• Better Stats for Better Decisions
  • Google Play Apps & Games Team
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: BriFuture
  • Proofreader: Jianboy

The latest Google Play Console and Firebase can help you analyze your audience

Tom Grinsted (Product Manager, Google Play Console) and Tamzin Taylor (Head of Apps & Games, Google Play Western Europe)

Google Play generates more than 3 billion events a day, including store searches, details page views and app installs. Part of our job is to quantify all the events and the data that come with them into metrics, and to do the analysis and build tools that allow you to make better decisions.

When you think about what you do every day in business, you make decisions all the time, lots of decisions: about business, about acquisition, about development, about product planning. Good data analysis leads to informed decisions.

In this article we’ll discuss some of the most important tools you can use to discover, capture, interact, and profit. We also introduce tools in the user lifecycle model that help with benchmarks, perspectives, and decision making.

User life cycle

Like every good journey, you need to start somewhere: you need a framework that allows you to think as a developer about what benchmarks, perspectives and tools you need to improve your app and build your business. This framework is the user lifecycle.

The life cycle begins with discovery and acquisition. The stage is to go in front of everyone and tell them that you made a really fun app or game and they install it.

Once installed, it’s all about interaction and profit. Now you have to get people to use your product every day: open it and (preferably) love it. They also buy in-app goods and subscribe, so you can get revenue.

It would be great if everyone you get keeps using your app and that’s the end of the story, but unfortunately, you’re overthinking it. For whatever reason, someone will uninstall your app or game and become a churn.

This is not necessarily the end of the story. Convince people to come back, keep the user lifecycle going, give you a second or third chance, tell them about the wonderful new features in your app, and convince them they’ll want to try it again.

It was within this framework that we and our colleagues at Google Play thought about the challenges ahead of us.

Tools for discovery and acquisition

Before we look at the tools that help us make decisions, let’s take a look at three features in the Google Play Store: Early Access, pre-registration, and Google Play Install Free (Instant).

Early Access programs allow you to discover users before the official app is released. When you put your app or game on the Open download channel of the Google Play Console, it’s available to one of the 230 million users who participate in the open beta, and more than 2.5 million new users sign up every week.

Then there’s pre-registration. With this feature you can put your app or game on the Play store, but people will only see the pre-registration button instead of the Install button. Once someone shows up, you can tell them when the app or game will be released.

Ville Heijari, marketing director at Rovio Entertainment, commented: “Pre-registration is useful to keep your fans excited about upcoming games and to keep them informed when the game is released.”

The third feature is Google Play Instant (install free). This is an extension of install-free apps, which can provide a small portion of the app experience, allowing users to try out an app or game without installing an app.

“We’ve almost doubled click-through rates for all the apps in our store listings,” says Oliver Birch, a market forecaster at Hothead Games, which has enabled Google Play Instant. New users grew by more than 19%. [As a result] we are planning a install-free promotion for all of our games.”

However, you can only manage what you can measure. To support the launch of Google Play Instant and help you understand its contribution to your bottom line, there are new statistics in the Play Console,

You can now see how many Instant Apps are launched and converted, and how many times a user opens your App and downloads the full version. Also, since the data is in the Play Console, you can use other key metrics, such as installs and revenue, to slice and aggregate the information. The added data tracks which product — the browser, Search, or Play store — drives your install-free app to success.

Now you probably care about getting valuable users. The buyer acquisition report always does the job, it will show you how to turn visitors in the Play Store into repeat customers, and now it will tell you the average revenue per user (ARPU) in each phase.

With this improvement, you can clearly see what the average cost per user is, what you’re getting from different marketing channels, including natural traffic. Whether you’re using the classic CPM model, the cost-per-install model, or pushing value to the top of the funnel, this information is important to evaluate your strategy and make better decisions.

Finally, there are new benchmarks for the discussion of discovery and acquisition.

Benchmarks are great because they help you focus on investing in the things that yield the highest returns. Retention of your app’s installers is the benchmark for the user acquisition funnel, which also includes all the natural traffic to see where there are opportunities for improvement and where your investment pays off.

Brandon Ross, partner strategist at Intuit partners, commented, “Natural Benchmarks helped us measure conversion rates against our peers and helped us optimize search and conversion.”

