Segment your users with Google Analytics & Firebase

You can use Google Analytics & Firebase to help you identify and monetize app users who are unlikely to spend in your app. Offering customized experiences based on the type of user can help you maximize your revenue.

How to segment your users

To segment your users and customize their ad experience, you’ll need to use:

• Google Analytics Audiences to create audiences based on user purchasing probability  
• Firebase Remote Config parameters to customize the showing and frequencies of ads.

Step 1: Set up

1. Ensure you’ve implemented the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK and the Remote Config SDK into your app.
2. Record the following events in Google Analytics. Choose the event that corresponds with your app type (i.e. gaming, utilities, or e-commerce). These are used to predict purchasing probability.
   • In_app_purchase events (commonly used for gaming or utilities apps)
     • For Android apps, you’ll need to first link your Firebase app to Google Play. 
     • For iOS, in_app_purchase events are automatically logged. 
   • Purchase events (commonly used for e-commerce apps)
     • Use Google Analytics custom events to record ‘purchase’ events.

Step 2: Create audiences

There are two options to create audiences of users based on their likelihood to purchase:

1. Use predictive metrics: Google Analytics offers a “Purchase probability” metric that predicts the probability that a user who was active in the last 28 days will make a purchase within the next 7 days. You can use this metric to customize the Analytics audience.

   Example:

   To create an audience of the bottom 20% predicted purchasers, or the 20% that are unlikely to spend, you can configure the metric to customize the user range from 0 to 20%.
   Note: We recommend using this option when your app has more than 1,000 purchasers in the past 28 days.
2. Use historical first party data: You can also target users who have been in the app for the past X days but haven’t made a purchase.
   Note: To determine the X-day period, we recommend reviewing the average time it took your past purchasers to make a purchase.

Step 3: Implement Remote config

1. Show IAPs to predicted purchasers and ads for predicted non-purchasers. Give users who are not likely to purchase the option to watch an ad instead of making an in-app purchase.
2. Extend frequency caps. Let users who are unlikely to spend view more ads; ads will likely be the only viable monetization option.
3. Diversify format mix. Let your app monetize users with other ad formats that are not typically in your formats mix once you identify them as predicted non-purchasers.