Currently when I access the Google Play store from a browser (https://play.google.com/store/apps/top?hl=en), I can only see:
Top Apps, Top Selling Apps, Top Grossing Apps, Top Games, Top Selling Games, Top Grossing games.
I am trying to scrape data to get the top selling/grossing apps on the Play Store for EVERY GENRE of apps (i.e. Education, Health, Social, etc). I would've thought this data would be available on the browser Play Store because apparently it is available on the Android App Play Store. When selecting a category on the web browser Play Store, there are no options to view the top selling/grossing apps.
There are many (commercial) API's that give information on top Google Play apps for each genre so surely this information is able to be scraped from somewhere? For example Applyzer, https://www.applyzer.com/?mmenu=worldcharts shows top apps for every genre on the Play store. I would web scrape from here but I want to do this directly from Google.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
SOLVED: see my own post below
SOLVED: I just managed to solve this myself. Turns out the Google Play Store does display this information, but you must manually enter the URL yourself. For example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/BUSINESS/collection/topselling_paid BUSINESS can be replaced by any category, and topselling_paid can be interchanged with topselling_free or topgrossing
Related
My company uses LinkedIn Share API to publish messages on LinkedIn profiles sharing content from WordPress posts.
One thing that is driving me crazy right now is that when I share the same URL and content to two different profiles, the preview cards that result from that are different. On one profile I got a full image preview like the following:
But the same content (same API params to share) produce this different preview:
I'm trying everything I can to get a consistent behavior. I'd like to have all previews being full size previews like the one shown in the first screenshot. API documentation doesn't help much here.
Any help or clue would be appreciated.
It's a random behaviour from LinkedIn. From time to time a significant percentage of accounts reached via the post API return a small thumbnail as well as a different content link (if you use redirected links like bit.ly). It happened for a week in February and since last Friday, including a number of Internal Server Errors. It looks like LinkedIn runs different code on different parts of its infrastructure.
So there is nothing you can do programmatically on your end I'm afraid.
I'm currently comparing 'New Users' on GA to 'Downloads' on the Play store and I'm seeing about a 30% difference - I appreciate dashboards like GA are not a perfect science, however, this is obviously way outside any reasonable tolerance. I've also cross-validated with other analytics tools such as Facebook and this appears to be in line with what Google play sites. What could be causing GA to be so massively out?
Thanks in advance!
There are many possible reasons:
Many devices have more than one user (eg people who have a home and work account on the device)
People share apps using methods other than Play downloads (P2P sharing, other app stores, etc)
People reset their id on the device to prevent ad tracking etc. Looks like a new user, but no new download
These are just a few possibilities.
I'd like to track play counts of songs for popular artists. This doesn't appear to be available through the Spotify API, but it's visible either through the desktop app or the web app here. Is there a simple way to scrape this data?
No, this data isn't exposed in the public API. This feature was added as an enhancement request in the Web API's public issue tracker less than a month ago. Feel free to add support for it by writing about your use case, or by simply putting a +1.
I'd like to track screenviews in my website, is this possible or are screenviews just meant to be used on apps? If so, how can I do it? Let me give you an overview of my situation.
I am restructuring a web site. Some of the pages that used to live under differents urls are now living under the same, with a hash id to denote the particular area of the page the user is in. So, for example, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA, http://www.example.com/problems/topicA and http://www.example.com/equations/topicA, are now in http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#content, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#problems and http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#equations.
Now, I'd like to keep track of users visiting these areas. My initial idea was send a page view when the url is loaded and send a screenview each time the user clicks on the button to change the area of the page (i.e. #content, #problemas or #equations). For doing so, I used something like ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});. As I couldn't see the screenviews in reports, I played a bit, setting the app name, the app id, the installer id etc before sending the screenview, for example:
ga('set', {
'appName': 'myAppName',
'appId': 'myAppId',
'appVersion': '1.0',
'appInstallerId': 'myInstallerId'
});
ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});
So I can't see the screenviews in the real time reports (though I can see the page views). I can't see them in the regular reports either. I decided to create custom reports with dimensions Page and Screen name. There, I see sometimes screenviews are tracked (I think it happens when I set the appid etc before sending it, but not sure about this point).
Are screen views adecuate for tracking this behaviour or should I use just events, as I'm not on an app at all (just a responsive website)?