Tools to enhance and profit

Let’s broaden our horizons and talk about the Firebase tools and the tools in the Google Play Console.

First, don’t forget the Events Timeline in the Google Play Console.

This new report provides situational information at the bottom of the chart on the stats page, in the Android Vitas control panel, in the Subscription control panel, and in other charts on the Play Console. The report will show information about relevant events that affect the application, such as the usage of new versions. For example, you can see whether the average ratio change or price change associated with the release of a new version increases or decreases ARPU.

When it comes to exploring the way people interact with applications, Firebase’s tool can now be even more helpful. In particular, linking the Analytics SDK to your app will enable Google Analytics for Firebase, which of course requires signing up for the service.

Right out of the box, Google Analytics for Firebase provides meaningful metrics for interaction and retention of users. However, you can also write code to track the activities that have the most impact on your app or game.

Parsing all the information you get from Google Analytics for Firebase can sometimes be a challenge, but Firebase Predictions makes it much easier.

Firebase Predictions uses analytical data, combined with machine learning and other tools to predict for you how people will use the application. By default, you can get estimates of user spending and churn. Moreover, you can build your own apps that predict the features and behaviors that are most important to you.

Next comes the monetization phase, where there have been some improvements to subscription messaging. The Subscription Dashboard, which has been available since last year, is used regularly by most of the most profitable subscription businesses. That’s why we’ve been enhancing the functionality of this panel, including improved reports on user retention and deletion.

Keep an eye out for upcoming updates to subscribe, keep, and delete reports, which will make it easier to compare similar groups and evaluate important features like free trials and account retention. You can also easily track more important data like renewals.

With the peer Group selector, you can select a group of users by SKU (inventory unit), date, and country. Using this feature, you can focus on a group of subscribers and analyze their behavior. For example, you can choose a free trial SKU and compare it to a product price SKU to see which one is more profitable.

When it comes to reducing subscriptions, updating the uninstall report will help you get more information about why people are unsubscribing.

When a user cancels a subscription, ask them to fill out a questionnaire so they can explain why they cancelled. And the results of these surveys can be viewed from the subscription control panel.

The control panel can now also report user regression features such as account retention and longevity.

The user returns and reinstalls

The Play Console provides reports about uninstalls, such as daily uninstalls or uninstalls events. Also, in the saved installer acquisition report, you can find things like how long people kept the app.

We hear from a lot of developers that they want more information, and we can understand why. Later this year, you’ll see some new features, such as the ability to analyze how many people are uninstalling your app and how many are installing your app. So stay tuned for more updates.

Application control panel

All the new information brings challenges. You have enough on your plate as a developer. You have a bunch of tools from Google and others, and you get all the information you need from a lot of places. What you need is an easy way to view the information that the Play Console must provide and that is important to you.

One solution: The App control panel in the Google Play Console.

The app Control Panel is the page that opens when you select an app on the Google Play Console. The first is the trend information provided: installations, revenue, ratings, crashes, etc. This is followed by a complementary set of data such as installs and uninstalls, total revenue and revenue per user (RPU).

Panels can be customised, with each section being unfolded or folded. So if you’re interested in revenue, you can expand this part, but if you’re not so interested in pre-registration, you can fold this part over. The panel remembers your preferences and leaves you exactly where you left off.

The final language

The user lifecycle has become an important way to drive new features and updates to the Google Play Console. As a result, these changes are meant to help you optimize every stage: from Google Play Instant and pre-registration for discovery and acquisition, to new subscription reports, enhanced acquisition reports, new event timelines, and uninstall statistics. This information and other details, such as technical capabilities, are contained in the application control panel.

All the tools here will help you succeed by giving you a better understanding of your users. If you want to learn more, check out more about best practices for capture, or learn more about releases in the I/O 2018 conference below.

  • YouTube video link: youtu.be/oib_gHJA_-0…

What do you think?

Do you have any ideas about analytics app acquisition and interaction? Leave a comment below or join the discussion at #AskPlayDev on Twitter, where we respond with @Googleplaydev, where we often share news and tips on how to succeed in GooglePlay.

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