Google Analytics for mobile apps: limitations, challenges, and alternatives

When Google Analytics upgraded to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), it enabled its users to measure web traffic, advertising metrics, and (for the first time) mobile app analytics.

Unfortunately, many users have since reported being disappointed with GA4’s capabilities—not least regarding mobile analytics. 

Keep reading to find out 

• How GA4 helps you understand mobile app analytics

• Where GA4 falls short when it comes to mobile app analysis

• The top GA4 alternatives for mobile app analytics

How Google Analytics helps you understand mobile app analytics

GA4 gives you web and mobile analytics data in one platform. 

GA4 represents a major switch from a sessions-based model to an events-based model. In theory, you can record all user interactions as events, which could include any action a user takes on your website or app, such as creating an account, logging in, or clicking ‘follow’.

You can use GA4 to track how users experience and engage with your product or mobile app rather than simply focusing on vanity metrics such as pages viewed and bounce rates. 

So far, so good, right? Let’s not be too hasty. 

Let’s examine GA4’s key features through the lens of mobile analytics to see how they hold up.

Here’s the takeaway: Google Analytics still falls short when it comes to mobile analytics. It’s not as robust or user-friendly as other tools on the market, and still lacks important mobile-specific features. 

What we’re hearing from GA4 users again and again is that they want to use it for analytics, but they simply can’t instrument their apps fast enough to close the gaps in their data. As a result, there are unavoidable blind spots, and data teams find themselves unable to answer questions. Even in major companies, weeks or months can go by before missing tags can be added. By the time the data arrives, the team that asked the question has already forgotten why they were asking.

Let’s now take a look at some of GA4’s specific limitations around mobile app analytics.

4 limitations of Google Analytics for mobile app analytics

Here are 4 ways Google Analytics falls for short mobile app analytics.

1. Difficult user interface

GA4’s updated interface is designed to work across different devices and screen sizes, but many users have reported the simplified layout has come at the expense of resizable columns. As such, it’s difficult to navigate and locate the data, new features, and different functionality.

2. Basic KPIs only

Despite the upgrade, GA4 metrics are still relatively basic compared to other analytics tools. 

We can categorize these metrics simply within Acquisition, Engagement, and Monetization. Here’s a quick snapshot of the important metrics GA4 offers that you’ll need to be aware of.

The metrics above are geared towards a general view of user behavior: How long roughly do your users spend on your mobile app? How many events did you have this week? 

The problem is that to really understand how you’re doing, you need more granular metrics that go deep into user engagement and the customer journey. Only then can you exponentially improve your user experience.

3. Manual capture means high effort, costs, and unavoidable data gaps 

While GA4 does offer automatic capture for mobile through Google Tag, you still need to do manual tracking to track basic click events and add additional data at the event level. 

That means teams will need to build an implementation plan for tagging, and then constantly revise their tags as things change over time.

For mobile app analytics, manual tracking becomes increasingly complicated because of the different mobile development frameworks for Android on Google Play and iOS on Apple’s app store. 

Multiple tagging schemas will not only need to be created and maintained for each mobile operating system, but also each app version—not ideal for app development.

Data teams constantly contact product managers and engineers to prioritize their tracking tags against other roadmap items. However, it’s impossible to scale insights and become a data-driven business that way. 

4. Data sampling or hefty fees

The free version of Google Analytics doesn’t track everything on your site. In fact, it samples your data when performing analytics to aggregate your metrics. 

This can be a huge problem when you want to understand user behavior. Sampled data means you miss essential user segment-level interactions. 

It also means your behavioral data could be merely an approximation of real behavior, which is problematic if you’re basing critical business decisions on it.

Of course, the paid version of GA4 (GA4 360) provides 100% capture. However, it starts at approximately $50,000 minimum per year which means it doesn’t make economic sense for many start-ups and SMBs. 

4 Google Analytics alternatives to track mobile app analytics

Now that we’ve covered GA4’s advantages and limitations, let’s review some of the best alternative mobile app analytics solutions on the market. 

1. Contentsquare

Contentsquare is an experience intelligence platform that combines Experience Analytics, Experience Monitoring, Product Analytics, and Voice-of-Customer (VoC) capabilities to help you understand user behavior across your website and app.

