Tracking when page opens inside Gmail App | Community
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OscarMartinezM
January 27, 2023
Solved

Tracking when page opens inside Gmail App

  • January 27, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 2001 views

Hi Community, 

 

In Android devices, when you get a link in an email and you're using Gmail App, the page linked will open inside the Gmail App. Do you know what it will happend with Adobe Analytics trackinkg in this cases?

 

Thanks, 

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Best answer by Jennifer_Dungan

The gmail app opens your webpage through a "webview"... think of this as the equivalent as opening your website in an iframe.

 

The Analytics will still fire, but you won't know if was from the gmail app webview....

 

Some apps (gmail may be one of them.. but not sure) append a custom value to the end of their user agent strings.. usually this looks something like (including the square brackets): [somevalue]

 

The user agent in Adobe will still just show as whatever browser is that user's default.. likely Chrome, as the default browser is used in the webview to render the content.

 

If the gmail app does have this customized value, then you can create some custom code (or use Processing Rules) to look for this appended value and add some custom code to indicate "gmail app", or "facebook app" or any other apps that provide this extra data that you can leverage to identify that it was loaded via an app.

 

There may be other code to generically detect the use of a "webview" but I don't have that handy.

1 reply

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe ChampionAccepted solution
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
January 27, 2023

The gmail app opens your webpage through a "webview"... think of this as the equivalent as opening your website in an iframe.

 

The Analytics will still fire, but you won't know if was from the gmail app webview....

 

Some apps (gmail may be one of them.. but not sure) append a custom value to the end of their user agent strings.. usually this looks something like (including the square brackets): [somevalue]

 

The user agent in Adobe will still just show as whatever browser is that user's default.. likely Chrome, as the default browser is used in the webview to render the content.

 

If the gmail app does have this customized value, then you can create some custom code (or use Processing Rules) to look for this appended value and add some custom code to indicate "gmail app", or "facebook app" or any other apps that provide this extra data that you can leverage to identify that it was loaded via an app.

 

There may be other code to generically detect the use of a "webview" but I don't have that handy.

yuhuisg
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
January 30, 2023

Adding on to @jennifer_dungan's answer:

If the same user had opened your website inside Gmail app, then later on, he went to your website in his regular web browser, you would not know that it is the same user, even though he is using the same device. This is because the cookies and other browser storage are normally kept separate between webviews vs the standalone browser. So the ECID in the Gmail app's webview would be different from the ECID in the standalone browser, even for the same user and device. This is especially true in iOS.

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
January 30, 2023

Oops yes, I should have mentioned that.. while it does use the default browser to render the content, it is treated like a separate instance with it's own unique cookies. Thanks @yuhuisg for adding this.