Android google analytics unique visitors

Question

I'm using Google Analytics SDK to collect statistics from my Android application. I want to be able to create a chart showing which language are users using.

To do so, I'm creating a visitor scope custom variable like this:

tracker.setCustomVar(1, "Language", language, 1);

The problem is I'm afraid that this approach isn't correct. I want to create a pie chart in Home -> Dashboards in google analytics, so I choose Add widget -> Pie -> "Unique Visitors" grouped by "Custom Variable (Value 01)".

Pie chart created like above shows invalid results. The goal is to get last variable value for each user and then display the number of users for each value. What it actually does is it takes all variable values and for each value it shows the number of visitors that ever had this value.

This means that if someone switched between languages, he will appear in both languages in the chart. Not the one that he is actually using.

So my question is - how to do it correctly? Should I change something in the code, perhaps use something other than variables? Or maybe it's possible to fix it just via google analytics website?

Thanks

Answer 1

There's no way to achieve what you want.

If the same visitor changes it's language it will have that language from now on, but he'll still show up as the old value on the days before. It happens because in GA history is never rewritten, data is processed by session(visit) and the data that goes in is static and can't be removed or changed. If the visitor was reported only on the new value it means that the visits before would have been changed. This is just against the design.

You may find other ways to remedy that and understand better people that are changing their languages on the application. You may fire an event when Language is changed for example and understand the impact of new languages being added to your application.

There's only one place in GA where you have a better view on multiple sessions. and that's the multichannel funnels, but they only work for Goal Completions reporting on different Traffic Sources. The reports you see there are processed by a separate system inside Google Analytics and can break some of the rules about how Google Analytics processes and stores data. Because of that they can tie the visit back together and understand the progression of changes that happend on the traffic sources dimension and lead to a goal completion.

I'm sorry it doesn't solve your problem. But unfortunately it's just not possible by design.