If you've implemented app indexing,
you're getting all the benefits of new users clicking
on app pages and installing your app from search results,
as well as your current users returning to your app
again and again.
But once you're there, how do you know how you're doing?
You could, of course, enlist your coworkers, your friends,
or your family to do searches on their phones
and see if deep links from your app show up.
But wouldn't it be nice if you could
track where your app shows up in search results, for which
queries, which content from your app is most popular,
or if there are any technical issues?
There is a better way.
My name is Mariya, and I'll show you
how to use the new reports of Search Console
to get deep insights on how to optimize
your app's performance in search results
and get found on Google.
By the way, if you haven't yet implemented app indexing
and you want to know how to do that,
check out the developer site.
It has the most detailed information.
Back to Google Search Console.
It's a free tool that shows you how
Google understands and treats your content in search results.
In fact, it's the best place to look for top query, top app
page data, as well as for app indexing and technical issues.
To be clear, Google Search Console
is different from analytics.
If you imagine the process of search
with the click as the middle point,
analytics typically focuses on how
the user is behaving after they click--
what are they doing inside your app, what are they clicking on,
how often they click, and so forth-- whereas Google Search
Console focuses on what happens before someone enters your app.
Specifically, if you've implemented app indexing,
Search Console will provide you a ton
of data about how users are searching for, finding,
and navigating to content inside your app.
It can even show you the times when
your app showed up in search but no one clicked on it.
So let's take a quick look at how
to use Search Console to improve your app's discoverability.
We'll use a recipe app as an example.
It's got a bunch of pages which are already indexed.
Are you ready?
Let's go.
Search Console shows a lot of very comprehensive data
about your app, so we don't just show it to anyone.
No, no, no.
You need to verify that you are the owner of the app first.
It's simple.
You just need to enter Search Console using your Google Play
account and add the app from there.
The Google Play account is necessary to prove
you really do own the app.
Now we can see the app dashboard.
It might take a day or two before your app's data appears,
and in the meantime, what you can do
is connect your app to your website inside Search Console.
Associating your site to your app
is necessary for app indexing to work.
Plus, it helps with understanding and ranking
the app content better.
So now that we've finally got our data, let's see,
what can we do with it?
Remember earlier when we were doing random queries
on our phone trying to see if a deep link was triggered?
Let's look at how to do that the smart way.
The first and most important thing
you can find out from Search Console,
how well is your app doing in search?
For a recipe app, how can we find out
which are the most popular dishes?
Every app developer has specific business goals, a target
audience, and success metrics to keep track of regularly.
For our recipe app, we want to increase the user base
and get more regular users.
We're primarily targeting English speaking users
on their phone in the kitchen looking for something to cook.
Who's actually searching for and finding content in your app?
You can find out where the users are from,
what devices they're using, and what they're looking for.
The search analytics report in Search Console
has all of this info.
In search analytics, you can immediately
see the top queries for which your app pages show.
There are also options to filter by specific queries,
by country, or by app page.
For our recipe app, we recently added a lot of salad recipes.
So let's see if any of them are actually
showing up for salad queries.
You can add filters to highlight only a type of query--
for example, queries containing the word "salad."
In our case, we're getting very few clicks
for salad-related queries for the past month.
Is this because they don't show up in search?
Let's see.
You can add impressions as an additional metric,
so you can compare how many people
saw a deep link versus how many actually clicked on it.
Hm.
It looks like salads are not as popular as we thought.
App pages from our recipe app get decent impressions but very
few clicks for salad-related queries.
What is popular then?
If you sort by clickthrough rate,
you find the most convertible queries.
Summer desserts.
Our app shows up a lot for summer dessert queries
like fresh berry cake and peach cheesecake,
and people are clicking through.
In this case, it might be a good idea
to beef up the desserts section of our app.
Now, let's see which are our most popular recipes.
You can do this from the Top Pages filter.
Here again, it's useful to compare your expectations--
which pages do you consider most important-- with the ones
that people actually search for and click on.
If there is very little overlap, you
may need to restructure your navigation,
or make the most important content easier to find.
Another thing to consider is, have you provided deep links
to all of your app pages?
If we encounter errors while indexing your app content,
we won't be able to show deep links for those app pages
and search results.
So it's important to keep track of new errors in Search Console
and debug the underlying cause.
Here is our Crawl Errors report.
You can find the type and the number of errors
we've detected.
Turns out our recipe app has two types
of errors, content mismatch and back button behavior.
That's why app deep links were not
showing up in search results.
Content mismatch means that the app content
is too different from the content
of the corresponding web page.
As for the back button behavior, we
want to make sure people are not trapped and can get back
to the search results.
You can investigate specific error types
to see a list of sample pages with that problem.
Let's take one of the content mismatch errors from our recipe
app to see how to debug it.
Each example app page show its corresponding web page,
the dates when we last crawled both, also
step-by-step instructions on how to fix the specific error.
For content mismatch errors, it's
really useful to see your app page the way
Google sees it to understand where
the mismatch is coming from.
Try the Fetch as Google feature.
Compare the rendered result with the corresponding web page,
and see what you need to fix.
In our case, it seems to be a pop-up window asking users
to sign in or create a profile, which makes the render app page
content appear very different from the web page content.
Removing that fixes the content mismatch issue.
Mystery solved.
We took care of the app indexing errors,
and our app pages are beginning to show up in search results.
So now you know how to use Search Console to monitor
your app for errors, and improve your app's visibility in search
results.
To get started on analyzing and troubleshooting your own app,
add it to Search Console now.
If you want to know more about app indexing,
check out our developer site in your next video.
And don't forget to try out the delicious lava cake
recipe in our app.
Thanks for watching.
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