Google Analytics Android App Lacks Key Features

Google Analytics is an incredibly valuable, and free, Web service for a website and blog owners. When you log in, you can learn practically everything about your site visitors, except perhaps their mothers’ maiden names. The service provides an awesome amount of data to help you find a variety of information, including the keywords people use to find your site; which operating systems visitors use; which countries they live in; and even the browsers that load your pages the fastest.

Google just introduced a Google Analytics app for Android devices, and that’s great news for Webmasters and data junkies—to a degree.

The Android app is a stripped-down version of the full desktop Google Analytics service. It shows you Google Analytics’ new real-time data (currently in beta), so you can see active traffic on your site. Love that.

The Dashboard lets you view graphs of your site’s daily unique visitors and goal conversion rates, from one day to six months. Those are the default graphs, but you can also chart other metrics, such as e-commerce, goals, gage tracking (including bounce rate and page views) and more.

You can swipe to the right of your Android’s screen to view the Automatic Alerts page, where you’ll find stats on your site’s overall bounce rate, average visit duration, country visits, percentage of new visits and other data. There’s also a Custom alerts section.

This is all helpful, and the Google Analytics app for Android is a nice first effort. But I’d love to see more detailed information, such as keywords, operating systems, browsers used and the ability to compare periods, for starters. And the app doesn’t really make good use of Android tablets’ screen real estate.

I suspect Google will continue to pump up its Android analytics app, and it’s worth a look now. But if you’re hungry for more mobile Google Analytics reporting and visuals, I recommend Analytics HD for iPad ($7) or the free gAnalytics Android app, both of which offer more features and functionality than the current Google Analytics Android app.