Getting Started with Flurry Analytics: In today's mobile app market you need to track your applications and analyze user data to give yourself the competitive edge. Flurry Analytics will do all that and more, and this book is the perfect developer's guide.

Flurry provides you with social analytics that is very useful in current market. High engagement in social media has raised the requirements for social media marketing in organizations. Social media marketing has now become the key component for marketing. Analytics helps to determine the best social place to publicize the application and the location from where the application targets a large number of customers.

There is a list of social media giants in the market on which you should start a campaign to achieve significant results. A few of the supported platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, Pinterest, and so on.

Flurry also provides you with monetary value conversions, which helps you to know which social site is more productive and which is less productive. These results will help you to customize your strategies accordingly and further strengthen your marketing in the required social media. Along with these updates, you can also focus on your weaknesses to overcome them and prove your business logic to strengthen the weak parts.

It's sometimes important to know how many new visitors your application has to track its growth rate. It's even more helpful when we know the growth rate of the application for the time period chosen by us. Let's say that the result is 100; this means that 100 unique users visit your application everyday. This number is directly associated with your rank in search engines.

Determining user behavior is one of the most important analytics as users are the ones for whom the application is developed. Flurry Analytics provides you with a better way to understand users' behavior while they using the application, which helps you to identify which sections or screens of your application are frequently accessed by the users. This reflects user engagement level and the flow they are traversing. You will also get data that tells you the type of device that your users are using the application on, along with the time they spend using your application. This information is useful to improve marketing plans.

We are now in the era of online media advertising, which can add success to your journey. The difficult part of the application process is reaching its customers. Many applications use ads as their main monetary source. Marketing helps you to reach and scale your user base. You will definitely capture a larger market than applications that are not marketed at all.

Ads performance is also dependent on an effective marketing campaign. Flurry provides you various advertising channels to track your ads performance. Advertising analytics help you to track all your possible advertising channels such as social ads, e-mails, and banner ads.

This feature of Flurry also helps you to track the AdWords campaign,by which a user can get a track of all the ads and the number of clicks on the ads, how many times the ads is been clicked by user and know which words or terms have better impact on users and which one is non-productive. In the AdWords marketing strategy, you can provide auto tagging to your advertising campaign, which helps you to analyze the impact of words and placement of ads on your landing page.

Flurry report data provides you with a better way of relaunching your marketing campaign with rich insight into your customers. You can pinpoint prospects with the major features and points of your products, thus allowing an effective target for your ads with proper synchronization of interests.

Flurry provides you with effective content sources to analyze the screen or section of the application that gets high-user traffic. This information can be used to determine which content is most valuable to users and to develop similar content to make the application preferable to the visitors' needs.

Flurry is useful in finding out information about the various sources of incoming traffic to your application to help determine your marketing strategy. You can also find popular links and keywords that are used by visitors while searching for specific products in search engines. This can be useful for maximizing the results of your e-mail marketing campaign for the success of your promotional efforts. Besides, this method of tracking users' activities on the application can be immensely useful to help you cater to the specific needs and requirements of your customers.

Using Analytics will help users to trace their activities and follow up, with their interests and visited channels on the application.

A session can be described as an end user's one-time use of the application. This tracking starts at the application launch and ends when the user forces a close or terminates the application. Flurry allows users to specify the session's start and stop times; however, it depends on the platform. Note that the session does not depend on the number of screens viewed in the application and the amount of time the application is used.

In case your users are using application in the offline mode or when they are offline, Flurry stores the data locally and pushes the data to Flurry the next time your application is open in the online mode. This is so that you do not lose any data.

Active Users is defined as the number of users having at least one session in a given period of time, that is, days, weeks, and months. In case a user launches your application more than once, it will still be counted only once. So, for any given time interval, you will have a unique count of the active users.

When a user first begins to use your application, Flurry refers to this user as a New User. Flurry provides a unique device ID to identify the new users, and these vary depending on the platform. Flurry recognizes new users when they initiate or start using the application. If the user has downloaded the application and has not launched it, it will not be counted. If a user deletes the application and reinstalls it on the same device or upgrades the device to a new version, it will not be re-counted. However, if a user downloads the application to a new device, it will be counted again as the new user count mainly depends on the device identifier.

