[MUSIC PLAYING]
Good afternoon, everyone, my name's Cliff Samaniego,
and I work on the business development team focused
on Google Play Games.
And today, we're going to talk about understanding
and engaging with your Google Play audience.
The foundation of success for Google Play
is building a great game.
But how do users know what's a great game
versus a mediocre game before they download the APK?
The answer lies with consumer ratings and reviews
that are found on every product page listing on Google Play.
Ratings and reviews largely shape the install and purchase
journey for users and will help forge your success
on our platform.
Over the years, we've seen a direct correlation
between ratings and quality and revenue.
The game developers that have higher ratings
will have a greater opportunity to make
more revenue on Google Play.
So it makes sense that you spend the time looking
at what users have in terms of feedback
and actively managing their feedback.
With ratings and reviews, we also
feel that you have a great opportunity
to talk with your most passionate and engaged
audience.
After all, they're the ones that are leaving you feedback
directly on Google Play.
However, the burden that sometimes
comes with popular games is the influx of reviews.
How can you manage all these reviews that come in?
With 1,000 different reviews, you're
going to see that not all feedback is equal,
and you're going to also experience
the good, the bad, and ugly.
However, this shouldn't deter you
from mining that great information
and understanding user satisfaction and, in the end
result, making improvements to your game quality.
We've recently announced new improvements
that will address a lot of these issues that you face.
That's going to allow you to search, organize, diagnose,
as well as take action very quickly.
Some of these recent enhancements
include ratings over time, where you're
going to see upswings and downswings of ratings for a set
period of time, ratings by device, app version, Android
version, country and language, and more.
You're going to be able to look at review
highlights where we're going to bubble up common themes that
are found in the reviews, the ability
to search through text in reviews,
and also look at device on a per review
basis-- device metadata on a per review basis.
And last but not least, we also made an enhancement
to receive notifications for updated reviews.
Now let's take a look at mastering ratings and reviews
with five very easy tips.
First, be sure to always reply to reviews,
whether they are good or bad.
What you want to do is build your community on Google Play
and make sure that they are being listened to.
Thank them for their suggestions.
Also let them know if any bugs are being addressed.
Include, if you can, your email support alias in the reply,
especially if you're going to have
a lot of bugs that need to be handled in mass,
and your user support team can handle that.
If you follow these steps, users will often
positively change their rating.
Next, make sure you're looking at reviews
and how they change over time, and overlay these
with your updates.
If they do coincide with recent updates,
you're going to be able to drill down a little bit further
to troubleshoot the issue.
Next, take advantage of our new search functionality.
This powerful new release is going
to allow you to run queries on a lot of different parameters
that include ratings, language, app version, devices, and more.
We also recently launched review highlights,
where we're going to bubble up common keywords that
are found in your user reviews.
This will help you drill down on immediate needs.
It will also help you prioritize surface topics.
These will actually be surfaced on the product page listing,
so be sure to prioritize these when you see them.
Last but not least, after you've identified key themes
is to have dialogues and take actions.
There's two tools that are going to help you out with this.
The first is our recently launched notifications tool.
That's going to keep you updated any time a user has
amended their feedback or their ratings or comments.
Also, set alerts within the developer
console, and that'll keep you informed
of any swings in terms of crashes, installs, and ratings.
Thank you very much.
And, hopefully, you are having a bit better understanding
of your Google Play audience.
And with that, I'd like to introduce Mark Chambers.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]