使用适用于iOS v2的Google AnalyticsSDK跟踪屏幕层次结构

Question

I'm in the process of adding Google Analytics SDK for iOS v2.0 to an app.

I've used v1 of the SDK before and I'm fairly sure I used to be able to send a single tracking string like this:

[[GANTracker sharedTracker] trackPageview:@"/Home Screen/Contents Screen/Chapter X/Section X/Page X"
                               withError:&error]

or

[[GANTracker sharedTracker] trackPageview:@"/Home Screen/Credits Screen"
                               withError:&error]

When this tracked page was submitted to Google, I could then see a nice break down of the hierarchy of the app in Analytics like this:

• Home Screen
  • Contents Screen
    • Chapter 1
      • Section 1
        • Page 1
        • Page 2
        • etc
      • Section 2
      • etc
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • etc
  • Credits Screen

Now the problem is this, when we send this same formatted string to Google using the iOS SDK v2 like so:

[tracker sendView:@"/Home Screen/Contents Screen/Chapter X/Section X/Page X"];

we just get a single Screen view in Analytics with an extremely long name and not split up at all:

• /Home Screen/Contents Screen/Chapter X/Section X/Page X

How do we go about splitting our screens out into a hierarchical view as we did in v1?

The reason for using the sendView method was so that we could tap into data such as how long users spent in each chapter or section or page and so give us a good idea of the most used areas of the app.

We could do this with Events but I'm sure the Screen tracking should be able to do what we want?

It may just be that I'm approaching this the wrong way. Any light on this would be greatly received!

Many thanks, Justyn

Answer 1

The way Google want you to track this kind of data is via Custom Dimensions.

So for the above example, you would need to create new custom dimensions for Book, Chapter and Page Number within Google Analytics. Here is a good article explaining how to set that up: Configure Google Analytics Custom Dimensions

Once set up on the server, you can then reference them from the client by their index and just pass in the value you want to set. You would set the values of the custom dimensions before calling [tracker sendView:@"Screen Name"] . Something like this:

// Get the tracker object.
id tracker = [[GAI sharedInstance].defaultTracker;

// Set the dimension value for index 1. (Book Dimension)
[tracker setCustom:1 dimension:@"Book Name"];

// Set the dimension value for index 2. (Chapter Dimension)
[tracker setCustom:2 dimension:@"Chapter Name"];

// Set the dimension value for index 3. (Page Number)
[tracker setCustom:3 dimension:@"Page Number"];

// Dimension value is associated and sent with this hit.
[tracker sendView:@"Book Reader"];

You can have up to 20 custom dimensions set which should be plenty.

There is a good example for the iOS SDK v2.0 on Google's docs

Please be aware that Google have recently released Google Analytics SDK for iOS v3.0 Beta which you might want to use instead. Some of the method names have changed.