Sunday, October 23, 2011

A run at runtime stats for your Windows Phone 7 apps with Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework and Google Analytics

Mark Monster - Statistics for your Windows Phone application (Google Analytics)

"Alright, I’ve tried a couple of different systems to get the statistics for the apps I created.

Google Analytics custom way

I started more than a year ago with a unreliable option using Google Analytics. This option was unreliable because it didn’t handle things like no connectivity and was depending on the WebBrowser control. Technically this was an option, but there are better options.

Flurry Analytics

My first applications actually did go live with Flurry Analytics for the stats. ...

PreEmptive Runtime Intelligence

Alright, then I heard people say, why don’t you use PreEmptive’s Runtime Intelligence. ...

Google Analytics with Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework

Alright, I’ve chosen to go back to Google Analytics and follow the comments I got from my readers on my custom Google Analytics tracking post. They suggest to make use of Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. This framework supports a couple of very important scenario’s.

  • Offline scenarios
  • Support for multiple analytics services, including:
    • Comscore
    • Google Analytics
    • PreEmptive Solutions

Where I already have experience with implementing analytics using the custom PreEmptive tools I wouldn’t try that again, how long will it be free? I also have some experience with Comscore for one of my customers. I don’t understand how to read the reports so that’s not really an option for me, neither is it free. So Google Analytics it is, I know how to read the reports, and I’ve got a lot of experience implementing it for websites. Let’s start with the implementation in a Windows Phone application.

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This approach might not be as hands-off as using PreEmptive’s Runtime Intelligence but there's something about the deterministic nature of it that I dig.

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