.
AFAIK this and many other features are not available in Management API.
I am using Firebase as my authentication and database platform in my React Native-Expo app. I have not yet decided if I will be using the realtime-database or Firestore database.
I need to perform statistical analysis on daily data gathered from my users, which is stored in the database. I.e. the users type in their daily intake of protein, from it I would like to calculate their weekly average, expected monthly average, provide suggestions of types of food if protein intake is too low and etc.
What would be the best approach in order to achieve the result wanted in my specific situation?
I am really unfamiliar and stepping into uncharted territory regarding on how I can accomplish this. I have read that Firebase Analytics generates different basic analytics regarding usage of the app, number crash-free users etc. But can it perform analytics on custom events? Can I create a custom event for Firebase analytics to keep track of a certain node in my database, and output analytics from that? And then of course, if yes, does it work with React Native-Expo or do I need to detach from Expo? In addition, I have read that Firebase Analytics can be combined with Google BigQuery. Would this be an alternative for my case?
Are there any other ways of performing such data analysis on my data stored in Firebase database? For example, export the data and use Python and SciKit Learn?
Whatever opinion or advice you may have, I would be grateful if you could share it!
You're not alone - many people building web apps on GCP have this question, and there is no single answer.
I'm not too familiar with Firebase Analytics, but can answer the question for Firestore and for your custom analytics (e.g. weekly avg protein consumption)
The first thing to point out is that Firestore, unlike other NoSQL databases, is storage only. You can't perform aggregations in real time like you can with MongoDB, so the calculations have to be done somewhere else.
The best practice recommended by GCP in this case is indeed to do a regular export of your Firestore data into BQ (BigQuery), and you can run analytical calculations there in the meantime. You could also, when a user inputs some data, send that to Pub/Sub and use one of GCP Dataflow's streaming templates to stream the data into BQ, and have everything in near real time.
Here's the issue with that however: while this solution gives you real time, and is very scalable, it gets expensive fast, and if you're more used to Python than SQL to run analytics it can be a steep learning curve. Here's an alternative I've used for smaller webapps, which scales well for <100k users and costs <$20 a month on GCP's current pricing:
Write a Python script that grabs the data from Firestore (using the Firestore Python SDK), generates the analytics you need on it, and writes the results back to a Firestore collection
Create an endpoint for that function using Flask or Django
Deploy that server application on Cloud Run, preventing unauthenticated invocations (you'll only be calling it from within GCP) - see this article, steps 1 and 2 only. You can also deploy the Python script(s) to GCP's Vertex AI or hosted Jupyter notebooks if you're more comfortable with that
Use Cloud Scheduler to call that function every x minutes - see these docs for authentication
Have your React app query the "analytics results" collection to get the results
My solution is a FlutterWeb based Dashboard that displays relevant data in (near) realtime like the Regular Flutter IOS/Android app and likewise some aggregated data.
The aggregated data is compiled using a few nodejs based triggers in the database that does any analytic lifting and hence is also near realtime. If you study pricing you will learn, that function invocations are pretty cheap unless of-course you happen to make a 'desphew' :)
I came up with a great solution.
I used the inbuilt firebase BigQuery plugin. Then I used Cube.js (deployed on GCP - cloud run on docker) on top of bigquery.
Cube.js just makes everything just so easy. You do need to make a manual query It tries to do optimize queries. On top of that, it uses caching so you won't get big bills on GCP. I think this is the best solution I was able to find. And this is infinitely scalable and totally real-time.
Also if you are a small startup then it is mostly free with GCP - free limits on cloud run and BigQuery.
Note:- This is not affiliated in any way with cubejs.
i have a realtime platform when users are staying on pages for a long duration, i found that after 5 minutes (more or less) the GA realtime stop show them so i created timer that each 4 minutes send pageview and this way all users remain "connected" to GA.
I wonder if it's a good approach or it's can may produce un-accurate data on the reports later.
Is anyone experienced that?
Your terminology seems a little off - users do not become "disconnected" from Google Analytics, the difference between realtime reports and data from the reporting api is that the former shows only a subset of ad hoc computed dimensions and metrics whereas the reporting api shows, after some processing latency, the full set of metrics and dimensions, including stuff that required more processing time like session- and user scoped data.
Other than that your approach is fine. There is a limit on the number of API calls you are allowed to make - the documentation has an example on how to calculate your calls to stay within the limits, and Google suggests to implement some sort of serverside caching if you do need a lot of realtime dashboards.
But this is not going to affect the data quality of reports in any way. Realtime API is a read-only API, the worst thing that can happen is that you exceed your quota and get blocked for the rest of the day. So there is no way this would create "un-accurate data on the reports later".
I'm looking for a good way to track CPU and memory usage for a variety of web applications and to be able to cross-reference this information with information on Google Analytics. For example, I'd like to be able to generate a report that shows the CPU and memory usage along with number of hits averaged over minute periods. One way I thought this could be solved is by adding custom page-level variables to Google Analytics for tracking CPU and memory usage. My questions:
For those familiar with GA reporting as it pertains to custom variables, is this possible?
Is there a better way to generate the kind of report I'm seeking? Perhaps even without using GA?
Thanks.
You can use the Google analytics API to push this data directly from the web page via javascript, or from the server using whatever language is relevant.
I've seen at least one large implementation use the API for UX A/B testing by way of event tracking, but there's no reason you couldn't store whatever related data you'd like.