Last week Google announced that they have expanded mobile reporting in Google Analytics so that developers can now include tracking in both Android and iPhone apps using the new Google Analytics for Mobile Apps SDKs which are available from the Google Code website.

Mobile applications are built using native SDK's to the operating system, be it Android or the iPhone, and thus don't fire "events" and "pageviews" as a website would via HTML but with the new Google Analytics Mobile App SDK's you can embed code directly into your applications so that these events can be tracked using Google Analytics.

So what are "pageviews" and how can you use them?

Pageviews can be used to calculate visits, session length, and bounce rate. Because mobile apps don't contain HTML pages, the app developer must decide when to trigger each pageview request.  For example you might decide to track when the application is first opened, when it was closed and which "pages" of the application a user is visiting... Thus enabling you to track your application downloads against usage and spot oppurtunities to enhance popular errors or offer new features.

...and events?

Traditionally an event would be fired when a button is clicked on a webpage or when a user interacts with a certain page element as part of your usabliity assessments.  With Google Analytics for Mobile Apps you can define events to be reported in the Event Tracking section of Google Analytics. Events can be grouped into categories. For example if your application is viewing your latest corporate videos you may wish to attach an event to the play button of your media player to see which videos are popular so you know where to focus your production efforts.

I'm sold - how do I start?

First of all check out this video from the Google Mobile team...

Google Analytics for Mobile Apps is incredibly easy to integrate and full code examples are available on the Google Code website where both SDKs can also be download free of charge (don't ya just love Google?).

There is also a full release statement from the Google Mobile Ads team on the Official Google Mobile Blog.