You Ask, I Answer: Screen Resolution in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, uh Onerjan, I'm guessing that's how that's pronounced in Turkish. Onerjon asks, I would like to kindly ask a question about I'm tracking that one of the mobile native app Android versions in Google Analytics. Why is screen resolution shown as not set in your Google Analytics reports? Um okay, this one's pretty straightforward. It's because Google Analytics for the web is not suited for mobile apps.

Prior to the advent of App Plus Web or now Google Analytics 4, uh you needed to use Google's Firebase Analytics for mobile apps, which would contain data like that. Now with the advent of Google Analytics 4, uh all that information should be centralized within GA4. Uh your an ideal use case actually for using Google Analytics 4 for collecting this kind of information because it really is uh intended for people who've got uh web properties of some kind and also mobile apps of some kind, which uh increasingly more and more companies have, and being able to cross match between devices and see what kinds of devices people are using uh on your stuff. So let's take a quick look at this. Let's move over here.

So here's Google Analytics 4. And where you would set this up is first you would go into your admin, and you're going to go do your property settings, go away, uh I'm sorry, you're gonna go to your data streams, and you're gonna set up a data stream for each of the versions of mobile app you have. So you have an iOS uh data stream, uh if you have an iPhone app, you have an Android uh data stream, and then you're going to deploy uh your Google Analytics for tracking code inside each of those apps, either using an SDK or using tag manager. So, just as an example, uh let's do a test. Uh let's see.

Okay, let's register the app. That's gonna go through and create all the necessary pieces uh to uh build a Firebase database. By the way, Firebase is actually what Google Analytics 4 is uh underneath the hood, and then you will go through and implement this inside your mobile app. I'm gonna just cancel out of this because this is not uh something I need to have set up here. Once you've got your uh SDK tracker implemented inside of your mobile app, then it's time to head into Google Analytics 4 to see how is that data being displayed.

Uh so in Google Analytics 4, uh you're gonna go to the text section. One of the things people are having a lot of trouble with in in GA4 is that things are not necessarily obvious at first blush where everything is. This is the the technology section, and you can see it defaults to things like browsers. Scroll down, choose screen resolution, and then you can start getting obviously once your mobile app is all set, you can start getting a sense of what size screen people are looking at uh your stuff on the web. Now you may want to add some additional clarity as to what type of device uh it is that somebody's working with.

So let's go with uh device category. Actually, let's go just do device. I've got a bunch of not sets there. Why? Because this is Firebase Analytics and uh this is I'm using my web stream, so I'm gonna have a whole bunch of not sets here because it's not available.

However, I can for the web uh do things like operating system, and you can now start to see Windows, Macintosh, etc. Um, and go here, go to device brand, Apple, Google, etc. Um, so now starting to get a better sense of the different types of technologies. Remember, because this is Google Analytics for is a blend of both uh web and mobile. You're gonna get some data points for some devices and other data points for not, depending on whether you're looking at the data from uh an app data stream or a web data stream.

It's not as you saw, there's gonna be some things where there's gonna be gaps. Um things are simply not in there, and that's okay. Um as long as you understand what you're looking at is uh is the information you need to make choices about how you're going to track uh and ultimately uh what kinds of technology you deploy to make the best user experience. Uh at its core, this is Firebase Analytics, which means that it is well suited for mobile apps. So uh to solve that screen resolution not being shown in GA in your GA, switch to GA4 and get it deployed.

Uh if you've got any follow up questions on this stuff, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel on the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems?

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