LAURENCE MORONEY: Here, reporting
from the Coffee With a Googler stage
on level two in the Moscone.
I'm going to be chatting today with Ellie powers, who's
a Product Manager on the Google Play
team, who gave us a wickedly great keynote this morning.
Thanks, Ellie.
So tell us all about what you do at Google Play and some
of the stuff you spoke about in the keynote.
ELLIE POWERS: Well, so I'm a product manager, which
means I work on all sorts of new products and services
for our developers and our users.
So we're constantly trying to understand,
as the world of Android grows, what
do developers and users need to have a better experience.
And so for users that can mean how do we
surface the right apps to them?
How do we help them find what they want?
How do we help them explore and do
the most with their phones and tablets that they possibly can?
LAURENCE MORONEY: As a parent myself
I saw some of this stuff on families that you spoke about.
That looked really, really cool, because my kids use the Play
Store all the time, and I don't want them
to find anything inappropriate.
Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
ELLIE POWERS: Sure, so we saw basically
exactly what you've been seeing with your kids;
we've seen that about a third of Android users in the US
actually have kids under age 12.
So that's a lot of parents who are out there trying
to find the right content for their kids.
And so we said we can do something that's
better than what we've been doing before,
and what we're so excited to have now is
an easy way for parents to say, let
me find the right content for my kids.
And the right content can mean appropriate for their age,
but also aligned around their interests.
So whether it's like a favorite character,
if they're big fan of Mickey Mouse or something like that--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Dora the Explorer.
ELLIE POWERS: Dora the Explorer, that's my favorite.
They can go and find that content easily and be sure
that that's going to be appropriate for their kids.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So if I'm a developer producing
child-friendly content, how do I get
it like filtered and filed and appropriately listed
in the Store?
ELLIE POWERS: So, if you're a developer on Google Play,
you're already going into the Google Play Developer Console
to publish your app and check on the latest
stats, how much money you're making, things like that.
And so if you just go in there, click on the app
that you want to distribute into our family section,
and then you go to a page called Pricing and Distribution.
Down at the bottom, there's actually a little check box,
and it just walks you through the process.
It shows you exactly what the requirements are,
and you can submit your app, and we'll
let you know as soon as it's approved.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, so is there
some kind of smart work going on in the background
to kind of pick characters out of the app and validate age
appropriateness and all that kind of thing?
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, absolutely, we
really want to have a very professional experience
for the parents.
We want them to be really confident in what
their finding, so we do go in and make sure
that it adheres to all the rules for the program
and make sure that we're not filing
Dora the Explorer under "Star Wars" or something like that.
So we'll make sure that you can actually
find the right content.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I think a "Dora the Explorer"/ "Star
Wars" crossover would be awesome.
ELLIE POWERS: That would be so awesome.
I guess we'd have to put it in both places in that case.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, it'd be really, really neat.
Now I know you also do a lot of stuff
with the Developer's Console.
Can you talk through a little bit about that?
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, absolutely, so one of the biggest
challenges we're seeing the developers are facing today
is that they want to just bring more users to their apps.
So in addition to everything we're doing on the user side
in terms of surfacing the right apps to users,
we're also making it so that developers can take action
to make their apps more discoverable
and to make users more likely to install it.
So there's a couple big things we're doing there.
The first one is we're making it really
easy for developers to create advertising campaigns.
So if you haven't tried it before,
we want to make it possible with just a couple clicks
to start advertising.
So we have something new in the developer console called
Universal App Campaigns, and all you need to know
is just the total budget that you want to spend
and the amount that you want to pay per user.
And we just make it easy.
Within a couple minutes you, can set up your whole ad campaign,
and we'll go and we'll select the right inventory
across Google search, YouTube, AdWords, and the Play Store
Search ads as well, and so that's really easy.
And so probably the next thing you probably
want to see after that is, well, is it working?
If I'm doing certain types of marketing activities,
which ones are going well, which ones aren't?
Where do I want to double down?
Where do I want to cut back?
So we have a new page that we're calling the Conversion Funnel,
and so you're able to see all of basically user
traffic in the Play Store, and you
can see how many users look at your page on Play, how
many of them actually installed the app,
and then how many went on to spend money.
And you can also break that down based
on how the user found your app.
So you can see, oh, this ad campaign that I created,
this is how many installs it was able to get me.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sweet-- I also saw
that you have like an AB testing kind of thing in the Play Store
itself, so you can test your listings?
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, that's exactly right.
So a lot of developers say that they
want to make the best store listing that's going
to appeal to the most users.
But how are you supposed to know if like a red icon
our a blue icon is going to be most effective?
And you can get in the conversation all day,
but without data, it's not really clear
what you're supposed to do.
So you can just create up to three different variants
of your store listing in the Google Play Developer Console,
and then we go on and we test those new graphics and texts
across a bunch of users.
And then we'll tell you, hey, it looks like this one here
is the winner, and you can just switch over to it.
You don't have to do any math.
You don't have to write any code.
We just create everything for you,
and all you need to provide is the graphics and the text.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice, and if I want to make changes
to my graphic and text based on feedback from this testing,
it's pretty fast for me to filter that into the store?
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, absolutely, you can just make the change.
We'll say, this option is the winner,
and you can just click on it, and say, yep,
I want to make that my new Play Store listing.
And then very soon, it'll show up there for everybody.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, and one other thing
that I saw that I was really excited by was developers
can actually have their own page in the store
where they list all of their, apps
and I think that's really powerful.
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, we're really excited about that, too.
Some developers have maybe just one or two apps,
but other developers have a very large catalog actually
of what they've created.
And a lot of developers have told us, well, wouldn't it
be nicer if there was just a single place in the Play Store
where they can send users.
They could say check us out on Google Play
and send the users to that one page.
So now we've made it so that developers can customize
that page, and they can really give it a flavor of their brand
by putting custom graphics there.
And then if they have a certain title,
maybe they've just launched a new game,
they can feature that one at the top of the list,
and then users can go and explore the other apps
and games that they have, too.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I personally
found it's a great way to discover things
that I like, is that usually, if I
like one app from a developer, it's
like liking a book from a particular author,
that you tend to like the other ones from that author.
So if I have that page where I can see the other apps
from that developer, it's great for me as the user,
and it's great for that developer, too.
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, absolutely, we really
hope this can be a way to build loyal fans like you, where
you say, oh I like the first game from this developer.
I'm going to try the next one and the next one
and the next one after that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Exactly, and like if I'm an app developer,
how do I go about getting one of those pages or setting that up?
ELLIE POWERS: Well it's all in the Developer Console, again,
so you just go there.
You click on your store listing, and there's a new experiment
section, and you can set up all the different experiments
that you want to run, and you can go there.
And you can also go to find your developer page in your profile
section, too.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, so basically the Console
is a one-stop shop for all of this stuff?
ELLIE POWERS: Yeah, anything you want to do on Google Play,
you can just go to the Developer Console right there.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, well thank you.
Is there anything else?
We've covered so much.
ELLIE POWERS: Gosh, I think that's pretty much it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's pretty awesome.
So a lot of great new announcements today.
Thanks so much for coming, Ellie.
This has been fabulous.
Great job with the keynote this morning.
It was just wonderful.
We've looked at so many new things
that are available in the Google Play Developer Console.
As Ellie mentioned, there's the advertising.
There's the AB testing.
There's a developer page.
There's the family-friendly stuff,
and there's great new stuff available for Play Games
developers.
So just go and check out the Google Play Developer Console.
If you're submitting any apps, if you're submitting any games,
there's lots of great new tools on there for you.
So thanks, Elie.
ELLIE POWERS: Thank you.