Firebase Analytics vs. Google Analytics: Which Is Better?

Google Analytics and Firebase Analytics are two mighty analytics platforms that businesses use to gain interesting insights on their website and app performance. Google Analytics is a web analytics tool built by Google. Concurrently, Google has launched Firebase Analytics, a mobile app analytics solution. Both systems are of great importance for the optimization of business processes, for monitoring the user behavior, for tracking the conversion, and for making data-driven decisions.

Analytics is essential for any business as it helps in measuring the efficiency of marketing efforts, understanding the customer preferences, and optimizing the strategies correspondingly. From the analysis of data obtained from different sources, companies can get an invaluable vision of user demographics, traffic sources, user engagement, and conversion rates. These data assist them in realizing the areas that need to be addressed, to create the marketing strategies that will work, and in the end, to fuel growth.

Firebase: What is it?

Before engaging into the analytics, it is important to acquire more Firebase knowledge first. Through Firebase, you can develop your ideal mobile application for your company in no time.

Since it is based on Google’s infrastructure, it is automatically adjusted to Google’s needs. In other words, Firebase provides the means to develop mobile applications that perform well on Google’s platform.

The app gets extra powers from Firebase. All of the databases, crash reports, communications, and analytics can be seen. You can quickly respond to problems if they arise because you can reach out to this information.

The same platform is used for all of this. You can use this platform to share your data and insights with others. It is a user friendly and mostly flexible platform that supports iOS and Android.

Crashlytics

Crashlytics is an important part of Firebase, which is a platform that offers various services. Crashlytics will be helping you to monitor and rank problems in your app. This function makes the operation of fixing stability problems faster and then your program will run again smoothly.

Crashlytics is a tool that helps to get a deeper understanding of the reasons for the error and the work mechanism. It becomes your guide in the process of resolving the crash and finding the exact cause of the crash. Less of the time will be spent on the improvements and bug fixes.

Plus, you will never experience an app crash due to the fact that there is the support of this function. Being watchful of any problems and ready to solve them will always be your profession. It will also help you make the app experience more enjoyable to your users.

What is Firebase Google Analytics?

The tracking of your apps performance is done with Firebase Analytics. It is a cost-free instrument which delivers all the details about visitors and the performance of your app. Firebase Analytics provides you with the free and unlimited analytics coverage to know how your app is performing.

Software development kid catches events in Google Analytics for Firebase that are set to watch. Events are the actions taken by the app’s users.

Having finished setting this up, you may then check how your audience performs them. Building an app that is more useful for your audience may be possible if you understand how they use it.

Throughout the use of Firebase Analytics, there are four main areas to monitor. These are the ones that matter both for your app’s performance as well as for helping you to enhance it.

• Events: They are initiated when users interact with your application. Events are focused on achievements or any specific actions that you want users to perform within your app – for example, opening the app or going to a particular page.
• User properties: This is a part of your users’ preferences, like eating style, color, or hobby.
• Conversions: The very instant when the user buys the product, downloads the app or performs the necessary action.
• Audience: Groups of users are divided according to events and characters.

You can get your app for your audience developed by following these four behaviors with Firebase. These indicators will be able to work in favor of the development of a superior app.

Google Analytics: What Is It?

The usage of Google Analytics enables you to trace the success of different campaigns and assess their effectiveness. These activities consist of content marketing, PPC advertising and SEO.

With Google Analytics you can monitor a number of data sets at the same time, which gives you a clearer view on the user experience. It will help you understand the consumer behavior and strategize to influence the same. With the knowledge of consumer behavior, you can customize your app to make those actions more comfortable.

The application of Google Analytics will help you to recognize your audience and to come up with more efficient campaigns.

Principal Distinctions

Next, let’s move to the general differences between the two

• Analytics-Specific Tool vs. Mobile Development Platform

The Firebase SDK is not only an analytics tool, but also a mobile development platform. As I have stated, the analytics reports are just one of the many Firebase platform features that work together with other Firebase technologies like Cloud Messaging, Cloud Functions, Remote Config, among others.

One of the Firebase’s strong points is that it provides the integration of its products in a very good way. Mostly, these SDKs of Google Analytics have been deprecated because of the added value they bring in.

• Send a notification to the user when the app analytics event is started.
• Customize an app experience with Remote Config according to the actions triggered (analytics events).
• Perform A/B testing with Remote Config and Optimize.

Predictions which is a Firebase machine learning tool that helps to analyze user behavior and develop audience groups (also based on analytics events) can be used to improve campaign targeting for alerts.

The use of Firebase event logging gets you a head start as it gives you access to many of the features mentioned above.

On the contrary, Google Analytics is one of the components of the Google Marketing Platform’s range of marketing solutions. Moreover, there are also some noticeable integrations there but they are mainly concentrated on advertising features like audience sharing. Integrity is the name of the game with Firebase, items on offer here.

Also, Firebase has more mobile ad networks than Google Analytics for mobile apps, which is a more traditional tool. The method is now more straightforward than it was previously because 60 ad networks have agreed to share campaign attribution data with you. Moreover, there are connectors with products of the Google Marketing Platform.

• Event Logging Volume Charges and Limits vs GA Hit Volume with no cap

However, there is NO LIMIT to the number of events that you can log in Firebase. While the number of distinct event names available is limited to 500, there are no charges for using Firebase exclusively for analytics.

It is to be mentioned that there are other Firebase products that are at your disposal at no cost. For any marketer who is trying to evaluate their mobile ad performance, Crashlytics and Dynamic Links are two of the best examples of these that can help in gaining more information on campaign attribution for unsupported ad networks.

