U NO WORK ON IPAD! – O RLY?

So, a number of customers have been asking us….

Why can’t I get access to the Management Tools on my shiny new fangled tablet – mainly due to variances in browsers, their support of JavaScript and SVG for chart rendering, and because some are really picky about correctly encoding ampersands!

So we spent some time with various emulators and various tablets analysing why they were failing – and I am pleased to say we now support access on iPad, Android and Playbooks…

U NO WORK ON IPAD! O RLY?

Works on Playbook too

But I am sure we will have missed something, so please give it a go, and let us know how it works out for you!

Updates to WebServices

For those of you who make use of the Web Services provided by Bango, from everything from finding out information about your users, to extracting your Analytics data, to managing payments from within your Apps, we thought you’d be interested in the recent updates we have made to our APIs.

December Analytics Release

With the upcoming final Analytics release of 2011, we thought we’d let you know some of the features which are contained in it!

Our key feature is the addition of New and Return visitor metrics -

New & Return Visitor metrics

This report allows you to view new visitors to your site for the reporting period, as well as comparison between returning visitors to analyze traffic and loyalty of your site visitors.

Talking of loyalty, we have re-organised some of the menu structures and added more reports to better match the Definitions as defined by the Web Analytics Association.

Clearer device information using ‘Derived devices’ in reports and filters

We have created a new way to see your customers device information in reports and filters. So, not only do we show you what devices your customers were using to navigate your site, but we also now show the derived information for that device.

What is derived device information?
The device information that we show from in the ‘Devices’ and ‘Device makes’ reports is the information that we can ascertain from the device itself. However, the derived information is the marketing/advertised name for that device, or family of devices that the device belongs to.

An example of this would be the device in the ‘Devices’ report may show a ‘RIM BlackBerry 9700’. However, this device would show in the ‘Derived devices’ as a ‘RIM BlackBerry Bold’.

New Permissions

We’ve had a few requests from customers, especially those using third party agencies or out-sourcing their App development, to improve the permissions options for giving users access to Analytics reports.

So, we’ve just released an update which allows you to specify whether a user has access to the Web Analytics reports, App Analytics reports and Payment reports.

To set the permissions, simply visit the Manage Seats page under the My Account tab, select the user you wish to grant permissions to, and choose one or more of the options.

New permissions

Now, when a user logs into the Management Tools, they will only have access to the specified tabs.

User with App Analytics permissions

New Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) SDK released

We have now released an Application Analytics SDK for devices running Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5 operating system codenamed Mango. This SDK uses a number of the new features now available in Mango to improve performance, and provide more device and user information than was available in Windows Phone 7.

Download the Bango Windows Phone 7.5 SDK from CodePlex here.

Integrating with Bango Application Analytics

To set up Bango Application Analytics in an app you need to first get an application ID. There is a simple form to complete in the Management Tools; in the Setup and Config section click on ‘Analytics set-up’ in the menu on the left, then click ‘Application analytics’.

All you need to do is give your app a title, this will be used in reporting, and, optionally, choose a category for your app. Once you’ve done this we will provide you with an ID for your app and you can choose an SDK to download.

Please note: the SDKs cannot be integrated into an app without an application ID, you can sign up for a free analytics trial if you want to integrate and test an SDK.

What happened to my report?

If you’ve logged into the Management Tools today, you may have noticed our most recent feature – the ability to disable the automatic loading of reports, which we’ve switched on for everyone by default.

Previously, using the Analytics pages could be slow, as we’d fire off an AJAX request for each report as soon as the page was loaded and because we allow you to report on the actual recorded data (and not ‘pre-canned’ data) it could take time for a report to be returned.

We realised that most people actually wanted to set a date range before loading a report, especially when their site or app receives a large amount of traffic or events.

Now, when you access a report, you’ll automatically see the date range picker. This will allow you to set a date range and the report will be loaded when you apply the date range. Of course, if you’d prefer to automatically load reports when the page loads, just hop over to the settings page and change the setting (either for yourself, or for everyone in your package if you are an administrator for your package).

This is only stage one, we are working to allow you to set filters before loading the report – look out for this soon.

As always – we’d love to hear your feedback.  Leave us a comment!