Does It Cost to Upload an App to Google Play
A guide to the Google Play Console
Whether you're in a business or technical function, in a team of 1 or 100, the Play Panel can help you with more than publishing
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You may have used the Google Play Console to upload an Android app or game, create a store listing, and hit publish to attain an audience on Google Play. But you may not realize that the Play Console has a lot more to offer, especially to those focused on improving the quality and business organization functioning of their app.
Join me for a bout of the Play Console; I'll innovate each feature and point you lot to some useful resources to make the almost of them. Once you become familiar with the features, you can take reward of user management controls to grant your teammates access to the correct features or data that they need. Note: when I say 'app' in this post, I generally mean 'app or game'.
Bound to a section:
- Observe your way around
- Dashboard and statistics
- Android vitals
- Development tools
- Release direction
- Shop presence
- User conquering
- Financial reports
- User feedback
- Global Play Panel sections
- Get the Play Panel app
- Stay up to appointment
- Questions?
Find your manner around
If y'all've been invited to assistance manage an app or you've already uploaded an app, when you access the Play Console you'll see something like this:
In this post I'll presume you lot accept an app. If you're getting started and publishing your commencement app, take a look at the launch checklist. I'll come up back to the global carte du jour options (games services, alerts, and settings) later.
Option an app from the list and you are taken to its dashboard. On the left-mitt side there is a navigation bill of fare (☰) with quick access to all the Play Console's tools, let's look at each in plow.
Dashboard and statistics
The first 2 items are dashboard and statistics. These related reports give y'all an overview of how your app is performing.
The dashboard answers key questions you have nigh your app with summaries of installs and uninstalls, height installing countries, active installs, ratings volume and value, crashes, Android vitals, and pre-launch reports. For each summary, click explore or view for more detailed information. You tin can switch the view between 7 days, 30 days, 1 year, and the app's lifetime.
Hopefully, the summary shows your app is succeeding with cracking install rates and few crashes. A quick glance at the dashboard is a simple way to see if anything isn't going as expected, look out for: increasing uninstalls, increasing crashes, a sliding rating, and other poorly performing metrics. If all isn't as you hoped, so you or your engineers can access more details to find the crusade of unlike issues.
Statistics lets you build a view of the app data that matters to you. In addition to seeing data over any engagement range, you lot can plot ii metrics simultaneously and compare them to a previous period. You can go a full breakup of statistics past a chosen dimension (such every bit device, land, linguistic communication, or app version) in a table below the graph. Some stats offer plots at hourly intervals, for more detailed insights. Events (such as app releases or sales) appear on the graph and in the events timeline below it, so y'all tin can see how they impacted your stats.
As an example, yous might be running a new app promotion in Brazil. You tin configure the report to show installs by country, filter the country list down to Brazil (from the dimensions table), and so compare the data with that from an earlier campaign to become a clear picture of how your promotion is going.
More resources for the dashboard and statistics
- Monitor your app's stats, and review alerts for unexpected changes
- Clarify your audition & criterion metrics to grow on Play (I/O '18 session)
Android vitals
Big Fish Games used Android vitals to reduce crashes past 21% in their hitting time management game, Cooking Craze.
Android vitals is all about your app'due south quality, equally measured by its performance and stability. An internal Google study conducted terminal yr looked at one-star reviews on the Play Store and found fifty% mentioned app stability and bugs. By addressing these issues y'all'll positively impact user satisfaction, resulting in more people leaving positive reviews and keeping your app installed. When there is enough aggregated data, Android vitals can provide information well-nigh five aspects of your app's operation: battery life, rendering (also known equally jank), stability, startup time, and permission denials.
The kickoff two measures — stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups — indicate if the app is adversely affecting battery life. The reports show where the app has asked a device to remain on for long periods (an hour or more), or is frequently asking the device to wake upward (more than 10 wakeups per hour since a device was fully charged).
Information on app stability takes the form of the ANR (App Not Responding) and crash rate reports. The summary, as all the summaries in this section exercise, provides breakdowns by app version, device, and Android version. From the summary, you lot can drill down into details designed to help developers identify the cause of these problems. Recent improvements to the dashboard provide significantly more than detail on ANRs and crashes, making them easier to diagnose and fix. Engineers tin get more details from the ANRs & crashes section and load de-obfuscation files, which assistance improve the readability of crash reports.
