Google Analytics App+Web Property: a brief walkthrough of the setup

This is part of a series on Google Analytics App+Web Property.

1. A brief walkthrough of the setup (this post)
2. Setting up a Configuration tag
3. Setting up an Event tag

On 31 July 2019, Google Analytics a new way to measure app and web usage. It uses a new property (data store) called, creatively enough, "App+Web Property". You can read the announcement at your own time.

By the way, I'm just going to put this out here first and foremost.

If you depend on Enhanced Ecommerce, in particular, if you use product-scoped Custom Dimensions and/or Metrics, then you might want to hold off using the App+Web property for now. As with Firebase measurement, the App+Web property does not have any support for product-scoped Custom Dimensions/Metrics (yet).

To setup a new App+Web property in Google Analytics, create a new Property like you would inside GA's interface.

1. Go to your Analytics admin.
2. Choose the Account where you want to setup your App+Web Property. It can be an existing Account.
3. Click the blue "Create Project" button.
   
   
   
   
4. Scroll down and choose "Apps and Web", then press the blue "Continue".
   
   
   
5. Enter the required details, including the Industry and Currency, then press the blue "Create".
   

When the set up is complete, you'll be directed to setup your Data Streams. A data stream is basically your data source, i.e. what you want to measure. It can be a website or an iOS app or an Android app.

I've setup a Web data stream already. When I did so, Google Analytics automatically assigned a new Measurement ID. It's like the old "UA-xxxx-xx" property ID, but now it's "G-xxxx" because Google.

Enhanced measurement is where you can allow Google Analytics to automatically measure certain user actions, like outbound clicks and downloads, without any additional tagging work. I assume the rules for these actions would be similar to what experienced web analytics specialists are familiar with, e.g. outbound clicks are where the user clicked a link where that link's domain name is not the same as the current page's domain name.

The next section provides instructions for setting up your tags. You can use plain ol' JavaScript or Google Tag Manager. It's quite self explanatory. I assume that third party tag management vendors like Tealium will build support for this soon, otherwise they'd lose out a huge chunk of customers.

Finally, there's something called Connected Tags. And that's all I know about it, because the Help page that is linked from "Learn more" describes the Web data stream only.

I haven't setup an app data stream yet, but I don't actually have any mobile app in my Firebase project.

Back in the property settings, there's Data Retention. This is where you tell Google how long you want them to keep your data (because of GDPR and other privacy regulations). The biggest change here from the old property types is that you get two retention durations only: 2 months and 14 months. This is shorter than the 14, 26 and 38 months that the old property types allow.

And then there's Default Reporting Identity. This is basically the new method for session unification, that analytics process for being able to identify your users uniquely.

If you really need to deduplicate your users, then you will want to make sure you're tracking a User ID. Otherwise, the App+Web property basically falls back to the old device ID, which is how the old property types are tracked. As far as I know, there is still no way to identify that an anonymous user (i.e. someone that you're tracking but without a User ID) who is browsing your website is the same anonymous user who is interacting with your mobile app.

Finally, there's Product Linking. For now, linking is provided for Google Ads and Firebase only. The Firebase link is a no-brainer, since the App+Web property is basically based on Firebase, so you have to link your property to a Firebase project.

And Google Ads is there because… I guess it was easier to roll that out than with DoubleClick Display & Video? Also, Firebase has native support for Google AdMob, and AdMob is now basically Google Ads, so maybe the backend integration was much easier there.

(And also because Google wants you to use Analytics to spend more money on Ads.)

When you're done with the setup, you can go back to the main Admin interface. The most obvious thing you'll notice is that there are no more Views. That also means that Filters are no longer used. If you want a filtered view, you will have to use a visualisation tool (like Looker, which Google bought in June 2019) and apply segments there.

So that's a quick walkthrough of the setup for Google Analytics new App+Web Property. There's lots more to learn about this new property, including how it actually sends data from the web.