Today we’re announcing a new and improved version of the Google Analytics SDK for Android. This release is jam-packed with lots of good fixes, improved methods, and most importantly, better campaign tracking! Read on for all the juicy details.
General Campaign Tracking
This new feature is probably the most exciting one for this release. The SDK now supports the ability to set campaign referral information at any time, instead of at installation time. This gives advertisers the ability to now track ads which lead people to user their app. To learn more about this feature and how to use it, check out the new campaign tracking section in our documentation.
Anonymizing Ip Addresses
To provide more privacy to your users, we added a new setAnonymizeIp method in the GoogleAnalyticsTracker class. This removes the last octet of the IP address prior to storage and makes the tracking more anonymous
Configuring The Sample Rate
If you are getting a large volume of traffic, you can set the tracking sample rate to only send a portion of data to Google Analytics. Once configured, the tracker will decide based on visitor ID whether to send hits.
Deprecations
We are deprecating the start and stop methods in favor of the startNewSession and stopSession. The existing methods will continue to be in the library, so your applications will still work when you upgrade, but we highlight recommend you move to these new methods.
Bug Fixes
In this release we were also able to fix three bugs:
1. We’ve fixed a few issues with how the SDK accesses SQLite. As a result you will see less warnings and the SDK now uses less memory!
2. We’ve fixed a bug that might occur if you’re using custom variables.
3. The tracker no longer uses the application context passed to the SDK when starting up. This should avoid memory leaks caused by holding Activity Contexts beyond the life of the Activity.
We hope you’ll find this latest version of the Google Analytics SDK for Android to be a big improvement over previous versions. We also hope you realize we’re committed to making Google Analytics a first class provider of mobile app analytics as well as web analytics.
There’s plenty more coming for the Google Analytics SDKs for both Android and iOS. Stay tuned.
General Campaign Tracking
This new feature is probably the most exciting one for this release. The SDK now supports the ability to set campaign referral information at any time, instead of at installation time. This gives advertisers the ability to now track ads which lead people to user their app. To learn more about this feature and how to use it, check out the new campaign tracking section in our documentation.
Anonymizing Ip Addresses
To provide more privacy to your users, we added a new setAnonymizeIp method in the GoogleAnalyticsTracker class. This removes the last octet of the IP address prior to storage and makes the tracking more anonymous
Configuring The Sample Rate
If you are getting a large volume of traffic, you can set the tracking sample rate to only send a portion of data to Google Analytics. Once configured, the tracker will decide based on visitor ID whether to send hits.
Deprecations
We are deprecating the start and stop methods in favor of the startNewSession and stopSession. The existing methods will continue to be in the library, so your applications will still work when you upgrade, but we highlight recommend you move to these new methods.
Bug Fixes
In this release we were also able to fix three bugs:
1. We’ve fixed a few issues with how the SDK accesses SQLite. As a result you will see less warnings and the SDK now uses less memory!
2. We’ve fixed a bug that might occur if you’re using custom variables.
3. The tracker no longer uses the application context passed to the SDK when starting up. This should avoid memory leaks caused by holding Activity Contexts beyond the life of the Activity.
We hope you’ll find this latest version of the Google Analytics SDK for Android to be a big improvement over previous versions. We also hope you realize we’re committed to making Google Analytics a first class provider of mobile app analytics as well as web analytics.
There’s plenty more coming for the Google Analytics SDKs for both Android and iOS. Stay tuned.