The next two measures — slow rendering and frozen frames — relate to what developers call jank, or an inconsistent frame rate within an app's UI. When jank occurs, an app'due south UI judders and stalls, leading to a poor user experience. These stats tell you about the number of users who have:
- Had more 15% of frames take over 16 milliseconds to render, or
- Experienced at to the lowest degree one frame out of 1,000 with a render time of greater than 700 milliseconds.
Information on ho-hum app startup time gives you details of the percentage of sessions where cold starts took more than 5 seconds, warm starts took more than two seconds, and hot starts took more than a 2d.
The final vital is permission denials, where you encounter the percentage of daily permission sessions during which users denied permissions or denied permissions by selecting 'never inquire again'. A count of the approximate number of sessions recorded is also provided.
Behavior thresholds
For each metric, y'all'll come across a bad behavior threshold. If 1 of your Android vitals exceeds the bad behavior threshold, yous run across a red error icon. This icon means your app's score is higher than other apps for that metric (and, in this case, being higher is worse!). You'll also see anomalies in whatsoever vitals, when there's a sudden change you lot should be enlightened of. You lot should address poor performance every bit soon as possible, because your audience is having bad user experience, and your app volition exist performing worse on the Play Shop. This is because Google Play'due south search and ranking algorithms, every bit well as all promotional opportunities that include the Google Play Awards, take into business relationship an app's vitals. Exceeding bad beliefs thresholds contributes to downranking.
More resource for Android vitals
- Use Android vitals to improve your app's operation and stability
- Learn how to debug and set issues in the Android vitals documentation
- How to fix app quality issues with Android vitals (Part one) (Medium post)
- Android vitals: debug app functioning and reap rewards (I/O '18 session)
- Quality over quantity: why quality matters (Playtime '17 session)
Evolution tools
I'll pass over this section; it'southward a few tools for technical users of the console. The services and APIs department lists the keys and IDs for various services and APIs, such as Firebase Cloud Messaging and Google Play games services. While FCM statistics shows you data associated with messages sent through Firebase Cloud Messaging. For more info visit the assist center.
Release management
Zalando focused on quality and used release management tools to reduce crashes by ninety% and increase user lifetime value by 15% on a quarterly ground.
In the release management section, y'all command how your new or updated app gets to people's devices. This includes testing your app before release, setting the correct device targeting, and managing and monitoring updates in the testing and production tracks in real-time.
Every bit an app release is taking place, the release dashboard gives you a holistic view of of import statistics. You tin also compare your electric current release with a past release. Y'all might want to compare confronting a less satisfactory release, to make sure that similar trends aren't repeating. Or, you tin can compare against your best release to come across if yous've improved farther.
You should use staged rollouts for your releases. Yous cull a per centum of your audience to receive the app update, then monitor the release dashboard. If things aren't going well — for instance, crashes are spiking, ratings are falling, or uninstalls are increasing — before as well many users are affected, y'all can click manage release and append the rollout. Hopefully, an engineer so resolve the result before resuming the rollout (if the issue didn't need an app update) or starting a new release (if an update was needed). When everything is going well, you tin can go along to increment the percentage of your audience who receive the update, until you lot accomplish 100%.
Google Play allows you to go through beta to your soft launch right through to global launch, constantly getting feedback from users. And this allows u.s.a. to look at real information and to brand the best possible game for our players.
— David Barretto, Co-Founder and CEO of Hutch Games
App releases is where apps (your Android App Bundles or APKs) are uploaded and prepared for release. Apps can be released to different tracks: internal, closed, open, and production. Use the internal track to release your app to up to 100 testers in seconds for internal testing and quality assurance checks. Use the closed testing track to exam pre-release versions of your app with a larger set of testers. If needed, you lot can as well create multiple airtight tracks to test different versions of your app. When you're ready, you can move to the open up testing track to expand your test to a wider audience. Ratings and reviews you receive during your open test won't bear upon your app'south public shop listing. Saving your release as a draft is a skilful way to ensure all your app'southward details are accurate and avoid mistakes before you lot're ready to roll information technology out.
