The Google Play Console: A User's Guide

The Google Play Console: A User's Guide

The Play Console can assist you with more than publishing, whether you're in a commercial or technical capacity, and whether you're part of a team of one or one hundred.

To reach an audience on Google Play, you could have utilized the Google Play Console to submit an Android app or game, generated a store listing, and pressed publish. However, you may not understand that the Play Console has a lot more to offer, particularly for app developers looking to improve their app's quality and profitability.

Join me on a tour of the Play Console, where I'll walk you through each function and refer you to some helpful resources for getting the most out of it. Once you've mastered the features, you may utilize user management controls to provide your coworker's access to the capabilities and data they require. Note that in this piece, I use the term 'app' to refer to both an app and a game.

Go to a certain section:

1. Make your way around the area

If you've been asked to help manage an app or have previously published one, you'll see something like this when you go to the Play Console:

I'll presume you have an app for this post. Take a look at the launch checklist if you're just starting started with your first app. Later, I'll return to the global menu selections (games, notifications, and settings).

When you select an app from the list, you will be brought to its dashboard. A navigation menu () on the left-hand side provides rapid access to all of the Play Console's tools; let's take a look at each one individually.

2. Statistics and a dashboard

Dashboard and statistics are the first two elements on the list. These reports provide you with an overview of your app's performance.

With summaries of installations and uninstalls, top installing nations, current installs, rating volume, and value, crashes, Android vitals, and pre-launch information, the dashboard answers critical questions you may have about your program. For additional information on each summary, click explore or see. You may choose from seven different views: seven days, thirty days, one year, and the app's lifespan.

Hopefully, your software is succeeding with high install rates and minimal crashes, as seen by the summary. A quick peek at the dashboard can reveal if something isn't working as it should. Keep an eye out for increased uninstalls, crashes, a falling rating, and other metrics that aren't operating well. If things aren't working out as planned, you or your engineers can get more information to figure out what's causing the problems.

Statistics allows you to create a customized display of the app's data. You may plot two measures concurrently and compare them to a previous period, in addition to displaying data across any date range. In the table below the graph, you can get a detailed breakdown of statistics by dimension (such as device, country, language, or app version). Some states provide hourly graphs with more extensive information. Events (such as app launches or sales) are displayed on the graph and in the chronology of events below it, allowing you to see how they influenced your numbers.

As an example, you can be conducting a new app promotion in Brazil. You may create the report to display installs by nation, filter the country list down to Brazil (from the dimensions table), and then compare the data with that from a previous campaign to obtain a clear image of how your marketing is performing.

3. Android vitals

The quality of your app, as assessed by its performance and stability, is the focus of Android vitals. Last year, an internal Google research looked at one-star ratings on the Play Store and discovered that 50 percent of them referenced app stability and issues. By fixing these concerns, you'll improve user happiness, which will lead to more good ratings and consumers keeping your app loaded. Android vitals may offer information on five areas of your app's performance when there is enough aggregated data: battery life, rendering (also known as jank), stability, startup time, and permission denials.

The first two indicators — sticky wake locks and frequent wakeups — show if the app is reducing battery life. The reports highlight instances when the app has asked a device to stay on for an extended amount of time (an hour or more) or has asked the device to wake up regularly (more than 10 wakeups per hour since a device was fully charged).

The ANR (App Not Responding) and crash rate reports provide information on app stability. The summary contains breakdowns by app version, device, and Android version, as do all of the summaries in this area. You may go down into information from the summary to assist engineers to figure out what's causing these problems. The dashboard has recently been improved to show far more data about ANRs and crashes, making them much easier to identify and solve. Engineers may access additional information in the ANRs & Crashes area, as well as load de-obfuscation files, which increase the reading of crash reports.

The following two metrics, sluggish rendering, and frozen frames are related to jank or an app's UI frame rate that is uneven. The UI of the app judders and stalls when jank occurs, resulting in a bad user experience. These figures show the number of people who have:

• More than 15% of frames took more than 16 milliseconds to draw, 

• or at least one frame out of 1,000 took longer than 700 milliseconds to render.

Permission denials are the last important metric, which shows the proportion of daily permission sessions during which users refused permissions or denied access by selecting 'never ask again.' There is also a tally of the approximate number of sessions logged.