A Firebase event has only a few parameters that can be attached to it and the reports you can view in the reports are limited as compared to the data collecting methods used by the Google Analytics SDK. Before going to Firebase, you must be aware of these differences.

• SLA?

No costs mean no assistance. If you are in need of SLA, then you are not lucky with Google Analytics for Firebase because it does not offer SLA. Most likely you will get all properties support if you have Google Analytics 360 and you don’t matter if you have web or app data.

However, in the case you need help with your Firebase setup, there are a couple of options that are available. The article “Firebase Blog” is a great source of information on this topic. Moreover, documentation and help center articles are rich in details, which have improved significantly.

• Dashboards and Data Models

Firebase, due to its event-based data model, is not the same as Google Analytics in terms of reporting. Firebase’s reports are user- or event-focused, thus they differ from the screenview- and session-oriented reports provided by Google Analytics. Firebase does not have the same concept as “session” that Google Analytics does. This is especially beneficial in some cases as Firebase was built with the knowledge that users interact with apps in a different way that they do websites.

Actually, I like Firebase more than Google Analytics model, which is web-focused. The more I research these differences and the consequences they have on the final reports, the more I like Firebase. Besides that, many apps center on things the user can do rather than “pages” or “screens”. And Firebase is just the thing for it, but some companies–publishers for instance–might find it more difficult to use or get used to. Moreover, the elimination of the session as a part of the Firebase data model can easily allow its management in BigQuery, for example. These critical differences should be considered before a tool is selected.

Furthermore, Firebase employs a different structure for event monitoring than Google Analytics does. Google Analytics allows you to send multiple hits such as screenviews and events. Event category, event action, and event label are the three essential components of a Google Analytics event.

In contrast, the schema of Firebase is as follows: event name plus up to 25 other key-value pairs that you can customize for the event to provide additional information. Each entity in Firebase is an event, including screenviews. In this way, it similar to a standard occurrence tracked by Google Analytics, there are more available parameters. The disadvantage is that only 50 custom event parameters (40 numeric, 10 text) can be registered per project; otherwise all this data won’t be shown in the UI by default. To see your data in your reports, you need to “register” it in the Firebase console. If you have checked the BigQuery export, the data is also included in that. Determine your reporting needs prior to the installation, keeping this in mind.

• Organizing Your Data

The process of tracking the versions of your software was done separately for iOS and Android before. I intended to bring to the fore the fact that the condition is no longer a reason for rejection. However, Firebase allows you to see data for each platform in a stream, but it is now consolidated into one data set since data is now at the project level rather than the app level. This means that you are looking at general metrics like number of users for every app in a Firebase project. This is also true for the both BigQuery export and the Firebase interface.

Let’s say you’re using Google Analytics for your iOS data and want to send it to a different property than your Android data. While we don’t recommend that you do it, you may also forward it to the same address where your website visitors reside. While the Google Analytics interface might have a bit more flexibility, the users of BigQuery might not find this a somewhat problem since Firebase will be used in future.

• Support for Platforms

Please go through the documentation here for detailed information about the platforms where Google Analytics for Firebase is now available and they are iOS, Android, C++, and Unity. However, not every platform is covered, but the most are.

Think of “over the top” apps (OTT), such as Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. To illustrate, most of these apps may be designed for iOS or Android, which is what Firebase is compatible with. However, I’m not sure about the chances of your luck even if you’re using Adobe AIR or Roku. For example, Roku is using its proprietary software and We know of no way to integrate Firebase there.

Instead of that, Google Analytics provides a measuring device that makes it more applicable than Firebase in some scenarios. Discuss the process with the development team before you make any commitments.

Note: Although several FireBase products made for use on the web (HTML/JS) aren’t among those features yet, analytics is not one of those features.

The Google Analytics and Firebase Analytics have both their pros and cons

Benefits of Using Google Analytics include:

– The platform is designed to have the most advanced and data-based marketing and global business operations features. This is one of the benefit that Google Analytics provides.

– Integration with the whole Google family of products automatically. A wonderful and safe place of choices and support.

Drawbacks of Using Google Analytics:

– Google Analytics is full of disadvantages, especially for the beginners because it has a high learning curve.

– The deepest level of personalization of the tracking within the mobile apps is not reached.

Benefits of Using Firebase Analytics include:

– The majority of the mobile analytics services are provided by the technology that is mostly free to use and which are designed to leverage the deep analysis features.

– Firebase products have no disruption.

– The developers will make the apps creation by the apps UI which is intuitive.

Drawbacks of Using Firebase Analytics: Nowadays, web analytics systems may take a lot of resources, and hence, they cannot be used. The absence of Facebook Insights in the printed course materials and during class discussions first semester was a challenge which led to the students’ inability to work effectively.

However, Firebase and Google Analytics are the most versatile analytics tools for business purposes. With their assistance, you will be capable to make a decision which model works better for the company by considering the business needs and the current website look.

Internet analytics companies are the sea of competition that floods out its rivals. In fact, Google Analytics is more than that. It shows the steps going through and the linkage to other Google products and the customizable settings.

For the companies that are developing mobile apps, Firebase Analytics is an option only for those who are without mobile data services. It has the same Access level features, including the Firebase tools for integration of the data into the project and a convenient, up-to-date development environment.

The analytics platform you settle on will be determined by how well you assess your business and how you are using the resources to attain the long-term goals. This will tell whether you use Firebase Analytics or Google Analytics.