When you upload an Android App Bundle, Google Play automatically generates separate APKs and multi-APKs for all device configurations your app supports. In the Play Panel, yous tin can utilise the App Package Explorer to see all APK artifacts that Google Play generates; inspect information such as supported devices and APK size savings; and download generated APKs to deploy and test locally.
[Instant Apps] makes information technology like shooting fish in a barrel for a user to have a swell app experience without the actress step of installing the app from the Play Store. We are already seeing dandy success with our instant app.
- Laurie Kahn, Master Product Managing director at Realtor.com
The Android Instant Apps section is like app releases, except information technology's for instant apps. If you're not familiar with instant apps, they permit users to instantly access a part of your app'due south functionality from a link, rather than having to spend time downloading your full app from the Play Store. Cheque out the Android Instant Apps documentation for more details.
The artifact library is a technical department. It's a collection of all the files, such as APKs, you've uploaded for your releases. If there's some reason you need to, you can wait dorsum and download certain, old APKs from here.
On first use, [the device catalog] saved me from making a bad, uninformed determination. I was planning to exclude a device, merely then I discovered it had good installs, a 4.6 rating, and significant 30d revenue. Having such data in the catalog is awesome!
- Oliver Miao, Founder and CEO of Pixelberry Studios
The device catalog includes thousands of Android and Chrome Bone devices certified by Google, offer the ability to search and view device specs. With the granular filtering controls bachelor, you lot tin can exclude a narrow range of problem devices in order to offer the best feel on all devices your app supports. You tin individually exclude devices and/or set rules by operation indicators such as RAM and Organisation on Fleck. The catalog too shows installs, ratings, and revenue contributed past each device type. A low boilerplate rating on a specific device, for example, could exist the result of a device result not defenseless in full general testing. Y'all could exclude a device like that and temporarily halt new installs until you lot've rolled out a fix.
Play App Signing is a service we introduced to assistance continue your app signing primal secure. Every app on Google Play is signed by its developer, providing a traceable verification that the developer who claims to accept written the app did write the app. If the central used to sign an app is lost, information technology's a major issue. Yous wouldn't be able to update your app. Instead, y'all'd need to upload a new app, losing the app's history of installs, ratings, and reviews and potentially causing user defoliation when you try to become them to switch over. With app signing, after opting in you upload your app signing keys to store them securely in Google's cloud. It'south the aforementioned technology nosotros use at Google to shop our app keys, backed past our industry-leading security infrastructure. The uploaded keys are then used to sign your apps when y'all submit updates. When you upload a brand new app, it'southward easy to enroll in app signing during the first upload. Nosotros'll generate an app signing cardinal for you.
Language learning app developer Erudite attributed utilise of the pre-launch report to increasing retentiveness rate by 60%.
The final option in this section is pre-launch study. When you upload your app to the closed or open testing tracks, we'll run automated tests on popular devices with a range of specifications in the Firebase Test Lab for Android and share the results. These tests expect for certain errors and issues relating to crashes, operation, and security vulnerabilities. Yous tin extend the standard tests to harder to reach parts of your app by creating demo loops for games written with OpenGL, recording scripts in Android Studio for the examination crawler to follow, identifying deep links, and providing credentials to go behind logins. In add-on to reporting crashes, functioning, and security bug, screenshots of your app running on unlike devices and in different languages are bachelor to view. Tests are besides run for apps using Google Play licensing services.
Express or incomplete testing tin result in the launch of an app whose quality leads to low ratings and negative reviews, a state of affairs that can be difficult to recover from. The pre-launch study is a proficient starting betoken for a thorough examination strategy and can help you identify and fix common issues in your app. Even so, you lot'll still demand to run a suite of tests that comprehensively check your app. Building tests in the Firebase Test Lab for Android, which offers additional functionality over the pre-launch report, and taking reward of the lab's ability to run those tests automatically on multiple devices, can be more constructive and efficient than transmission testing.
