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Using analytics in your app

The most important part of any product, any App, or even any particular feature, is to understand what it aims to achieve, and ensure it does so effectively.
App analytics provide you with the usage data required to ensure this effectivenes, by letting you measure exact interactions your users have with your App.

There are many different ways to implement App analytics, and many different types of data to collect. For example:

  • Engagement data about different parts of the App can help you understand which App features your users most often interact with, and which features may be under-utilized/less relevant.
  • App crash/error measurements can help you identify issues as they happen in your production environment, allowing you, at times, to fix them before any user can even notice.
  • Etc.

As such, we heavily recommend that you utilize those where possible and reasonable, and will be using this page to help with outlining our recommended best practices for analytics.

Some analytics are automatically collected by Overwolf, and can be viewed in different Overwolf-provided dashboards.

Reasonable Analytics​

Analytics, like many different things in the world, are a neuanced topic.

  • On the one hand, ideally, as designers, would want to know every single thing about every single user. That way, we could carefully tune things to fit them, and would never lack knowledge of anything.
  • On the other hand, even if it was somehow technically feasible to collect all of that data without impacting the final product, there are many, incredibly valid concerns that this would raise (legally, morally, and the potential for abuse of this data).

As such, there are many regulations and guidelines in place, in order to ensure a safe balance of utility and user concerns. These requirements themselves can get rather intricate, and way outside the scope of this page (or even this website). However, to make your journey easier, we have collected a few articles and product comparisons* that we believe can help you get started with analytics, attached here:

* These pages lead to external websites that aren't associated with Overwolf, and may prioritize different things than what Desktop Apps require. They are meant to help you get started, but should not serve as a replacement to proper research.

Platform Support​

Do take note that some Analytics tools (for example - Google Analytics 4/GTag), cannot be used within desktop applications, due to any combination of their:

  • Terms of Service
  • Technical limitations
  • Unresolved bugs

These issues usually revolve around the local page protocol for desktop App pages being

overwolf-extension:// / file://
Rather than
http:// / https://

Always make sure your tool of choice supports your target framework/page in a production-like environment before comitting to it!

We're here to help!

As usual, if you are unsure of how to proceed, have any questions, need help picking the right tool, or just want to further discuss these topics, feel free to contact us!