Event Tracking with Analytics API v4 for Android

Ben WilcockJuly 18th, 2014Last Updated: July 18th, 2014

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As I’ve learned from developing my own mileage tracking app for cyclists and commuters, getting ratings and feedback from users can be challenging and time consuming. Event tracking can help by enabling you to develop a sense of how popular a particular feature is and how often it’s getting used by users of your app.

In Android, Google Play Services’ Analytics API v4 can be used to gather statistics on the user-events that occur within your app. In this post I’ll quickly show you how to use this API to accomplish simple event tracking.

Getting started

It’s important to say at this point that all of these statistics are totally anonymous. App developers who use analytics have no idea who is using each feature or generating each event, only that an event occurred.

Assuming you’ve set up Google Analytics v4 in your app as per my last post, tracking app events is fairly simple. The first thing you need is your analytics application Tracker (obtained in my case by calling getApplication() as per the previous post). Bear in mind that this method is only available in an object that extends Android’s Activity or Service class so you can’t use it everywhere without some messing about.

Once you have your application Tracker you should use an analytics EventBuilder to build() an event and use the send() method on the Tracker to send it to Google. Building an event is easy. You simply create a new HitBuilders.EventBuilder, setting a ‘category’ and an ‘action’ for your new event.

Sample code

The sample code below shows how I track the users manual use use of the ‘START’ button in Trip Computer. I have similar tracking events for STOP and also for the use of key settings and features like the activation of the app’s unique ‘battery-saver’ mode (which I understand is quite popular with cyclists).

// Get an Analytics Event tracker.
Tracker myTracker = ((TripComputerApplication) getApplication())
.getTracker(TripComputerApplication.TrackerName.APP_TRACKER);

// Build and Send the Analytics Event.
myTracker.send(new HitBuilders.EventBuilder()
.setCategory("Journey Events")
.setAction("Pressed Start Button")
.build());

Once the events are reported back to Google, the Analytics console will display them in the ‘Behaviour > Events > Overview’ panel and display a simple count how many times each event was raised within the tracking period. You can also further subdivide the actions by setting a ‘label’ or by providing a ‘value’ (but neither of these is actually required).