More than resources for release management
- See user expectations by testing against the quality guidelines
- Use pre-launch and crash reports to ameliorate your app
- Use test tracks to get invaluable early feedback
- Autonomous & customized pre-launch testing in Play Console (I/O '18 session)
- Build the new, modular Android App Bundle (I/O 'eighteen session)
- Release management: successful launches and updates on Play (I/O '18 session)
- The future of apps: modular, instant, and dynamic (I/O '18 session)
- Derisk your game launch (Playtime '17 session)
- Publish smaller apps with the Android App Bundle (DevByte video)
Shop presence
This section is where you manage your app's presentation on Google Play, run experiments on your app's listing content, gear up pricing and markets, become a content rating, manage in-app products, and get translations.
The store listing section is what you'd expect — it's the place where you maintain your app's metadata such equally its title, descriptions, icon, characteristic graphic, feature video, screenshots, store categorization, contact details, and privacy policy.
A great shop listing has an eye-communicable icon; a characteristic graphic, video, and screenshots (from all device categories and in all orientations supported) that evidence what'southward special about the app; and an attention-grabbing description. For games, upload a video and at to the lowest degree 3 mural screenshots to ensure your game is eligible for video/screenshot clusters in the games section of the Play Store. Knowing what content will work best and drive the well-nigh installs can exist a claiming. However, the next section of the panel is designed to accept the guesswork out of answering that question.
After running store listing experiments with the app icon and screenshots, Japanese real estate app LIFULL Habitation'S saw installation rates increase by 188%.
Store list experiments enable you lot to test many aspects of your shop listing, such as its descriptions, app icon, feature graphic, screenshots, and promo video. You tin can run global experiments on images and videos and localized experiments on text. When you run an experiment, you specify up to three variants of the item you want to examination and a pct of the shop visitors who volition see the test variants. The experiment runs until it has been exercised by a statistically significant number of shop visitors and then tells you how the variants compared. If you have a clear winner, you can choose to use that variant to your store listing and brandish it to all visitors.
Effective experiments start with a clear objective. Test your app icon get-go because information technology's the near visible part of your listing, followed by the other listing content. Test one content blazon per experiment to get more reliable results. Experiments should be run over at least vii days and, particularly where shop traffic is low, on 50% of store visitors — merely, if the test could be a little risky, keep the percentage depression. Program for iteration by taking the winning content from 1 experiment and testing against further variations on the theme. For example, if your showtime test finds a better character to include in a game's icon, your next experiment could exam the consequence of variations in icon background color.
Pricing & distribution is where you set the cost for your app and can restrict the countries to which its distributed. This is besides where you lot indicate whether your app is optimized for specific device categories such as Android Idiot box and where you opt your app into programs such as Designed for Families. Each device category and program has requirements and all-time practices, I've added links to more than information near each below.
As you prepare your prices, yous'll notice a localization feature where the console automatically rounds prices to match the convention most advisable for a particular state. For example, ending prices in .00 for Japan. At this point, you lot may also want to create a pricing template. With a pricing template, you create a set of prices past state that you so apply to multiple paid apps and in-app products. Any changes to the template are automatically applied to all the apps or products whose prices are set with the template. Find your pricing templates in the global settings carte du jour of the console.
Having set the details for your app, the nearly likely reasons for returning to this section are to run a paid app sale, opt-in to a new programme, or update the list of countries in which your app is distributed.
Learn more near distribution device categories and programs
- Distribute to Android TV
- Distribute to Android Auto
- Optimize for Chrome Os devices
- Distribute to Daydream
- Distribute to Wear OS by Google
- Distribute to enterprises and organizations using managed Google Play
- Distribute family or kid-focused apps and games
Next upward is your app's content rating. A rating is obtained by responding to a content rating questionnaire and, one time complete, your app receives the appropriate rating badges from recognized authorities around the world. Apps without a content rating will be removed from the Play Store.
The in-app products section is where y'all maintain a catalog of the products and subscriptions sold from your app. Adding items here doesn't add functionality to your app or game, the commitment or unlocking of each product or subscription needs to be coded into the app. The information hither governs what the shop does with these items, such equally how much it charges users and when it renews subscriptions. Then, for in-app products, you add their descriptions and prices while for subscriptions, in improver to descriptions and cost details, yous add a billing cycle, trial menses, and non-payment grace period. Item prices can be set upward individually or based on a pricing template. Where prices are ready individually for countries, you may accept the toll based on the prevailing exchange rate or set up each price manually.
