Filter out Your App in Your Website Analytics

Just like you might be interested in seeing how users interact with your website, you might want to know how they use your app. You can do so by taking a look at your website analytics.

Filtering App Users with User Agent

The easiest way to separate website users from app users in your analytics is by filtering the user agents. The user agent is a short string that the browser sends to websites. The user agent contains information about the browser, for example a Firefox browser could send something like this user agent:

User Agents Used by the App

The app uses a few different user agents:

• $regularUserAgent App-WebView ($operatingSystem) $version
  This is the usual user agent used by the internal browser of the app. Requests made with this user agent are initiated by the app user. This is the user agent you should look for in your analytics.
• App-HttpClient $version
  This is the user agent used for requests made by the app that are not directly initiated by the user. For example the app makes some requests with this to store parts of the website for offline use.

$version is the internal version of the app (e.g. 1.4.8+52) and $operatingSystem is the platform the app is being used on (e.g. ios or android).

$regularUserAgent is the user agent of a mobile browser that would be expected from the device, like Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148

You don't really need to worry about all of this, unless you want to do something special. Otherwise, just follow the next steps to filter by the user agent in your analytics.

Filtering By User Agent in Google Analytics

As an example, this is how to filter by user agent in Google Analytics:

• Click 'Administration' on the left
• Click 'Segments' on the right
• Click 'New Segment' at the top and enter a name for it, for example 'App'.
• Click 'Technology'
• Set the "Browser" field to "contains" & "App-WebView". If you wanted to create a segment for just iOS app users, set it to "contains" & "App-WebView (ios)"
• Click the save button at the top.
• Now you can analyze app users almost everywhere in Google Analytics, just click 'Add segment' on a page where you're interested in app user behaviour.

Filtering App Users with JavaScript

A more complicated but also more powerful way of detecting whether a user is visiting your website with a browser or the app is with the help of JavaScript. This is especially useful if your analytics software does not support filtering by user agents.

The easiest option is using getAppPlatform from the app helper script. The function returns null if the app is opened in the browser, otherwise the operating system the app is used on. However, as mentioned in its documentation, this only works if you let the app modify user agents.

An option that doesn't rely on user agents is executeWhenAppReady. The code inside it will only be executed if your website is being viewed inside the app.