4. Behavior threshold

You'll notice a negative conduct threshold for each measure. A red error indicator appears whenever one of your Android vitals exceeds the undesirable behavior threshold. This indicator indicates that your app's score for that statistic is greater than other apps (and, in this case, higher is bad!).

When there's a sudden shift to be aware of, you'll notice abnormalities in any vitals. Because your audience is having a horrible user experience, and your app will perform badly on the Play Store, you should solve poor performance as soon as possible. This is because the vitals of an app are taken into account by Google Play's search and ranking algorithms, as well as any promotional possibilities, such as the Google Play Awards. Downranking is a result of exceeding negative conduct thresholds.

5. Tools for development

6. Release management

For your releases, you should employ phased rollouts. You choose a proportion of your audience for the app update, then keep an eye on the release dashboard. If things aren't going well — for example, if crashes, ratings, or uninstalls are on the rise — you may select Manage Release and pause the rollout before too many people are affected. If the issue didn't need an app update, an engineer should be able to repair it before restarting the rollout or initiating a new release (if an update was needed). When everything is running smoothly, you may gradually raise the percentage of your audience who receives the update until you reach 100%.

You may progress from beta to soft launch to worldwide debut on Google Play, and you can gather feedback from consumers along the way. As a result, we can analyze actual data and create the best possible game for our gamers.

The Android Instant Applications area is similar to the app releases part, however, it only contains instant apps. If you're unfamiliar with instant applications, they allow users to access a portion of your app's functionality by clicking on a link rather than downloading the entire program from the Play Store.

A technical section is the artifact library. It's a collection of all the files you've posted for your releases, such as APKs. You may check back and get select, old APKs from here if you need to for any reason.

The device catalog contains thousands of Google-certified Android and Chrome OS devices, with the option to search and examine device specifications. You can exclude a small number of problematic devices using the granular filtering tools offered to provide the greatest experience on all devices your app supports. Individual devices can be excluded, and restrictions can be created based on performance metrics like RAM and System on Chip. Each device type's installs, ratings, and revenue contribution are also included in the catalog. A poor average rating on a single device, for example, might be due to a device fault that was not detected during broad testing. You might temporarily suspend new installs until you've put out a repair for a device like that.

We launched Play App Signing to help you keep your app signing key safe. Every program on Google Play is signed by the developer, giving verifiable proof that the developer who claims to have produced the app actually did. It's a huge problem if the key needed to sign an app is lost. You wouldn't be able to make any changes to your app. Instead, you'd have to submit a new app, which would mean losing the app's history of installations, ratings, and reviews, as well as possibly confusing users when trying to convince them to switch. After opting in, you submit your app signing keys to Google's cloud, where they are safely stored.

It's the same technique we use to store our app keys at Google, and it's backed up by our industry-leading security infrastructure. When you submit updates, the keys you've submitted are utilized to sign your apps. It's simple to enroll in app signing on the first upload of a brand new app. For you, we'll generate an app signing key.

The pre-launch report is the final choice in this section. When you submit your app to the closed or open testing tracks, we'll perform automated tests in the Firebase Test Lab for Android on popular devices with a variety of specs and publish the findings. These tests check for specific defects and problems such as crashes, performance difficulties, and security flaws.

7. The existence of the store

This is where you control your app's Google Play presentation, perform tests on the listing material of your app, establish price and markets, receive a content rating, manage in-app items, and get translations.

The store listing area is exactly what it sounds like: it's where you keep track of your app's metadata like title, description, icon, feature image, feature video, screenshots, store classification, contact information, and privacy policy.

An excellent store listing includes an eye-catching symbol, a featured image, video, and screenshots (from all device types and orientations supported) that demonstrate what makes the app unique, as well as a compelling description.

To guarantee your game is eligible for video/screenshot clusters in the games area of the Play Store, provide a video and at least three landscape screenshots. It might be difficult to predict which material would perform best and result in most installations. The console's next portion, on the other hand, is meant to eliminate the guesswork involved in answering that question.

Many components of your store listing may be tested with store listing experiments, including descriptions, app icons, feature graphics, screenshots, and promo videos. On photos and videos, you can perform global tests, and on text, you can run localized experiments.

