Use Firebase Remote Config with Analytics

When you build an app that includes both Firebase Remote Config and Google Analytics, you gain the ability to understand your app users better and to respond to their needs more quickly. You can use Analytics audiences and user properties to customize your app for segments of your user base with flexibility and precision.

Integrating the Google Analytics SDK provides insights that help you tailor your offerings with A/B Testing, Remote Config personalization, and Remote Config rollouts. You can analyze the results to understand how different choices impact key metrics like revenue and engagement.

To learn more about analyzing app usage with Google Analytics, see the Analytics introduction.

To customize your app using segments you may have identified outside Firebase, see the imported segments documentation.

Remote Config and user properties

Remote Config now lets you use combinations of Analytics user properties to create conditions, allowing you to customize your app for segments of your user base that you have defined.

For example, you could define the following user properties in Google Analytics for use in an exercise app with a range of exercise activities at different durations and difficulty levels:

  • Exercise_Interest
  • Preferred_Exercise_Duration
  • Preferred_Difficulty_Level

Then, you could create conditions that use these properties (individually, or in combination) to tailor the appearance and behavior of your app for specific users. For example, you could design your app so that users who are interested in running see an image of a jogger when your app is loading. Or, you could define segments of your user base by exercise duration and difficulty level so that casual users are first presented with a suggestion for a shorter, easier workout, whereas serious athletes are invited to start a 40-minute run when our app starts up.

If the behaviors of your users change in ways that alter their user properties, those updates are collected by Google Analytics, which can change the behavior and appearance of their app instance after the next fetch request. A full range of operators are available so that you can create rules that include or exclude users with specific user properties or combinations of user properties.

You can also combine other Remote Config rules with rules based on user properties, to deliver customized app behaviors to audience segments like the following:

  • Users who like yoga (Exercise_Interest exactly matches yoga), who use your app on an Android device (OS type == Android), located in Canada (Device in region/country == Canada).
  • Users who are interested in either weight lifting or weight loss (Exercise_Interest contains weight) who use your app on an Apple device (OS type == iOS) with an English-language UI (Device language == English).

Target by first open time

After you link Google Analytics and Remote Config, you can target users based on the first time they open your app (using the Analytics event first_open) for Remote Config parameter fetches and personalizations, and A/B Testing experiments.

You can use First Open Time to:

  • Target new users.
  • Target user groups who joined during a specific time period in the past.
  • Create and test onboarding flows and welcome experiences for new users.
  • Create custom experiences for users who join during specific time periods.

For example, say you have an online shopping app with users in multiple countries, and want to advertise special holiday deals to new app users. For something like a Black Friday sale, which applies to US users, you can set up a condition for your Remote Config or A/B Testing experiment that targets a specific iOS or Android app, then select all US users (Device in region/country == United States) who first open your app in the month leading up to the sale (First open After 11/01/2022 12:00 AM Los Angeles Time and First open Before 11/26/2022 12:00 AM Los Angeles Time).

User targeting by first open time is available after you select an Android or iOS app. It is currently supported by the following Remote Config SDK versions: Apple platforms SDK v9.0.0+ and Android SDK v21.1.1+ (Firebase BoM v30.3.0+).

You can target users that first launch your app at any time, as long as a supported SDK is installed and Analytics is enabled.

Next Steps

To learn more about user properties, see the following guides:

To learn more about how conditions are created by combining rules, see Remote Config Parameters and Conditions.

To add a Remote Config condition to your project, see Add or edit a condition. You can create parameters, rules and conditions in the Firebase console.