Noom grew international revenue by 80% by localizing their app on Google Play.
The last pick in this section is the translation service. The Play Panel gives yous access to reliable, vetted translators to translate your app into new languages. Yous're much more likely to increase your store listing conversion rate and increase your installs in a particular country when your app is available in the local language. At that place are tools in the Play Console that can help place suitable languages to translate into. For example, using the conquering report you can identify the countries with many visits to your store listing but low installs. If your technical team is working on translating your app's user interface via this service, yous tin go your text translated too. Do this by including store list metadata, in-app product names, and universal app campaign text in the strings.xml file before it'southward submitted for translation.
More resources for store presence
- Make a compelling Google Play Store listing to drive more installs
- Showcase your app with an attention grabbing feature graphic
- Convert more than visits to installs with shop list experiments
- Go global and successfully abound valuable audiences in new countries
- Analyze your audition & benchmark metrics to abound on Play (I/O '18 session)
User acquisition
Superlative Games boilerplate toll per conquering has been about 30–40% lower on Android than on other mobile platforms.
Every developer wants to attain an audience, and this section of the Play Panel is about understanding and optimizing your user acquisition and retention.
In conquering reports, you lot access up to 3 reports (the tabs at the peak) depending on whether you lot sell in-app products or subscriptions:
- Retained Installers — shows the number of visitors to your app's store page, and then how many of them installed your app and kept it installed over thirty days.
- Buyers — shows the number of visitors to your app's store page, and so how many of them installed your app and went on to buy i or more in-app products or subscriptions.
- Subscribers — shows the number of visitors to your app'due south store page, then how many of them installed your app and went on to actuate an in-app subscription.
Each report includes a graph that shows the number of unique users who visited your app'south store listing during the reporting menstruum, followed past the number of installers, retained installers, and (on the buyers or subscribers written report) buyers or subscribers. Some reports will be blank if nosotros've adamant at that place'southward not plenty data to bear witness. Use the "measured past" dropdown to switch between data cleaved downwardly by:
- Acquisition channel — shows a tabular array of information cleaved downward by where visitors come up from, such as the Play Store, Google Search, AdWords, etc.
- Country — shows the total number of visitors for each country.
- Country (Play Shop organic) — filters the country totals to prove y'all visitors coming to your store list organically by searching and browsing on Google Play.
On all the reports, yous tin can toggle the option to view installers who didn't visit the shop listing page, such as those installing directly from Google Search results or on play.google.com/store.
When reviewing the report by acquisition channel or country (Play Store organic), when at that place'southward plenty data you'll be able to view average acquirement per user, conversion charge per unit, retentiveness benchmarks. Based on your app'due south category and monetization method, these benchmarks give you a comparison of your app's performance with all similar apps in the Play Store. Benchmarks are a handy way of checking whether you're doing a adept task driving installs.
One way of increasing your installs is to run an advertising campaign, and yous can become started chop-chop from AdWords campaigns. You tin can create and track a universal app campaign from this section. This type of campaign uses Google's machine learning algorithms to find the all-time acquisition aqueduct for your app and target cost per install (CPI). Provide text, images, and videos for the campaign and AdWords does the rest, placing ads on Google Play, Google Search, YouTube, in other apps via the AdMob network, and on mobile sites on the Google Display Network.
In one case your universal app campaign is up and running, yous'll get additional data in the acquisitions reports. For detailed tracking, check out the reporting in your AdWords business relationship.
Another option for driving installs and appointment is to run promotions. Here you create promotion codes and manage promotion campaigns, and then that you can give away copies of your app or in-app products for free. You can apply the promotion codes in your marketing on social media, for case, or in an e-mail campaign.
The final feature in this section is optimization tips. These tips are generated automatically when we detect changes that can improve your app and its performance. Optimization tips may suggest languages to interpret your app into based on where it's pop, recognize the utilise of certain outdated Google APIs, place when y'all might benefit from using Google Play games services, or detect when your app is not optimized for tablets, amidst other tips. Each tip includes instructions to aid you with implementation.
