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Hi, I'm Ryan, engineer at Google Play.
In this webinar, I'll walk you through the revamped user acquisition features
in the new Play Console.
Our goal is to help you grow your audience.
A key way we do this
is by providing access to insights
that help you better understand where your users come from
and how to optimize your store listing.
Based on your feedback,
acquisition reports now help you better monitor
your app's acquisition trends over time,
evaluate the impact of your marketing changes,
and identify new opportunities to optimize.
We'll do that in a few ways.
First, by showing you a time-series view
of your store performance metrics,
so you can see what's changing, when, and why.
Second, by including new dimensions, like returning users,
which we know are important to your business.
Third, by letting you filter multiple dimensions at the same time
for a more targeted view of the data.
Finally, by extending peer comparison benchmarks
to all of your traffic,
so you can identify more marketing opportunities.
In this webinar, I'll show you how to use these features and more
to make the most of the new acquisition reports
in Google Play Console.
Timestamps are included in the video description
if you want to jump ahead.
We've introduced two new pages under Store performance
in the Grow section of Play Console.
First, let's look at Store analysis.
This offers a high-level view of your store performance
across different dimensions,
so you can decide where to investigate.
To better help you monitor your store listings performance over time,
we present your app's store listing acquisitions in a time-series view,
so you don't need to toggle between cohorts,
like in the classic report.
Acquisitions are broken down by traffic source,
which is where the user came from,
before they visited your app's store listing.
These include Search,
for users who performed a search to find your app on Google Play;
Explore, for users who found your app from Google Play
but not from searching;
and Third-Party Referral,
for users who landed on your store listing directly from a link
originating outside of the Play Store.
We're regularly assessing how to better meet your needs
as the Play Store continues to expand and evolve.
So, we've changed our classification of where the user came from
to better align with how you measure App Store Optimization changes.
Google Play Search now includes users who visited your app
directly from Play Store Search autocomplete app suggestions,
even if they skipped the full search results page.
This is in addition to users
who reached your store listing from search results
or saw a preview of your store listing in search results.
We classify all traffic based on where the user came from
before reaching your store listing,
so you understand how your assets affect each experience.
That means Google Play Search ads
are now a part of Google Play Search,
since that's where the user discovered your app.
Ads and other links from outside of Google Play
still count as third-party referrals.
You can continue to monitor these more granularly
using UTM tags.
Even though we no longer break out Google Ads traffic,
you can still view the performance of your App Campaigns
directly in Google Ads.
For more information about the changes to metric and traffic source definitions,
click the link in the video description
to visit our Help Center article.
You can also click the Learn More button in Play Console
for more useful resources.
Next, let's focus on the updated metrics,
store listing visitors, acquisitions, and conversion rate.
In the following section of the dashboard,
you'll see how each of these metrics is trending
and the percent change,
indicating whether they've gone up or down
relative to the previous period.
Store listing visitors
are the number of users who saw your app's store listing on a given day
and didn't already have your app installed on any of their devices.
Compared to the classic product,
we've improved deduplication
to better reflect how many unique opportunities you had
to acquire a user.
While most users will be counted once,
some users will be counted multiple times
if they discover your app in different ways,
like a search and an off-site ad, during the same day.
Store listing acquisitions are the number of users
who installed your app from the store listing
and didn't already have your app installed on any of their devices.
This number will be lower than your total number of installs,
since the user who installs on three different devices
will only be counted once.
Acquisitions are only counted if the install completes
shortly after the user store listing visit.
So, some apps may see fewer acquisitions
compared to the classic report, which included a longer period.
We've made this change to better reflect the effectiveness of your store listing,
so you should see stable metrics faster
to support more timely marketing decisions.
In the classic Play Console,
we heard that only counting first time installers,
who never installed the app before,
made it challenging to evaluate your overall acquisition success.
So, the report now includes returning users
who uninstalled your app from all of their devices before,
since we appreciate they are just as important to your business
as new users.
Because of this change,
many apps will see more total visitors or acquisitions.
Lastly, the store listing conversion rate
is the percentage of visitors who became acquired users
by clicking the install button on your store listing.
For most apps, the rate will be higher than in the classic product,
based on the collective changes to visitors and acquisitions.
Since all three metrics are related,
we visualize them together
to give you a better picture of what's going on.
For example, if your acquisitions went down
because you had fewer visitors,
you should try to drive more traffic to your store listing
to get more opportunities to convert.
On the other hand, if acquisitions went down and visitors stayed the same,
your store listing has become less effective
at getting users to install.
You should update it to improve your conversion rate.
Now that you know what's in the reports,
let's explore ways to customize them.
We listened to your feedback
that you wanted to explore multiple dimensions at the same time,
which is why we've added filters.
You can now filter the entire page
by any number of countries, languages, and app install state.
App install state lets you split out new users,
returning users, or both.
This offers a top-level view of any segment of your audience
so you can see changes to your organic versus referral traffic,
conversion rate, and more.
There are more tables at the bottom of the page
showing your top acquisition performers for other dimensions.
From here, you can easily click to explore any dimension, like country,
or specific selections, like Germany,
to drill down for a more detailed view.
There are even more ways to customize your report
on the store listing conversion analysis page.
Start by choosing the time period you want to view,
which can be one of the easy-to-use presets
or a custom range.
You might want to examine the first few days
after you updated your app's icon
to see if it attracted more visitors,
or maybe you want to look at several weeks,
coinciding with the marketing campaign,
to see if that increased acquisitions.
Next, pick which of the eight different dimensions
you want to view by.
We've already talked about traffic source and country
along with new options for language and app install state.
