Track and Improve Your App Performance With Firebase

Creating a native app become very popular with the widespread adoption of Smartphones, both the Android and iOS app stores are now crammed full of thousands of apps all competing for downloads. Apps are essentially bookmarks on steroids; they package together a small piece of the internet with the promise of better loading times, lower data costs and additional features using the access to data and hardware on your smartphone.

When it comes to digital marketing, the majority of marketers have focused primarily on the goal of merely acquiring downloads, ignoring retention or monitoring the uninstall rate. Which are equally imported factors when it comes to the success of an app.

Analysing your app

One of the key reasons for focusing only on downloads is due to the lack of analytics and marketing customisation. Many app developers rely on internal analytics solutions or 3rd party dashboard that does not play well with marketing analytics tools like Google analytics for apps.

While any marketing customisation needs to go through development and can slow down the process and leaves little room for experimenting and optimisation. To overcome this problem and help digital marketers promoting apps Google has introduced firebase.

What is firebase?

Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform developed by Firebase, Inc. in 2011, then acquired by Google in 2014. Firebase supports the web-based apps, iOS, OS X, and Android clients and allows apps control data, without having to think about how data would be stored, and synchronised across various examples of the application in real time. Firebase also eliminates the need to write server-side code or to deploy a complex server framework to get an app started with Firebase taking a lot of strain off your development team. To check out firebase for yourself, visit the site here

What does firebase offer marketers?

While firebase offers a host of helpful tools for this article, I'll focus only on what marketers can get out of it.

Google Analytics

Analyze user attributions and behaviour in a single dashboard to make informed decisions on your product roadmap. Gain real-time insights from reports, or export your raw event data to Google BigQuery for custom analysis.

Referral invites

Lets you enable your users to share all aspects of your app, from referral codes to favourite content, via email or SMS. This out-of-the-box solution works with Google Analytics for Firebase so that you know when a user has opened or installed an app via invite.

App Indexing

Re-engage users with their installed apps with Google Search integration. If users have your app and they search for related content, they could launch it directly from the results. If users don't have your app yet, an installation card shows up when they search for similar apps.

Adwords integration

Using Adwords is one of the most popular ways to push downloads and retain users by leveraging the reach of Google. Integrating Adwords with Firebase you can run ads across Search, display, and video as well as target specific user segments you define in Google Analytics for Firebase.

AdMob integration

Another one of Googles acquisitions, Admob is a native app advertising tool that allows you to earn money by displaying engaging ads to a global audience. AdMob and firebase make it easy to implement monetisation strategies and to maximise the revenue generated by each user. It can be tailored to your app, and its APIs are built to integrate rich ad formats with ease.

Building a solid base

Firebase creates a sandbox for marketers to take control of the app they're trying to push with better performance monitoring, marketing integration and monetisation. Are you using firebase? How is it working for you? Or do you prefer an alternative tool? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Tags: App Marketing, Blog, reporting, tracking