This is defined as the length or duration of the total session. It's basically the time between the application's start event and end event, which may vary based on the platform used. In some cases, such as when the application crashes, we have the start time of the application event, but there is no end time recorded. Hence, the session length is unknown. Flurry does not include instances for the calculation of average and median session length. Session length can vary depending on the way you integrate the SDK in your application project and whether you follow the recommended practices.

The number of sessions with respect to unique users over a given period of time is called Frequency of Use. Flurry tracks the frequency of use of your application on an individual user basis, so that the aggregated metrics will display the real average value and their estimates.

Flurry has vast amounts of data. So to ease the reading of useful information, Flurry leverages its data to provide readers with useful benchmarks. You can track your application performance and results by comparing them against category benchmarks on the selected metrics.

This section allows you to access the number of the application's discrete sections or screens accessed by users. You can customize and decide the way you want to define page views. We will learn about Page Views in more detail in the upcoming chapters. You can track your screens and check which pages are accessed the most.

Flurry allows you to track the paths that users take while navigating through your application. You can track customized events and the user path. Flurry accumulates this data automatically, calculates the final figures, and provides valuable insights that can help you to check the pathways followed by the user while using your application.

You can track and access groups and users, and based on the date, you can even measure their retention rates. This includes new users of the application along with the page views.

This section crunches your data and provides you with data on the users filtered by cohort. User Retention depends on when the user has launched the application's log with that. It will measure whether they are still in the active user category of the application. This metric contains the retained user that had at least one session with your application in the past seven days from the current date.

This section helps you to track the number of users that are ported to the new version of the application. It also gives you details about the evolution in usage over a period of time as the user upgrades the software version.

This section details the gender and age of the users using your application. You can check which age group and users are your prominent customers. However, to read this in detail, you need to provide these details to Flurry using its SDK. In case you do not provide such information, Flurry will use its own algorithms to estimate these data sets.

It tracks the time of the day when your application was used or viewed according to its local time. Hourly reporting allows you to see the usage of your application on an hour-by-hour basis. It provides detailed and important control over the user activity.

This section helps you to get reports based on a user's geographical location and further break it down by geographical area in terms of average active users, total sessions, percentage of users retained, and the median session length.

This section helps you to fetch the number of new users, active users, sessions, and the number of retained users filtered by users, device language. You can get good insight into your application's users based on geographical locations.

You can read data regarding the device on which the application is used the most. Flurry provides you with the data count for the sessions opened by any specific device type. The data received by Flurry is provided by the manufacturer of the device, but sometimes it is not available in few of the devices. Not all the devices support data sharing on Flurry.

This section provides you with the tracked reports of the number of sessions that are opened by users using specific carriers. You can filter the graphs and charts based on the specific carrier's data to get a report on the carrier your application is used on the most. Note that not all sessions and carriers can provide such data.

Flurry generates data based on the number of sessions generated by the device's firmware. You access the application's usability based on specific firmware. Note that not all firmware provides such a feature for generating a session's data.

Flurry allows you to log custom events to track user-specific actions made in your application, for example, browsing products, playing the radio, social media sharing, and so on. These activities help you to understand how users interact with your application. The following points will help you to capture the information.

[Flurry logEvent:@"Article_Read"];

NSDictionary *artistParams = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"John Mayer", @"Artist", // Capture artist info@"Registered", @"User_Status", // Capture user statusnil];

[Flurry logEvent:@"Artist_Played" withParameters:artistParams];

NSDictionary *artistParams = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"John Mayer", @"Artist", // Capture artist info@"Registered", @"User_Status", // Capture user statusnil];

[Flurry logEvent:@"Artist_Played" withParameters:artistParams timed:YES];

// In a callback of the function which captures user navigation away from artist played.
[Flurry endTimedEvent:@"Artist_Played" withParameters:nil];
// You can pass in additional
//params or update existing ones here as well

Flurry allows you to create segments as well. The concept behind segmentation is to divide your users into groups to assess their overall collective behavior. Similarly, you can also get the group's users, which are filtered based on the set of actions they take or the pathways they followed to use the application. This method will help you to create corresponding events to track such users. In the preceding example we discussed, you can browse through the Flurry portal and create a segment or a group to access only the metrics of admin-based users who are playing songs from John Mayer's album. Segments prove to be a powerful tool to locate and rapidly understand the most engaged and valuable users of the application. You will learn segmentation in more detail in the upcoming chapters.