More than resources for user acquisition and retentivity
- Sympathise where your valuable users come from and optimize your marketing
- Increase downloads with universal app campaigns
- Go global and successfully grow valuable audiences in new countries
- Taking the guesswork out of paid user conquering (Medium mail)
- How to optimize your Android app for emerging markets (Medium post)
- Analyze your audition & benchmark metrics to grow on Play (I/O 'eighteen session)
- Android (Become edition): optimize your app for global markets (I/O '18 session)
Fiscal reports
The analytics and testing capabilities offered by Play are unparalleled and equip developers like Hooked with primal insights that help u.s.a. grow, and are crucial in helping u.s. understand and optimize our acquirement.
—Prerna Gupta, Founder & CEO, HOOKED
If you sell your app, in-app products, or subscriptions, yous'll want to rails and understand how your revenue is going. The financial reports section provides yous with admission to several dashboards and reports.
The section's first study provides an overview of revenue and buyers. The study shows how your acquirement and buyer operation has changed compared to the last written report period.
Separate reports offering a detailed breakdown of revenue, buyers, and conversions offering insight into users' spending patterns. Each study lets you view data for specific periods such as the last 24-hour interval, 7 days, 30 days, or over the app'due south lifetime. You tin can besides drill down into device and country data on the revenue and buyers reports.
The conversions report helps you understand users' spending patterns. The conversion rate table shows what percentage of your audience is purchasing items in your app and helps you run across the bear on of contempo changes on conversion. The spending per buyer tabular array gives you insight into how users' spending habits modify and the lifetime value of your paying users.
More resources for monetization
- Sell in-app products with Google Play Billing
- Pattern your app to drive conversions
- Improve conversions using Google Analytics for Firebase
- From app explorer to commencement-time heir-apparent (Medium postal service)
- Predicting your app's monetization future (Medium post)
- Predicting your game's monetization future (Medium postal service)
- 5 tips to improve your games-as-a-service monetization (Medium post)
- Driving conversions on Android apps (Playtime '17 session)
- Playing with games lifetime value (Playtime '17 session)
- Making coin on Google Play (DevByte)
- Play Billing Library 1.0 (DevByte video)
Subscription information that's readily bachelor for analysis is valuable. Being able to encounter how subscriptions perform over time is something many developers would discover useful.
—Kyle Grymonprez, Head of Cross-Platform and Android evolution at Glu
Finally, if y'all offering subscriptions, the dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of how subscriptions are performing to help you make better decisions about how to grow subscriptions, decrease cancellations, and increase revenue. The dashboard includes an overview, a detailed subscriptions acquisition written report, a lifetime retentiveness written report, and a counterfoil reports. You can also see how successful features such as free trials, account holds, and grace periods are in acquiring and retaining users. With this information, identify opportunities to optimize your marketing and in-app messaging to bulldoze new subscribers and reduce churn.
More resources for subscriptions
- Sell subscriptions with Google Play Billing
- Edifice a subscriptions business concern for all seasons (Medium post)
- How to hold on to your app'southward subscribers (Medium post)
- Outsmarting subscription challenges (Medium post)
- Use behavioural economics to convey the value subscriptions (Medium postal service)
- How to win back subscribers who cancel (Medium post)
- Grow and optimize your subscriptions with new Play features (I/O 'eighteen session)
User feedback
The ratings and review department is a powerful tool to learn from your customs. We are answering them in their native language with the help of Google Interpret. As a outcome, we've seen a not bad comeback in user ratings. In fact, all of them are iv.4 stars or even higher on average.
— Andres Ballone, Chief Production Officeholder at Papumba
Ratings and user feedback via reviews are important. Play Store visitors consider your app'southward ratings and reviews when they're deciding whether to install information technology. Reviews besides provide a fashion to engage with your audience and gather useful feedback about your app.
Ratings is where y'all get a summary of all ratings with breakdowns over time past state, language, app version, Android version, device, and carrier. You lot can drill down into this data to run into how your app'south rating compares to the benchmark rating for its app category.
