Flurry Analytics vs. Google Analytics: Learn the Difference

Every industry needs to keep a track of the data that they have. And, for that “Flurry Analytics” is available, it is a free tool that most app developers use to track user data.

It is so ubiquitous it can be found in 400,000 apps on 1.2 billion devices all over the world. On an average, each device is running about 7-10 apps with Flurry, which means the company can collect as much as 3 terabytes of data each day.

If you haven’t already guessed, the reason for the data collection is advertising. With smartphone apps being fairly inexpensive, advertising is the most lucrative means to achieve economic payback for giving away relatively free digital tools.

Flurry analytics can profit immensely by collecting information on how users are accessing those tools and selling each impression in real-time bidding. With Flurry, app developers can ‘sell’ or ‘auction’ your smartphone screens to advertisers.

It’s a burgeoning market with an expected growth to a third of all ad-spending for digital displays by 2018.

Benefits of Flurry Analytics?

● Flurry Analytics if applied to iOS apps allows the app owner to track usage of the app.

● Incorporating Flurry Analytics into an iOS app is extremely easy - register your app, download the SDK and incorporate the header and library into your project, and make standard method calls.

● Flurry's documentation is very well written and provides several examples of the use of the different method calls in code.

● Examples of analytics that can be tracked are number of times a user brought up a specific view; number of times a user tapped a button; time spent in a given view or in a specific activity within the app.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is geared toward small and medium-sized retail websites. The service has limitations that make it less suited to more complex websites and larger enterprises.

For example, the system collects data through a JavaScript page tag inserted in the code of pages the user wants to collect data on.

The page tag functions as a Web bug to gather visitor information. However, because it’s reliant on cookies, the system can’t collect data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports rather than analyzing all available data.

Furthermore, some security experts have raised concerns about privacy issues in Google Analytics. Through the Google Analytics Dashboard, users can collect information on people whose websites link to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Benefits of Google Analytics?

● Google Analytics does the obvious thing really well: tracks user behavior around our website. But more specifically, it allows us to do some very complicated attribution to behavior, traffic sources and even specific campaigns or devices.

Depending on the volume of traffic we are trying to analyze and the purpose, we can narrow things down extremely well and get a great story to use for data mining.

● The eCommerce tracking with Google Analytics is hands down the best. Specifically, its attribution to traffic sources and matching with user behavior that is the best.

You have yet to find another tool that can let you track traffic sources, split campaigns down to devices and track which inventory was purchased specifically from that campaign--especially if you are looking back at inventory purchased from a campaign (or in our case, people who signed up for Classes) you can tell all of that from Google Analytics.

● You can use Google Analytics to track specific user accounts within a product, and differentiate user behavior within the product based on account roles.

A lot of people don't know about this, but with the help of a developer you can leverage a ton of data including creating lookalike audiences that you can sync into AdWords and make your display campaigns highly targeted. Most people think this kind of feature is only available on Facebook ads.

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Conclusion

The main difference between Flurry and Google Analytics is that Flurry Analytics is used track mobile application sessions, whereas Google Analytics can be used to track website statistics as well as mobile application sessions.

Hence, while they both focus on analytics they actually cater to different segments.

Flurry focuses primarily on mobile application sessions, whereas Google Analytics primarily focused on websites, and is now catering to mobile applications.

Furthermore Google Analytics has a limit of 2 million hits processed per month, whereas Flurry has no such limitations.