Google Analytics Come to Cards for Mobile App Developers

Google’s Analytics suite has been growing steadily larger on the back end, adding new features and functions to help websites and app developers understand their products better. The biggest problem, though, has been information overload. When you can know everything about what visitors to your site are doing, how can you decide what information is useful and what is just noise?

For San Diego iPhone app developers, the most important metrics are often the ones that change suddenly. Sales down 4%? Not a huge deal. Unique visitors up 800%? Now that commands attention.

So it’s a relief for app developers that Google Analytics has started to summarize relevant data using AI (and a healthy dose of common sense), allowing users to see the “front page” news about their digital product’s activity without having to do a deep dive into the numbers.

According to product manager Babak Pahlavan, the design will be a game changer for both small and large tech companies. For large corporations, surfacing insights will aid analysts and help them scale. For smaller companies and startups, the insights can replace analysts altogether. After all, most seed-stage startups can’t afford dedicated data analysis staff. Getting the big picture via Google Analytics will be better than getting nothing at all.

The “secret sauce” with the insights features is that it adapts over time to determine what individual users find useful. For example, cards that get shared to other team members indicate importance, even if the user doesn’t interact with the thumbs up/down icon on each card to let the system know their feelings about it manually. This is great for high-pressure projects at mobile app development companies, since rating a card will feel like a roadblock or afterthought more than a helpful feature.

Google spokespeople have also stated to the iPhone app development community that the Analytics 360 suite as a whole will be moving away from analytics and more towards “insight”-based data in coming years.

Insights is currently only available on mobile, but a desktop version will become available shortly.