By linking your app data from the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides comprehensive analytics and advanced features to measure engagement across both your app and website, all in one place. Its AI-powered insights also help you optimize your campaign performance.
In this article, you’ll learn more about the key GA4 benefits and features that drive App campaign performance.
Google Analytics 4 benefits for App campaigns
- Privacy-centric: Access different privacy settings and controls that give you flexibility in meeting user privacy requirements and regulations.
- Improved App campaign performance: Enable performance benefits like faster App campaign ramp-up, advanced bidding strategies, and audience management tools to help you reach users that meet your business objectives.
- Comprehensive measurement across channels and platforms: Get a holistic view of performance, across your website and iOS or Android app. If you’re already using a Google-approved App Attribution Partner, use GA4 as a complementary measurement solution.
Key Google Analytics 4 features for App campaigns
| Why GA4? | Benefits | Features | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Privacy-centric | Meet user privacy requirements and regulations | Data controls | Provides transparency, choice, and control over how data collected through GA4 is managed. |
| Improved App campaign performance |
Optimize campaign performance |
Cross-device measurement | Enables the use of additional consented, signed-in, aggregate data to automatically optimize App campaign performance. |
| Unlock advanced bidding strategies | Target ROAS (tROAS) bidding | Enables you to optimize your campaigns for key events that are different values for your business. | |
| Enables ad-funded advertisers to optimize campaigns for users who are likely to deliver revenue by interacting with ads served within their app. | |||
| Build audiences to reach the right users | Predictive audiences | Use Google AI to help you create audiences with at least one condition based on a predictive metric like key event probability, churn probability, or revenue prediction. | |
| Suggested audiences: Unnotified users |
Enables marketers to engage existing app users who have not been reached with push notifications. Available for Android App campaigns only. |
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| Suggested audiences: Dynamic lookback | Ability to reach app users based on their activity in a specific time period, for example, 7-day lapsed users. | ||
| Audience exclusion | Enables marketers to avoid targeting specific user groups, for example, users who have uninstalled your app or who have already installed an app within your portfolio of apps. | ||
| Re-use your app and web GA4 audiences across both your web and app campaigns | If you’ve created an audience in Google Analytics 4 across both your web and app users, we’ll automatically target only the relevant app users for your App campaigns for engagement. | ||
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Comprehensive measurement across channels and platforms |
Measure performance across web and app | Connect web and app streams in a single GA4 property | Enables a unified view of cross-platform user journeys using an event-based data collection model. You can add an iOS and Android data stream to any GA4 property to view app usage, performance, and return on ad spend against that of your website. |
| Drive better iOS performance and privacy-centric measurement | SKAdNetwork-based cross-channel app install reporting and attribution | Integrates observed SKAdNetwork postbacks to improve existing GA4 cross-channel install reporting and attribution. | |
| SKAdNetwork key event value schema setting | Access tools to set up your SKAdNetwork key event value schema to assign values to the in-app events that matter to your business, so you can better measure and optimize for them. Key event value schemas set up through GA4 can be exported with the Admin API. | ||
| On-device key event measurement | Privacy-centric measurement solution that allows you to use your consented first-party data to increase the observable key events available for campaign optimization. This works without any user-identifying information ever leaving a user’s device or being disclosed to external parties, including Google. | ||
| Comprehensive web-to-app key event measurement | Helps you integrate with a privacy-centric URL parameter, known as gbraid, to provide full web-to-app iOS key event coverage and power more comprehensive measurement and bidding optimization. |
Access Google Analytics 4 features
To enable all of the above GA4 features and performance benefits, you will need to:
- Integrate your app with the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK.
- Begin collecting events.
- Enable Google Analytics 4 for your project.
- Mark events as key events.
- Link your Google Ads and GA4 accounts.
- Import GA4 key events into Google Ads.
- Bid on GA4 key events.
Explore this guide to get more details on the steps you need to take to get started.