By the way, I am using Drupal 7 but that shouldn't make a difference.
Thanks in advance for your time and I hope I am making my question clear enhough.
Technically speaking its probably possible to send both pageviews and screenviews to the same Google Analytics web property.
The problem you will have is seeing the information. The way the Website is set up its either application or web account, Screenviews or pageviews. The reports are different, and you cant swap between them.
So you could send screenviews to a web site web property but you would never be able to analyse it on the website you would have to use the API to rip the data out. That and you would be analyzing apples and cars. Screenviews and pageviews are different they cant be analysed together.
Because of this web property's should be kept separate one for application (screenviews) one for web sites (pageviwes).
You should in my opinion do this using events.
+1 for an interesting question that made me think :)
Is possible, actually in BigQuery you can reach both data and see how this interact, both will have the same schema and will be stored in the same dataset(it is linked the raw data view). Even in the same sessions, you can send pageview and screen views having funny results.
But there is some important consideration when you implement this.
You need 2 different views, one Web View and One App View. Both views will let you access to different information and is not possible on the web interface of Google Analytics to access to both info at the same time. Not sure if with the API you can access to both info at the same time, I think that is totally possible
In the App View, you will able to see only information of screenview, events and ecommerce.Is also mandatory the App Name parameter on this hits.
In the Web View, you will able to see only the pageview reports,events and events.
The ecommerce info and events will be reachable from both views, there is no way to know if this comes from a web or an app ( technically). So is tricky to read this kind of reports in that case.
Sessions can experiment stranges behaviors. As example gosht sessions coming from the screen view with no page view, sending events.
Taking this into consideration, as Dalmto says, the best to you is use events or sent virtualpage view.
Mixing pageview and screen view is not recommended by Google but is totally possible.This kind of implementations is only useful when you have an embed web-app and a webpage on the same server and you want to have it all on the same dataset, if this case apply, is highly recommended to add a custom dimension to filter the app info on the web view and the web info on the app view and keep both worlds separated.
As the last point, your code is working, I can see the screen info on the desktop property. But not be able to see it in the web view.
I'm trying to reproduce some cool things of the Spotify opengraph integration but there is one thing I understand how they do :
when you go on your spotify app profile (mine : https://www.facebook.com/antonio.mendespinto/music) you can see that the musician links points to the facebook page and not the spotify web pages (http://open.spotify.com/artist/7CajNmpbOovFoOoasH2HaY). How do they do that.
Also, is it this that lets Facebook to do behind the scenes the nice box in the artists page https://www.facebook.com/ogp/464730384564/ on the top showing friends interactions with the artist and spotify friend interactions.
Everything seems to point to the facebook pages instead of the spotify pages. How do they do that?
Yes, Spotify uses Facebook Open Graph Music, a predefined set of objects and properties for music.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/music/
Then I guess the Spotify account is marked in a way that makes this available. It is possible that this is what makes Facebook show the nice box in the artist page.
I work at Spotify, but I am not really sure about all the details of this. I know other music streaming services also use this, but I am not sure if it still requires a special account. It did in the beginning. Spotify was one of the first users of Open Graph.
The destination of the links inside Open Graph artifacts are left to the discretion of the developer. Say you're writing an app that lets people share restaurant tips. When you post a "Tip" object to OG, you naturally would include a link to the restaurant. As the app developer, you could choose the restaurant's web page, its Yelp page, its OpenTable page, your own representation of the restaurant page on your web site or any other web page on the internets. :-)
Being faced with a similar situation, I chose to use my own application's web page representing a restaurant. I experimented with using the restaurant's Facebook page (which I had to look up using the Graph API for search) as well as a third-party provider of restaurant information, e.g. Yelp. Using the Facebook page, my app felt more tightly integrated with Facebook, but I didn't get the luxury of having my own Facebook app metadata. Because I chose to link to my own restaurant page, I was able to set and retrieve whatever metadata I wanted, which really came in handy later when I started configuring aggregations.
I don't know how Spotify data surfaces on artist pages nor do I know how they managed to shoehorn song AND album objects into each listen post on OpenGraph, e.g.: "Chris listened to Torn and Frayed on Exile on Main Street." I could only ever get ONE object linked to an action, e.g. "Chris left a tip on California Pizza Kitchen." My assumption is that since they were one of the (if not the only) Facebook Open Graph launch partner, they probably had some inside help.