When it comes to analyzing this data, in that location are two key things to look for. The first is ratings over time, especially whether ratings are going up or down. Decreasing ratings advise you need to review recent updates. Perhaps updates have made the app harder to employ or introduced bug that crusade it to crash more than often. The 2nd use is to look for areas where ratings are out of line. Perchance there is a low rating for a language — suggesting your translation isn't up to scratch. Or ratings could be low on a specific device — suggesting your app isn't optimized for that device. Where you have a generally skillful rating, finding and addressing poor rating 'pockets' tin can help you elevator the ratings, particularly when app improvement opportunities are harder to find.
We use reviews analysis to gather feedback from users on Google Play and use them to polish Erudite's features. It also allows us to reply to users directly and individually, and then we can ameliorate the communication with our users and know their truthful requirements.
— Benji Chan, Product Manager at Erudite
Users can provide ratings for your app without providing a review, but when they do include a review its content can provide insight into what is driving their rating. This is where the reviews analysis section comes into play. It provides iii insights: updated ratings, benchmarks, and topic analysis.
Updated ratings helps you sympathize how users who change their reviews also change the rating they provide. The data is broken downwards betwixt reviews where you responded and those where you didn't. Y'all should find that the report shows that responding to poor reviews (for example, if yous replied to let a user know an consequence has been fixed) often results in users returning and revising their rating up.
Benchmarks provides an analysis of ratings based on common review topics for an app category. So, for example, you can see how users are mentioning your app'southward sign up experience and how reviews on that subject field are contributing to your rating. Besides, you lot can run into how your rating and number of reviews compare to like apps in the same category. If yous want to explore farther, clicking a topic takes you through to the reviews that made upward this assay.
Topics provides information most primal words used in your app's reviews and their issue on ratings. From each discussion, you can drill down to run into the details of the reviews that it appears in, to get a more detailed understanding of what is going on. This feature provides analysis for reviews in English, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
It makes it piece of cake for us to search through the reviews, contact users when we demand to get more information from them and, merely in full general, information technology has saved me a tremendous corporeality of fourth dimension, anywhere between five and 10 hours a week.
— Olivia Schafer, Community Back up Specialist at Aviary
In the reviews department itself, you become to see private reviews. The default view shows the most recent reviews from all sources and in all languages. Use the filter selection to refine the list. Observe the all reply states option. Filter the reviews to expect at those you haven't replied to, as well as the reviews where yous replied and users have subsequently updated their review or rating. Replying to reviews is easy, in a review only click respond to this review.
Occasionally you'll come up across reviews that break the Comment Posting Policy. When yous do, y'all tin can report these reviews by clicking the flag in the review'due south tile.
Using beta feedback, with Early Access , Spanish game developer Omnidrone was able to improve retentivity past 41%, engagement past 50%, and monetization by xx% .
At that place'southward a department specifically for beta feedback. When yous run an open beta examination of your app, any feedback provided past testers ends up here — it doesn't get included in your production app'south ratings and reviews and isn't visible publicly. The features are similar those for public feedback: you can filter reviews, reply to reviews, and see the history of conversations with users.
More resources for user feedback
- Browse and reply to app reviews to positively engage with users
- Clarify user reviews to understand opinions near your app
Global Play Panel sections
So far, I've looked at the Play Panel features that are bachelor for each app. Earlier finishing, I desire to give you a brief guide to the global Play Panel features: games services, order management, download reports, alerts, and settings.
Senri implemented Play games services saved games in Leo's Fortune as well equally ane Leaderboard per chapter. Google Play games services users were 22% more likely to come up back after ane day and 17% more likely after 2 days.
Google Play games services offers a range of tools that provide game features to aid bulldoze histrion engagement, such every bit:
- Leaderboards — a place for players to compare their scores with friends and compete with meridian players.
- Achievements — prepare goals in your game that players earn experience points (XP) for completing.
- Saved Games — store game data and synchronize it across devices so players can easily resume play.
- Multiplayer — bring players together with real-fourth dimension and turn-by-turn multiplayer gaming.
A number of these features can be updated and managed without changing the game'south lawmaking.
