My App team has the firebase analytics implemented in a mobile app, I was just working on some data analysis tasks in big query, and I found that there are sessions with 0 screen views. I just want to understand what could be a possible scenario for this?
Any suggestions or documentation for this topic is highly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Regards,
Nitesh
I was trying to calculate the aggregate numbers in big query
Sessions with 0 screenviews and pageviews indicate missing screen/page tracking. The only thing a session needs to exist is an interactional event. Whether that event is a screnview or not is not essential.
Find what events are firing in the empty sessions, list them, then send them to your app developers so that they could see where they're firing the events and fix the absence of screen tracking. It's easier to find these events when looking at raw BQ data, and smaller data manipulations in BQ can be done for free.
These missing screens are likely to be initial screens like the splash screen or log in/sign up screens.
On a rare occasions, these would be the cases when a user suspends the app for 30 minutes, so their session expires, and then they come back and do something on that screen without navigating away from it. This will look like an empty session with some events, but no screenviews. Exactly to avoid this situation, it's a good practice to ask the devs to send the screenview whenever the user returns to the screen. Preferably, indicating in an event property of that screenview that this is a return from the background rather than a normal navigation.
You can definitely go further to improve it, but this should be good enough.