What is android-app://com.google.android.gm in my analytics?

Why an app name instead of a website

A link clicked on a web page carries the page’s address as the referrer. A link tapped inside an Android app has no web page behind it. Android lets the app that opened the link say who it is, and Chrome can pass that on in the form android-app:// followed by the app’s package name. Your analytics then shows the package name where you’d expect a website.

The most common ones:

• com.google.android.gm: the Gmail app.
• com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox: the Google app, the search bar on most Android home screens. That one is a search, not an email.
• com.linkedin.android: the LinkedIn app.

Some tools show the full android-app://… form, others only the package name. They mean the same thing.

What it hides

It tells you the visit came from the Gmail app. It doesn’t tell you which email: your newsletter, a launch announcement, a reply to a cold email or a friend forwarding your link all look identical. The same email opened in Gmail on a laptop may show mail.google.com instead, and a mail app that passes nothing on leaves the visit counted as direct.

How to see which email it was

Tag every link you put in an email. Tags are part of the address, so they arrive whatever the app sends as referrer:

https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sept-update

Use a different utm_campaign for each send. Then “Gmail app” stops being a source and becomes a device detail, and the email itself gets the credit.

Where it goes in your reports

Tools that know these package names sort Gmail into email and the Google app into search. Tools that don’t will list com.google.android.gm as an unknown website. If you see it under referrals, move it to email in your head when you read the numbers.

With Nordva Launch

Launch recognises a list of Android app package names: Gmail and other mail apps count as email, the Google app as search, and social apps such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit as social. A UTM tag that names a channel (utm_medium=email, or a source such as reddit) wins over the referrer, so a tagged newsletter link is credited to that newsletter.