Tracking when page opens inside Gmail App

[OscarMM]

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, 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

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]

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]

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.

[OscarMM]

So, what it will happen is tracking still working (if app tracking is available) but will manage its own session/user id? Is is correct?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Basically, the gmail web app would function like a separate "browser"... 

So just like a user opening the site in Chrome, then in Firefox, then in Edge, then in Opera, etc....

So if you have a website and a webapp, and let's say they user uses both.. The gmail app will open a webview to the website version of your site; basically acting like a third device (and UV id for your user). (Adobe does have some partial linking for webapp and website, but it relies on the user opening the app first, then opening the website from the app - thereby overwriting the web id with the app id...)

Unless you happen to have universal linking set up on your app, the Gmail app might try to open the webview to your website, but this could trigger your universal linking... you won't track the gmail webview in this case (just like wouldn't track any hit to the website if someone triggered a universal link by coming from another website.)

Universal links are triggered by server code, they will redirect the user to the app via a deep link. This occurs before the website page actually loads. Therefore, you would just be tracking the traffic on the app.