iOS Question How to parse email from Apple: ”App Analytics Weekly Summary”

Sandman

Expert
Licensed User
Longtime User
I've have an iPhone app live and kicking since a couple of years, and every week Apple send me an email with the full subject ”App Store Connect: App Analytics Weekly Summary”

This is somewhat embarrassing for me, but I've never really understood how to parse that email. I've done some tries a couple of times but came up short. Perhaps I've been looking in the wrong places, or I'm just too stupid to understand the wall of texts that Apple publishes.

So I thought I'd expose my cluelessness here and ask if a fellow forum member could briefly explain how to understandd the email? The column with green boxes shows a diff, (probably from last week?) so that one I can understand. But what about the column with the blue boxes?

I'm guessing that Impressions maybe is how many people somehow visited the app's page in the App store? And I also can understand that Crashes (probably) is how many crash reports Apple has received from users that volunteered them. (Which surely is less than 100 percent of all crashes that happened, because not all allow sending them in.)

But what is App Units and Sessions? Is that perhaps how many have the app currently installed on their device, and how many actually launched the app the last week?

1628832596229.png
 

Sandman

Expert
Licensed User
Longtime User
Thanks Erel. This is my current understanding, with a couple of follow-up question in underlined italic.

Impressions
The number of times your app showed up on the App Store. (So this one seem clear. Let's assume that an impression is always an impression, regardless of how they ended up there, to keep things simple. And let's consider "showing app in list of apps" = "showing app page", which really isn't the same thing, but whatever.)​
App Units
Each app purchase on a device with iOS 8 or tvOS 9, or later. How does this differ from Sales below?
Sales
I thought this one said how many apps you sold for the period. (In my report it says zero, which is correct as my app doesn't cost anything to install. It also doesn't have any in-app purchases etc.)​
Sessions
The number of times the app has been used for at lesat two seconds on a device. This one require a follow-up. Do we think "use" mean "actively use in the foreground"? I mean, I have geofence things going on, so the app wakes up now and then and does its thing in the background, but surely that can't be considered "used"? Or can it?
Crashes
How many crash reports Apple has received from users that volunteered them. (Which surely is less than 100 percent of all crashes that happened, because not all allow sending them in.)​


Am I correct that none of these numbers can be parsed to understand "this is how many instances of your app is actually installed for the period"? The closest we got is the sessions, which doesn't tell how many users, just how many sessions there's been? Like, if I had ONE install in total worldwide, and that user used the app for 2 seconds 100 times, that number would be 100.


I also notice that not a lot of people answered this thread, so I'm guessing I'm not the only one having problems understanding the terms. (Or perhaps it's so obvious to everybody that they can't bother explaining the simplest basics. :) )
 
Upvote 0

Sandman

Expert
Licensed User
Longtime User
My guesses about these questions are as good as yours
Well, that decides it - if not even you have managed to understand the numbers they are officially difficult to understand.

Thanks, I appreciate the effort. I'm in a tight spot for time at the moment so I won't research more about it now. If nobody else has posted a guide, I'll do it if I get some devine insight later on.
 
Upvote 0
Top