Google Analytics: Web View vs App View

Question

I'm feeding the same exact data to a Google Analytics Web View Report and a Google Analytics App View Report. For some unknown reason though the Audience Overview numbers are much less for the App View report versus the Web View report. Data is coming from a website that can be opened on desktop, mobile or within an android app (because the android app just wraps the website). Does anyone know why that is?

This is the difference between the two report views according to Google is as follows. Reading through it seems to say both report views should display the same data. (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2649553?vid=1-635809178639378105-4104360362#WebVersusAppViews):

When you create a view, you can choose between an app view and a web view. These two view types give you a slightly different analysis experience, but are otherwise the same. For example, app views give you some reports that aren’t available in web views, like Crashes and Exceptions and the Google Play reports and web views give you Site Content reports.

Both types of views can display any data you send to your property, regardless of how you collect those hits. For example, you can see web data in your app views and app data in your web views.

If you’re only collecting and sending one type of data to Google, we recommend using views that will give you the best analysis experience. For example, if you only collect data from mobile apps, select app when you create a view and if you only collect data from websites, select web.

Answer 1

Both types of views can display any data you send to your property, regardless of how you collect those hits. For example, you can see web data in your app views and app data in your web views.

While it's true that a Web view can report on App data and vice versa, the thing you need to remember is that certain hits are considered App hits in Google Analytics and thus require app-specific fields to be valid.

For example, you can send a pageview hit without specifying the appName field, but you can't send a screenview hit without an appName. Hits that are considered App hits that don't contain an appName field are invalid and will not be processed.

When you're using the one of the mobile SDKs, this won't be an issue because they automatically send the appName (as well as other app fields) with each hit, but if you're using something like analytics.js (which usually just tracks web hits), you'll have to remember to do this yourself when creating the tracker. E.g.:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', {appName: 'MyAwesomeApp'});

If at any time you're unsure whether a particular hit is valid, you can use the Measurement Protocol Hit Builder to test and validate your hits before deploying your code to production.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure if this answers your question because it's not clear how you've implemented your tracking code, but I wanted to make sure you were aware of this common issue in case it's the culprit.