Custom Variables added to Android Google Analytics

Recently Google announced that they have added support for Custom Variables to the Android version of their Google Analytics SDK.

Google Analytics for Mobile is a free set of code that plugs straight into your Android or iOS app and allows you to integrate with Google Analytics. Traditionally Google Analytics was used to track visits to non-mobile websites, but over the past few years Google has extended support across both mobile websites as well as apps. Given that the service is free it’s well worth checking out, as long as you’re happy about giving Google even more information about how people use the internet.

Custom Variables are a feature in Google Analytics that let you add additional information about your visitors when you record what pages they’ve visited or actions they’ve carried out. For example, you can tag whether they’ve paid for your service or not, allowing you to carry out more detailed segmentation to help deliver a better service to your users. Customer variables are a powerful feature, and a welcome addition to the Android SDK. Given Google’s vested interested in moving Android forward, we’ll have to wait and see how long it is before they add this to the iOS version of the SDK. Fingers crossed it’s not long.