It was our third virtual event, and we’re slowly managing to find our groove in this meetup-by-Zoom era. With an unexpected boost by way of a tweet from @googleanalytics, we had a strong and engaged showing, including attendees from four continents (North America, Europe, Australia, and Africa)! The crowd was not disappointed, as Mai AlOwaish from InfoTrust provided a concise, but quite thorough, rundown of the ins and outs of Google App+Web.

A smattering of takeaways:

• As a platform that draws heavily on Firebase Analytics, it is a fundamentally user-centric platform that relies on an event-based model. Fare thee well “all hits are of type: pageview, event, or transaction!”
• The event-based model has great power…but also will take some getting used to for those who are steeped in a long tradition of Universal Analytics
• The platform has been in beta since July 2019. But, what does “beta” even mean in Google terms? Don’t they keep things in beta when they’re clearly ready for production use? Well, yes…but it would be pretty risky to just deploy App+Web at this point. Functionality to match, for instance Enhance Ecommerce has not yet rolled out (but there are many signals that it is imminent)
• Unlike the cutover from the original Google Analytics to Universal Analytics, dual-tagging a site with both Universal Analytics and App+Web is not a problem: they use different measurement protocols and send data to different realms within the Googleverse.
• App+Web—a free platform—has native connectivity to Google BigQuery (one of those things that used to stand out as a differentiator between free Google Analytics and GA360). Of course, depending on the volume of traffic you’re sending to BigQuery, you may wind up with a bill for that, but the analytics platform itself does not incur a cost.
• The “Analytics Hub” adds a more robust analyst tool for working in a browser to drag and drop dimensions and metrics and do handy visualizations like Venn diagrams to visualized the overlap between two segments.

And much, much more! But, you can just watch the video of her presentation for a full run-down (or check out the slides):

There were a few notable links shared in the chat for more information:

• Mai’s DAA blog post about App+Web
• Simo Ahava’s tweet that shows the non-NDA version of the App+Web roadmap

This meetup was, once again, also a fundraiser for the Mid-Ohio Food Collective. With help from our sponsors we’re matching the first $1,000 donated! Thanks so much to those who have already donated, it means a lot to us and even more to the people you’re helping. We’ve still got matching funds available, you can donate here now. We’ll be running the campaign for the rest of the month so it’s not too late!