Other popular choices include terms users searched for
to find your app on Google Play
and the UTM sources and campaigns
that you and partners include
in the URL tracking parameters of your third-party referrals
with newly added custom store listings as a dimension as well.
Once you've decided on a dimension,
you can select up to 10 different values
to plot in the charts below.
For example, you might want to plot a few of your top search terms.
Also, in response to your feedback,
we've updated our grouping logic,
so you should see more unique values for sparse dimensions,
like search terms and UTM campaigns,
and less things bundled into Other.
Finally, you can apply filters on one or a combination of dimensions
to hone your analysis.
Here, we'll limit search terms to just new users
in the US or Canada
to see how brand awareness is trending.
Once you've configured the report,
you'll see a time-series view of story listing visitors,
acquisitions, and conversion rate
for your chosen dimension values.
The URL is shareable
so your teammates can click to load the same configuration
and see the same dataset.
Coming soon, you'll be able to export data from here as well.
At the bottom of the page,
there's a summary table for your selected period
with a sum of daily visitors, acquisitions,
and your app's weighted average conversion rate.
In addition to the values you chose to plot at the top of the page,
you'll see totals for other dimension values here as well.
So, you can see whether they're trending up or down,
so you can decide whether they're worth digging into further.
We've heard that comparing your app's performance to similar apps
is really helpful for finding new opportunities,
which is why we'll be launching expanded peer comparison benchmarks soon.
These comparisons highlight
where your app's store listing is doing better than your peers
and where you still have room for improvement,
which is particularly useful
when prioritizing which marketing strategies to employ next.
We're happy to announce that we're extending
peer comparison benchmarks in a number of ways.
First, peer comparisons will be available for all traffic sources,
including third-party referrals and your overall traffic.
Second, peer comparisons will be available for more dimensions,
including countries, languages,
new users, returning users, or both.
Third, peer comparisons will be compatible with filters.
This means you could compare your search, explore,
and referral performance
when filtering to only new users in one particular country.
We're also adding peer comparisons to the new charts
so you can monitor how they change over time.
This can help you understand
whether shifts have affected the whole ecosystem
or are specific to your app
and worth investigating.
Last year, we introduced over 150 smaller curated groups of apps and games
that you can choose from for more specific topics
and are continuing to update these over time.
These are meant to be more relevant and actionable
while still keeping your app's individual stats private,
using the same peer groups available on the Statistics page,
and they've been newly added to your Android vitals as well.
Oftentimes, you'll find that your app is related
to more than just one category.
That's why we let you see peer comparisons for all of them.
For example, if you have a fitness app,
which also prominently features music,
you could look at both category benchmarks.
Visit the store settings page and grow store presence
to learn more about what tags are available
and tell us which best describe your app's content
so that we can give you better recommendations.
There are several other Play Console tools
that you can use to optimize your store listing,
based on the insights that you draw from the reports.
If your app has a low conversion rate in certain languages,
consider using Play Console's translation service
or adding custom localizations to your store listing.
Then you can use the acquisition report's language dimension
to see if your conversion rate improved.
If your app has a large number of visitors in certain countries,
consider creating a custom store listing,
where you can tailor your text, screenshots, and videos
for different interests or holidays.
Then you can use the Acquisition report's store listing dimension
to measure how they're doing
and decide if you want to make changes or add new targeting options.
When you have an idea for a change,
we encourage you to start with store listing experiments.
The updated step-by-step flow
lets you gradually configure changes to the assets that are seen here
and only test them on a subset of users
who visit your store listing.
You provide the assets, and we do the analysis for you.
The results are updated every few hours,
and you can opt in to email notifications
to be alerted when we've seen enough to recommend the winner.
You can wait to apply the changes to all users
until you're confident that you'll see an improvement.
There are some tips and tricks for making the most of SLE
in the Developer Guide.
You can find a link in the video description below.
For games, in particular, the most prominent assets
are your icons, screenshots, and videos.
So, consider trying these first.
To get the clearest results, test just a single asset at a time.
If you adjust too many things at once,
you won't know what actually drove the change in acquisitions.
Test for at least one full week
to include weekday and weekend performance.
When you have a new version that seems to be working,
promote that one to be your new store listing,
but keep the original as a small experiment
to ensure that the new one is still performing better.
Finally, let's take a look at some of the other Statistics pages
that continue to be relevant for monitoring your acquisition.
To complement the new acquisition reports,
we'll soon be updating the user acquisition section
of your app dashboard
with more relevant store performance metrics
so you can get a quick pulse check
on what's changed since you last logged in.
You'll notice here that all charts react to any screen size.
So, you can monitor data on the go, on mobile,
or make the most of a large desktop
to see complex data clearly.
All charts are also using a refreshed color palette
to improve readability and accessibility.
Although we focus, so far, on store listing acquisitions,
you can still view all of your apps acquisitions
on the Statistics page.
This includes users whose app was preinstalled
or downloaded peer-to-peer.
We've made configuring your report
a more intuitive and focused experience
by placing advanced options behind an Edit button.
You can also save your report with a custom name,
so you can quickly revisit it another time.
You can share the URL of any report you've configured with teammates
even if it's not saved,
and you can export the data directly from the UI.
I hope this video helped you understand how the new acquisition reports
can help you further your success with Google Play.
While you're trying it,
don't forget these key new features:
view new trends to monitor changes over time;
explore new dimensions, like returning users;
use filters to analyze across different dimensions;
and coming soon, make more peer comparisons
to decide where to optimize your story listing
with Play Console tools.
Give the new Play Console a try.
If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.
We hope that you found this session helpful.
Thank you, everyone. Stay safe and healthy.
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