Contentsquare’s Mobile App Analytics gives you in-depth insights about your app users that go way beyond Google Analytics’ session and pageview metrics.

Advantages of Contentsquare over Google Analytics

• Autocapture of behavioral data means you don’t have to manually tag anything or lose any insights because you didn’t tag in advance. Unlike Google Tag Manager, Contentsquare’s event layer directly integrates with iOS and Android native apps. It can also pull in data from over 20 third-party integrations, including Shopify and Salesforce, so product, marketing, and customer support teams get all the data they need without having to ask engineers to create new tags, change tracking codes, or build reports.

• Data governance capabilities and retroactive analysis let you roll back the clock and leverage data that Contentsquare has already collected—whenever you discover that new questions require additional event data 

• Experience analytics and monitoring lets you discover exactly what engages and frustrates your users so you can optimize your app journeys

• Go beyond superficial ‘touch and tap’ metrics. In addition to tracking high-level metrics like churn rate, retention rate, conversion rate, and monthly/weekly active users, Contentsquare tracks macro and micro behavioral metrics like session depth, session length, time spent on individual screens, and average screens viewed per visit.

• Discover the ‘why’ behind behavior with investigative tools like Journey Analysis. The platform also lets you reconstruct individual user sessions and replay behaviors with Session Replay, helping you understand those behaviors and how to change or replicate them.

• AI capabilities: Contentsquare’s AI, Sense delivers action-ready, user behavior insights (through summaries, reports, alerts, and recommendations) directly to the teams that need it. And when your teams have questions like ‘How many new users subscribed within the first 7 days this month?’, they can Chat with Sense, in natural language, and get fast answers, plus next steps.

• Stay on top of technical, UX design, and performance issues negatively impacting user journeys and behaviors with Error Analysis and Speed Analysis. (Contentsquare will alert your teams to issues and quantify their potential impact)

We’d be happy to show you how Contentsquare helps make your mobile app experience shine. Book a demo today.

2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a popular product analytics platform that lets you analyze web, mobile, and app analytics to see how and why users engage, convert, and return to your site. Unlike GA4, the tool tracks behavioral analytics, although, like Amplitude, GA, and Adobe, Mixpanel requires manual tracking and all the headaches that come with it.

How Mixpanel compares to Google Analytics 

• Mixpanel has more detailed metrics on funnels, segmentation, user paths, and product impact

• Good segmentation capabilities 

• Interactive reports to show how users are engaging with your product 

• Easy customization

3. Amplitude

Amplitude is a user-focused solution that aims to pinpoint valuable behavioral patterns. It allows you to look beyond GA4’s acquisition and paid analytics offerings and dig into mobile and app analytics. 

While Amplitude recently launched its own autocapture feature, it is still new to the market, whereas Contentsquare has refined and perfected its autocapture capabilities over the course of 10 years. Autocapture requires not just the automatic tracking of events but also rich data governance and retroactive analysis capabilities to be practical.

Advantages of Amplitude over Google Analytics 

• Detailed behavior events and user attributes to visualize the customer journey

• Collaboration features that enable users to share descriptions, dashboards, and notebooks

• Integrated data governance capabilities

 4. Pendo

Pendo is built primarily to optimize walk-through guides for users, helping product teams increase adoption across web and mobile devices.

While Pendo provides decent insights into user onboarding and offers several features outside the scope of GA, it lacks the robust analytical capabilities needed to really put your finger on the pulse of user behavior, let alone experience.

Advantages of Pendo over Google Analytics

• More detailed metrics and KPIs than GA4 

• Easier user interface 

• Multiple site management capabilities

Deliver 5-star mobile app experiences with Contentsquare 

If you’re looking for an analytics solution that helps you track and optimize your mobile app journeys to deliver more retention, conversion, and 5-star reviews, look no further.

Our mobile analytics solution lets you

• Make rapid improvements with visual mobile app data

• Uncover and understand app user journeys (and connect them to cross-platform journeys)

• Prevent churn and uninstalls by reducing frustration and addressing user feedback

• Increase revenue and conversions by identifying high-value opportunities to increase engagement

And it’s simple to deploy. Our software development kit (SDK) is lightweight and compatible across major frameworks including Native iOS and Android, Flutter, and React Native.

Want to know more? Contact us today to arrange a demo.