WeChat Mini Program Analytics, what more to know?

Last June, we published a comprehensive English tutorial on WeChat Mini Program Analytics. Since then, it has been one of our most read blog posts on the topic of WeChat.

In the past year, our team has worked on more WeChat Mini Program projects, leading to our better understanding of the platform as a whole.

We think it’s about time we updated this popular PDF, and summarize what we think are the good and the bad about the in-built analytics tool of WeChat Mini Program.

A quick recap

The WeChat Mini Program Analytics dashboard consists of a set of predefined reports:

• Overview (概况)
  • Trends of general metrics, including users, sessions, page views, average time spent, etc.
  • Top viewed pages and landing pages
• Real-time (实时统计)
  • Real-time page views, available to be broken down to pages
• Visit analysis (访问分析)
  • Trend of sessions
  • Traffic distribution by sources, visit length groups, or visit depth groups
  • User retention
• Source analysis (来源分析)
  • Source distribution by sources
• E-commerce analysis (交易分析)
  • Trends of general e-commerce metrics, including transactions, revenue, customers, revenue per transaction, transactions per user, e-commerce conversion rate, etc.
  • Transaction by sources
• User demographics (用户画像)
  • User distribution by gender or age groups
  • User distribution by province or city
  • User distribution by OS or model
• Custom Analysis (自定义分析)
  • Custom event analysis
  • Custom funnel analysis
  • Custom event, funnel, and fields management

What’s new?

A prominent addition to the default set of reports is E-commerce Analysis (交易分析).

With E-commerce tracking in place, now users are able to see common metrics like revenue, transactions, and e-commerce conversion rate easily, without going through all the fuss to set up custom fields one by one.

E-commerce reports also support breakdown by “Scene”, a set of WeChat Mini Program specific traffic source values, making attribution easier. Users can trace back to the source that converts the best, whether it’s from Mini Program template message, or Official Account custom menu.

There are other slight changes in metrics displayed in each reports, but that shouldn’t change the overall usability of the reports, so we’ll let you find out in our tutorial PDF at the end of this article.

What are its limitations?

As any marketing analyst that works with Mini Programs will soon find out, WeChat Mini Program Analytics doesn’t come without drawbacks.

Exporting data is still a pain, let alone integrating it with external data sources. Only some of the reports mentioned above are available for downloads. An analytics reporting API does exist, but has limitations in terms of both the variety of metrics (custom events simply aren’t available via the reporting API) and the length of time range.

Debugging your analytics implementation is not possible. Data is only captured after the Mini Program is launched, meaning users can not click around the dev or experience versions of MP and see the data flowing in. This is very risky when it comes to MP with complicated customizations.

E-commerce reports only count transactions made by WeChat Pay. For e-commerce Mini Programs that accept other payment types (e.g. credit card payment), this is simply not going to work. Having to manually recreate every e-commerce metric for other payment types as custom event and then aggregate numbers to see the whole e-commerce picture, it’s just too much unnecessary work.

Note: If these limitations are a deal-breaker for you, and you’re interested in using a third-party analytics platform such as Google Analytics to evaluate your Mini Program performance instead, you might be interested in our OMNI Data solution.

What to expect?

Compared to other established big analytics tracking tools, WeChat Mini Program Analytics is of course rather basic and limited.

But look at the bright side, we’re happy to discover that the WeChat team is gradually updating and translating Mini Program Data documentation into English.

While in the absence of the official English documentation, download and check out the tutorial Wiredcraft team has created for you here.

Read Tutorial