You must have used Google Play Console to publish your Android app on the Play Store. You become happy launching your app after a long development process.
You should be, of course, but you may not realize that Google Play Console has a lot more to offer that you might be missing.
Especially for those who want to improve Android application development and business performance of their app.
Join me for a tour of Google Play Console- the place where the adventure of launching Android apps for developers and marketers begins.
This blog will guide you on how to use Google Play Console and its amazing features.
Once you become familiar with these features, you can use this tool to empower your marketing and development team with the right data they need to make your app successful. Let’s begin.
What is Google Play Console?
Google Play Console is a developer’s account offered by Google to publish an android app on the Play Store. It gives many features and analytics for pre-launch period to test and collect feedback, and monitor your app’s performance after release.
Why you should use Google Play Console?
To use Google Play Console, you first need to have a developer account then you can get access to utilize its features. But you should not consider it merely an account to publish an app. It is similar to Google analytics that works for a website, whereas it works for android applications.
If you have outsourced your project to Android app development Company India, you need to check who holds the rights of developer account so that in the future, you can update your app without any hassle.
It would be better if you keep the access at your end, not only for security purpose but the access to this account will enable you to utilize the following benefits of Google Play Console:
- Learn how to distribute your app via Google play tutorials
- Launch your app with tools to help you publish, manage, and distribute your app worldwide
- Grow your audience by getting acquisition reports, statistics, reviews and other app analytics
- Track your app performance and revenue data
- Access to Google Play support forum (24×7)
- Charge for your app downloads
- Create a revenue stream by setting up a subscription model, offering in-app products, or offering other digital content.
- Engage and retain your users with engagement tools and insights
How to use Google Play Console?
1. First understand the dashboard
The first thing that you see is the Dashboard of Google Play Console. It gives a general overview of applications that you have launched or stored in beta.
In the dashboard, you can find a list of the apps or games that you have developed, and the insights such as ratings, number of installs, date of update, and the status (which can be draft, schedule to publish, and pending publication, published, rejected or suspended).
If you click on an app, you can see the performance of the main KPIs. These insights can be further explored with a detailed report.
However, at first sight, you can check the number of installs and uninstalls, the average rating and the crashed & ANRs (Apps Not Responding).
It was announced during the Google I/O 2019 that Google is focusing on new report on app size to help developer keep their application optimized at all times by showing its size and evolution through time.
2. Statistics & Analytics
If you move to the statistics section, you will find plenty of information available to explore. Let’s break it down to understand its main aspects when configuring a report:
Users: It allows you to filter the information by installs and uninstalls. You can check the number of times that a new user has installed or uninstalled an app or game, one or more mobile devices for the first time.
Device: This is one of the important features that give many insights about the device such as:
Installs on active devices
Installs, uninstalls, and updates by device
Ratings which allows you to divide them on the basis of average rating (total ratings in whole period) and the new cumulative average rating (the most recent ratings).
Quality: This section provides useful information in terms of crashes, ANRs, download size and app size on device (at install time). These all are essential to ensure the quality of the app.
Pre-registration: It allows you to check the total number of pre-registered users, conversion to check how many of those users actually installed the app, and cumulative conversion.
3. Android vitals
Android vitals is a feature that is designed to assist developers to understand the performance of android application. This section shows insights on ANRs and crashes, deobfuscation files, and app size.
It allows you to monitor your app’s size, compare it to competitors, and track its growth through time.
Android vitals is a crucial feature to measure the factors which have direct impact on your app. Top android app developers consider this feature very helpful to analyze the app’s progress.
Big Fish Games used Android vitals to decrease app crashes by 21% in their hit time management game.
4. Release Management
This section lets you monitor the current version of your app as well as to compare it with previous versions. Here you can check the number of installs this version has got, the number of crashes per 1000 devices and the average rating.
Moreover, it also gives you charts of these metrics to view its evolution through time. On “app releases” you can see on which version you are currently working, an open track for beta testing and a closed track for alpha testing.
One additional section is ‘Android Instant Apps. Here you can manage your instant apps’ APKs, review release history, and rollout your instant app to production, pre-release, or development.
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 us to look at real data and to make the best possible game for our players.
— David Barretto, Co-Founder and CEO of Hutch Games.
5. Store Presence
Store presence is the place where you can manage your app’s presentation on Google Play. It lets you run experiments on your app’s listing content, manage in-app products, get a content rating, set pricing and markets, and get translations.
Store presence is among the most important sections for App Store Optimization because here you write and publish your store listing. You can write title, short and complete description, introduce the graphic assets.
Many experts include this feature in their ASO tips to rank their app on Google Play Store.
Additionally, another interesting subsection is Store Listing Experiments which allows you to perform A/B test. This helps you to determine which elements are working better. You can also create custom store listings to focus on a specific segment of your audience.
Pricing and distribution is the section where you fix the price for the app. It further enables you to optimize the app for specific device categories such as Android TV, Android Auto, Wear OS, etc.
Japanese real estate app LIFULL HOME’S witnessed a hike in their app installation rates by 188%, after running store listing experiments with the app icon and screenshots.
So you can see here, Google Play Console allows you to make your product available for different android OS platforms as well.
6. User Acquisition Reports
This is one of the main ASO KPIs. In this section, you can measure how many users your app or game has acquired.
Select a period of time and compare the number of visitors with the first-time installers, and then check the retention between the first day and the 30th day.
Image source: TheTool
Along with this, it allows you to check the acquisition channels: organic (search and explore), Google Ads campaigns, tracked channels, Google Search, and Third-party referrers.
It is an important section to analyze your app’s performance on daily basis to monitor your app maintenance cost. Many companies fail to calculate how much does it cost to maintain a mobile app, just because they overlook regular monitoring of their app analytics.
Therefore, this report helps developers to retain the existing users.
7. User Feedback
The last section to use in Google Play Console is User Feedback. It enables you to handle your ratings and reviews. Google recently introduced a new feature called peer groups which lets you compare app performance with a group of similar apps.
Here you can check the number of ratings, reviews, and filter them by topic, OS version, and language.
This section is critical if you want to retain your existing app users. By analyzing reviews and ratings, you can improve or change in app’s functionality or feature that is causing inconvenience to users.
If you don’t pay attention to these reviews, you will see increment in uninstallation rates. So, keep in mind to reply to your users so that you can turn negative feedback into positive reviews.
Apple takes their users’ feedback very seriously; therefore, iOS App Development Company India especially focuses on user experience so that it meets the expectation of Apple users.
The ratings and review section is a powerful tool to learn from your community. We are answering them in their native language with the help of Google Translate. As a result, we’ve seen a great improvement in user ratings. In fact, all of them are 4.4 stars or even higher on average.
— Andres Ballone, Chief Product Officer at Papumba.
Conclusion
Google Play Console is the secret to your app’s success. It provides you with many valuable insights for both developers and marketers, and it is continuously upgrading.
There is a wide range of features available here; get quick access to your app analytics, ratings, reviews, and release information. If you strategically use these insights, you will see radical improvement in the number of app downloads.
Google Play Console requires intelligence to understand its vital information.
If you still don’t feel confident using this tool, eSearch Logix can help you understand your app performance and eventually increase the number of downloads.
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