Live Stats

Google Analytics data

As I mentioned earlier, here's the latest google analytics data over the period that I've been logging.

Popularity by page.

The above image shows a figure for the total number of hits tracked for each page or screen in the app that a user can look at. Although there are only a number of activities or screens that are re-used in the app implementation, when ever the data for a different game type it is tracked as if it were a separate page on a website.

Mmmmmm... pie.

The above chart shows the game results look up relative to each other game type. Lotto is a clear dominator.

Stats over time per page.

These graphs plot the number of page tracks over time which is interesting, as a clear trend of when people actually use the app can be seen. If you note that the graph spike on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the Irish lotto. EuroMillions turns up on Fridays, however interestingly people checked Euro Millions results more on Saturday. The number of people visiting each page actually reflects pretty I think on how many people play each game from my experience selling lotto in my previous retail job.

Live stats

The last image is the live tracking section of google analytics. This is the most I've witnessed people using my app at a single point in time, although it's entirely possible that there have been more people using it at once and I just hadn't seen it. It's interesting watching as individual clicks on pages scroll across the screen in real time. Obviously it's better to see in video format than a still image, as the interface is animated.

Measurement systems

Over the last couple of days I've made a number of changes to the Driver Tools app. A lot of them were purely aesthetic, however the biggest change is the addition of a static settings class for storing information that is saved across sessions about the user's preference for either the metric or imperial system. As a result you can now view the stats information in either Miles and Miles per imperial gallon, or you can view it as kilometres and litres/100k.

The next thing that I need to do is include a menu for changing this setting and finish of the mechanic for only ever allowing a configuration dialogue to appear once upon first starting up the app. Other areas that can be improved would be to graph or visualise more information on the stats page, and to clean up the fuel transaction log page. I also need to clean up the car picker menu and possibly allow a user to add a picture to their car.

Once those changes have been made and I finalise all of the pages or data that I'm going to track with analytics the app should be ready for release on the Android market.

Speaking of google analytics, I've built up a full weeks worth of stats and they're interesting. I'll write a full post on this at a later point with pretty pictures and graphs and stuff.

Lotto Checker stats, now with analytics results!

It's been an interesting few days with the inclusion of google analytics, however downloads is quickly approaching the 5000 marks, and with the inclusion of google analytics I now have a better idea of how people are using the app. The first day I updated my app to include analytics I saw that on Saturday 746 people started my app, with 452 on Sunday. I updated the app on Friday, so I would imagine that a lot of these hits were due to people checking out the app to see if there was anything new. I will have to observe the numbers over a longer sample period to gauge the weekly trends. It will be interesting to see next weekend and on Wednesday if the trend matches this Weekends usage, as the Irish lotto games are on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

I'm also looking at the pages that people are viewing. There were a total number of 1872 pages tracked on Saturday night, 778 of which were Lotto. An interesting observation is that my app has had more page view tracks than this blog has had in the number of months I've been posting to it. There were quire a large number of Lotto checks on Sunday as well at 498, probably because people might have resorted to checking numbers the day after the draw.

One of the most interesting parts of google analytics is the way in which you can present the data. The live data tracker is also quite impressive, where you can witness page events being tracked in real time on a sliding graph. It also gives you insight in to how many users were on the app at any given time.

I'm going to get back developing my Driver Tools app this week and try and get some debugging done on the graph information. There are a number of other design features I would like to review also, however I can't think of them at the minute. I'll have an update later on in the week.

Lotto Checker 1.5

I updated the lotto checker app today with the session class that I wrote for the Driver Tools app. It contained all the functionality for tracking the activities a user will start in my app. In the lotto checker app, I track when the app is started up, and when ever a user displays the results for a game, that is also tracked. This will help me in deciding on what an how I use analytics in the Driver tools app, and it will give me a better idea of how used my lotto checker app is, so that I can improve different aspects of it in the future.

The total number of downloads for my Lotto Checker app now stands at 4,373 total installs (users) and 3,028 net installs (devices).

Google analytics update and saving sessions. Back in the game!

These past two weeks that I've had off for Christmas have been the longest period of time that I've taken off work in the last 3 years. I didn't expect to enjoy doing literally nothing productive over the course of my time off, however it happened. I think I needed the break. I've had enough of doing nothing for now anyway, and I suppose my time away from development gave me a bit of time to think about the approach I was taking for this app.

I opened up a Claude Debussy playlist on iTunes and started coding again tonight and managed to get Google analytics working. I'm currently only tracking three pages, however once I decide on what exactly it is that I'm going to track, then I'll include more. Other changes include the addition of an abstract class for handling all of the session data. This is also used for tracking various pages. It's an abstract class with a number of variables which are encapsulated to make everything nice and tidy. The only other variable it stores for the minute about the session is the ID of the selected car. It also saves this to the app's settings upon creating and destroying the app.

I made a few slight changes to the database adapter, to include a function for getting all of the transactions for the currently selected car in the session. So that now it only shows all of the transactions and stats for the selectd car. I may include a feature to show the spending across all cars at a later point.

Also, happy new year!