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Screen view tracking

Screen view tracking captures screen changes within the app.

Tracking screen views in React Navigation​

If you are using the React Navigation library for navigation in your app, you can implement automatic screen view tracking by adding a callback to your NavigationContainer. The steps are explained in the documentation for React Navigation.

Tracking screen views in React Native Navigation​

When using the React Native Navigation library for navigation in your app, you can automatically track screen views by registering a listener when your component appears on screen. Use the Navigation.events().registerComponentDidAppearListener callback to subscribe the listener and track screen views as documented here.

Tracking screen views in iOS UIKit and Android Activity views​

The screen view tracking for UIKit views is disabled by default. It can be set in TrackerConfiguration like in the example below:

const tracker = createTracker(
    'appTracker',
    {
      endpoint: COLLECTOR_URL,
    },
    {
        trackerConfig: {
            screenViewAutotracking: true,
        },
    }
);

Using method swizzling in the ViewController class, the tracker automatically detects when screens are loaded (triggered by viewDidAppear in a ViewController) and tracks events that include information about the current and previous view controllers.

Using the Android Application.ActivityLifecycleCallbacks interface, the tracker automatically detects when Activities are loaded and tracks events that include information about the current and previous Activity.

Screen view event and screen context entity​

Automatic screen view tracking tracks two pieces of information:

  • The tracker automatically tracks each screen change using a ScreenView event.
  • If the TrackerConfiguration.screenContext property is enabled, the tracker attaches a Screen entity to all the events tracked by the tracker reporting the last (and probably current) screen visible on device when the event was tracked.

The Screen entity is conditioned by the internal state of the tracker only. To make an example, if the developer manually tracks a ScreenView event, all the following events will have a Screen entity attached reporting the same information as the last tracked ScreenView event, even if it was manually tracked and the app is in a different screen.

Indeed, disabling the screenViewAutotracking only, the tracker can still attach Screen entities automatically based only to the manual tracking of ScreenView events, and vice versa.

Screen engagement tracking​

Screen engagement tracking is a feature that enables tracking the user activity on the screen. This consists of the time spent and the amount of content viewed on the screen.

Concretely, it consists of the following metrics:

  1. Time spent on screen while the app was in foreground (tracked automatically).
  2. Time spent on screen while the app was in background (tracked automatically).
  3. Number of list items scrolled out of all list items (requires some manual tracking).
  4. Scroll depth in pixels (requires some manual tracking).

This information is attached using a screen_summary context entity to the following events:

  1. screen_end event that is automatically tracked before a new screen view event.
  2. application_background event.
  3. application_foreground event.

Screen engagement tracking is enabled by default, but can be configured using the TrackerConfiguration.screenEngagementAutotracking option.

For a demo of how mobile screen engagement tracking works in action, please visit this demo.

Updating list item view and scroll depth information​

To update the list item viewed and scroll depth information tracked in the screen summary entity, you can track the ListItemView and ScrollChanged events with this information. When tracked, the tracker won't send these events individually to the collector, but will process the information into the next screen_summary entity and discard the events. You may want to track the events every time a new list item is viewed on the screen, or whenever the scroll position changes.

To update the list items viewed information:

tracker.trackListItemViewEvent({
    index: 1,
    itemsCount: 10,
});

To update the scroll depth information:

tracker.trackScrollChangedEvent({
    yOffset: 10,
    xOffset: 20,
    viewHeight: 100,
    viewWidth: 200,
    contentHeight: 300,
    contentWidth: 400,
});