How to use Firebase?

Firebase is a handy tool developed by Google to develop, grow, and improve iOS and Android apps. Firebase offers various possibilities to find all the information you need to optimise an app. Furthermore, Firebase is integrated with Google Analytics, so you’ll have a clear insight into your visitor’s behaviour on your website and on your app.

When we develop an app for your garden centre, we also work with Firebase. Some basic knowledge of Firebase can also be practical for you, to stay up to date on the use of your app. There are many advanced possibilities, so today we’ll only limit to some basic statistics that are relevant for your garden centre.

The basics

The apps that we develop at Garden Connect are all connected to Google Firebase. With Google Firebase, you can get an insight into the use of your app. Important statistics can include: how your app is functioning, how many customers are using the app, and what could be improved. We will share some basic statistics below that you can use yourself.

The Firebase dashboard: First steps

When you log in to Firebase, you will see the following dashboard:

The dashboard shows you how your app is used. The main features are:

Daily active users: The number of people that have used the app of your garden centre in the past 24 hours.
Retention: the percentage of app users that continues to use the app after the first day of installation.

Below you will find the number of users per operating system: Android and iOS.

Measuring the active app users

You can click to go to the overview of active users:

Here you will find the number of active users in the last period. Because a garden centre app is usually not for daily use, the daily graphic will be quite low. That’s fine and normal for our industry. You can imagine, the number of daily users of an app like Facebook is almost the same as the number of monthly users.

If you scroll down further, you can find the average time spent per session. In this case, it would be 1 minute and 35 seconds:

Monitoring crashes

There’s also a table which shows you if there are any problems with your app. The daily users without crashes will be shown in this table:

An app crash could happen every now and then, but if you see many crashes here, please inform us immediately.

Most viewed pages

Of course, it’s relevant to know which pages in the app are the most visited. To find out, go to ‘Events’ and choose ‘Page views’. It’s important to put the parameter name on the right on “firebase_screen”.