Eric Froemling used player analytics to abound average revenue per user by 140% and increase boilerplate revenue per paying user by 67% , for the game Bombsquad .
Player analytics puts valuable information well-nigh your game's performance in 1 place, with a set of free reports to help you manage your game's business and understand in-game histrion behavior. Information technology comes as standard when y'all integrate Google Play games services to your game.
You can set a daily goal for actor spending, then monitor functioning in the target vs. actual chart and identify how your players' spending compares to benchmarks from similar games in the business drivers written report. You can runway player memory by new user cohort using the memory report and come across where players are spending their fourth dimension, struggling, and churning with the player progression written report. Then become assistance managing your in-game economy with the sources and sinks report and check, for example, that you're not giving away a resources faster than players are using it.
You tin also drill into details of player behavior. Apply funnels to create a nautical chart from any sequenced events, such as achievements, spend, and custom events or use the cohorts report to compare the cumulative event values, for any event, by new user cohorts. Get insights into what happens to your players during disquisitional moments with the player time series explorer and create reports based on your custom Play Games' events with the events viewer.
More than resources for Google Play games services:
- Utilize Google Play games services to create more than engaging game experiences
- Utilize actor analytics to understand better how players bear in your game
- Manage your games business concern with acquirement targets through thespian analytics
- Medium posts for game developers
- New and advanced Google Play tools for game developers (I/O '18 session)
Social club management provides access to details of all payments fabricated by users. Members of your customer service team will use this section to detect and refund payments (including fractional refunds) for in-app products and subscriptions or abolish subscriptions.
Download reports to obtain data including details for crashes & application non responding errors (ANRs), reviews, and fiscal reports. As well, aggregated data for installs, ratings, crashes, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), and subscriptions is available. Yous can employ these downloads to clarify the data captured by the Play Console using your tools.
Alerts surfaces issues related to crashes, installs, ratings, uninstalls, and security. For games using Google Play games services, there are alerts for game features that may exist blocked because they aren't existence used correctly, for reaching limits or exceeding quota for API calls, and others. You can opt-in to receive alerts via email in the notifications section of the settings carte.
Settings provides various options to control your developer account and the behavior of the Play Console.
One settings feature under developer account that I desire to highlight is user accounts & rights. You take consummate control over who can access features and data for your app in the console. You can provide each of your team member'due south with view or edit access to the whole business relationship or just to specific sections. For instance, you might choose to grant your marketing lead edit access to your store listing, reviews, and AdWords campaigns, but non to other sections of the console. Another common employ of access rights is to make your financial reports visible just to those that need to see them.
You should prepare up your programmer page to showcase your apps or games and company's make on the store when people tap your programmer name. You can add a header image, your logo, a cursory description, your website URL, and pick a featured app (a full list of your apps is automatically visible).
In preferences, you tin choose which Play Console notifications you receive via the web interface or email, sign up for news and elect to accept part in feedback and surveys, tell us about your role, and change your preference to share your console use data with us.
Get the Play Console app
The screenshots throughout this mail service bear witness the Play Console in a spider web browser, however there's a Play Console app available for your Android device too. Get quick access to your app's statistics, ratings, reviews, and release information. Go notifications for important updates, similar when your latest release is really alive on the shop, and perform quick actions like replying to reviews.
Go it on Google Play.
Stay up to date
There are several ways to stay upwards-to-date with the latest and greatest from Google Play:
- Tap the 🔔 in the top correct manus corner of the Play Console to see notifications about new features and changes you should know almost.
- Sign up to get news and tips by electronic mail including our monthly newsletters.
- Follow us hither on Medium for longform posts from the team with best practices, business strategies, research, and industry thoughts.
- Connect with us on Twitter or Linkedin and start upwards a conversation.
- Get the Playbook app for developers for curated posts (including all our blog and Medium posts) and YouTube videos to help you grow a successful business organization on Google Play, and cull what yous get notified nearly.
Questions or feedback about the Play Console? Arrive impact!
Comment below or tweet at us using the hashtag #AskPlayDev and we'll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.
Source: https://medium.com/googleplaydev/a-guide-to-the-google-play-console-1bdc79ca956f
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