What is the Distribution Service? - Part 2.

Welcome back to ‘What is the Distribution Service’...in part two of this Pugpig Pointers session we’ll look at the analytics that can be found in the Distribution Service.

First, quick recap...the Distribution Service is an area that acts as a dashboard for your Pugpig app. It sits between your CMS and the app itself, to provide one central location where you can access all information and features of the app. From content and authentication errors, to additional features such as push notifications and analytics.

ANALYTICS

We've digested the most important stats from your Google Analytics and put it into a easy-to-consume format. If you can’t see any data in this section let us know and we’ll configure it!

Scorecard tab

The 'Scorecard' gives you monthly snapshots of your app performance on the following areas:

• Total number of users
• Total number of new users
• Total number of sessions
• Average number of sessions per user
• Average session duration

It provides a coloured percentage next to each figure, to make it quick and easy to identify whether this is an improvement or not compared to the previous month. The analytics are split over iOS, Android, Web and other, and the current month will constantly update based on the users.

Content tab

The first graph shows a bar chart of all the editions in the app and the amount of downloads. By hovering over each bar you can see the exact amount of downloads.

The second bar graph is the download success rate, and this plots completed downloads vs failed downloads. We would always expect to see some failed downloads, e.g. the user is out of wifi range or not enough storage on the device etc.

The final smaller graphs on the page show the latest editions and the amount of views and duration each page gets as the users go through the edition. You can also hover over each bar if you wanted to see the specific stats. Generally you’ll see the number of views trail off through the edition, and a variation throughout of the time spent on each article (this could be due to users navigating via table of contents, or deep links to particular pages within the content), for example...

Users tab

This will give you a brief overview into who your users are, and information on devices/location.

The ring diagrams and the location map can be looked at in more detail by hovering over the area you’d like to explore.

Background tab

This tab shows statistics on the background activity of your app, such as background downloads, and push notifications received.

Versions tab

Is to give an idea of how many users are on the previous versions of the app, and how many have updated. We would expect most users to be on the latest version, but we do see users stay on older versions for a while. The relevance being that it can be older versions that users are having issues with, as they may not contain bug fixes and performance enhancements.