Configure Analytics data collection and usage

Google Analytics offers features which allow you to control the collection and use of Analytics data.

Disable Analytics data collection

In some cases, you may wish to temporarily or permanently disable collection of Analytics data, such as to collect end-user consent or to fulfill legal obligations. Google Analytics offers multiple options for disabling and deactivating Analytics collection. Used together, they support many typical use cases.

Temporarily disable collection

If you wish to temporarily disable Analytics collection, such as to get end-user consent before collecting data, you can set the value of firebase_analytics_collection_enabled to false in your app's AndroidManifest.xml in the application tag. For example:

<meta-data android:name="firebase_analytics_collection_enabled" android:value="false" />

To re-enable collection, such as after an end-user provides consent, call the setAnalyticsCollectionEnabled() method of the FirebaseAnalytics class. For example:

setAnalyticsCollectionEnabled(true);

If you need to suspend collection again for any reason, you can call

setAnalyticsCollectionEnabled(false);

and collection is suspended until you re-enable it.

Permanently deactivate collection

If you need to deactivate Analytics collection permanently in a version of your app, set firebase_analytics_collection_deactivated to true in your app's AndroidManifest.xml in the application tag. For example:

<meta-data android:name="firebase_analytics_collection_deactivated" android:value="true" />

Disable Advertising ID collection

If you wish to disable collection of the Advertising ID in your Android app, you can set the value of google_analytics_adid_collection_enabled to false in your app's AndroidManifest.xml in the application tag. For example:

<meta-data android:name="google_analytics_adid_collection_enabled" android:value="false" />

Control data collection for personalized advertising

If you have linked your Google Analytics project to an ads account or otherwise enabled an ads integration, or opted into data sharing, your Analytics data may be eligible for use in personalized advertising. This means for instance, that you may use collected events such as first_open to create and deploy audience lists for remarketing unless you indicate that such data is not available for personalized advertising.

You can programmatically control whether a user's Analytics data should be used for personalized advertising using any of the following options:

Disable personalized advertising features via a user property

Google's consent mode API is the recommended way to enable and disable personalized advertising.

However, if your app doesn't use consent mode yet, you can control personalization with the following option.

To disable personalized advertising behavior by default, specify the following field in your app's AndroidManifest.xml in the application tag:

<meta-data android:name="google_analytics_default_allow_ad_personalization_signals" android:value="false" />

Re-enable personalized advertising features via a user property

If you use the google_analytics_default_allow_ad_personalization_signals parameter to control ad personalization, you can re-enable ad personalization with the setUserProperty method as shown below:

setUserProperty( ALLOW_AD_PERSONALIZATION_SIGNALS, "true" );

If you have chosen to temporarily disable analytics collection (for example, until an end-user provides consent), and you want to control personalized advertising features upon re-enabling analytics collection for a user, ensure that your call to specify this setting precedes your call to re-enable analytics collection. For example:

setUserProperty( ALLOW_AD_PERSONALIZATION_SIGNALS, … );
setAnalyticsCollectionEnabled(true);

Confirm your settings

When ad personalization signals have been disabled for a user via one of the mechanisms defined above, subsequent event bundles logged from that user's device will contain a user property named non_personalized_ads with a value of 1 to indicate that events in that bundle are not available for personalized advertising. Disabling personalized advertising does not affect the use of the data for measurement purposes, including reporting and attribution.

See your configuration changes

Once you've made changes to your Google Analytics settings, the SDK downloads the changes. The process is fast and seamless, so you can quickly test your changes. When you make changes in Analytics, it may take a few minutes to deploy in your app. If your app is live, the full deployment process may take up to one hour to complete.