When you launch an experiment, you may choose up to three variations of the item to test, as well as a percentage of shop visitors who will view the test variants. The experiment runs until a statistically significant number of shop visitors have participated, and then it reports on how the versions are compared. You can opt to add that version to your store listing and display it to all visitors if you have a clear winner.

Effective experiments begin with a specific goal in mind. Because your app icon is the most prominent component of your listing, test it first, followed by the remaining listing material. To acquire more trustworthy findings, just test one content type for each trial. Experiments should be done for at least seven days and on at least 50 percent of shop visits, especially in low-traffic areas; however, if the test is a bit dangerous, keep the proportion low. Iterate by taking the winning material from one trial and putting it to the test against other versions on the topic. For example, if your first experiment identifies a better character to include in a game's icon, your second experiment may look at the impact of changing the backdrop color of the icon.

You may select the price of your app and limit the countries to which it is available in the pricing and distribution section. This is also where you specify if your app is optimized for certain device categories, such as Android TV, and whether or not you want to participate in initiatives like Designed for Families. Each device category and program has its own set of standards and best practices, which I've included links to below.

You'll notice a localization function as you select your pricing, where the console automatically rounds prices to reflect the convention most suited for a certain nation. For example, Japan's final prices are in.00. You could also wish to make a price template at this time. You construct a set of prices by the nation with a pricing template, which you then apply to various paid applications and in-app goods. Any modifications to the template will be applied to any applications or items whose pricing is established using the template. Your price templates may be found in the console's global settings menu.

After you've set up your app's information, you'll probably want to come back to this part to conduct a paid app sale, sign up for a new program, or update the list of countries where your app is distributed.

The content rating of your app comes next. A rating is gained by filling out a content rating form, and once completed, your app will be awarded the proper rating badges from reputable organizations all around the world. The Play Store will eliminate apps that do not have a content rating.

The catalog of items and subscriptions offered through your app is kept in the in-app products area. The delivery or unlocking of each product or subscription must be integrated within the app; adding things here does not provide the functionality to your app or game. The information in this section determines how the shop handles these things, such as how much it charges consumers and whether subscriptions are renewed.

So, for in-app items, you provide descriptions and pricing, but for subscriptions, you include a billing cycle, trial period, and non-payment grace period in addition to descriptions and prices. Prices for items may be put either manually or using a pricing template. You can accept the price based on the current exchange rate or manually set each price when prices are set differently for nations.

The translation service is the final choice in this section. The Play Console connects you with authorized translators who can help you translate your app into new languages. When your software is offered in the local language, you're far more likely to boost your store listing conversion rate and installations in that nation. The Play Console has features that can assist you to find appropriate languages to translate into. For example, you may use the acquisition report to discover nations that have a high number of visitors to your store listing but few installs. If your technical team is using this service to translate your app's user interface, you may have your content translated as well. 

Before submitting the strings.xml file for translation, include store listing metadata, in-app product names, and universal app marketing content.

8. Obtaining users

Every developer wants to reach out to a potential audience, and this part of the Play Console is dedicated to helping you analyze and improve your user acquisition and retention strategies.

Depending on whether you offer in-app items or subscriptions, you may see up to three acquisition reports (the tabs at the top):

• Retained Installers — displays the number of visitors to your program's store page, as well as how many of them downloaded and maintained your software installed for at least 30 days.
• Buyers — displays the number of people that visited your app's store page, then how many of them installed it and purchased one or more in-app items or subscriptions.
• Subscribers — displays the number of people that visited your app's store page, then how many of them installed it and activated an in-app subscription.

Each report contains a graph that displays the number of unique users that visited your app's store listing during the reporting period, as well as the number of installers, retained installers, and purchasers or subscribers (on the buyers or subscribers report). If we find that there isn't enough data to present, some reports will be blank. Switch between data broken down by using the "measured by" selection.

• Acquisition channel — displays a table of statistics divided by the source of visits, such as the Play Store, Google Search, AdWords, and so on.
• Country — the total number of visitors for each country is displayed.
• Nation (Play Shop organic) — filters the country totals to show you visitors that came to your store listing organically through Google Play searches and browsing.

You may observe installers who didn't visit the store listing page, such as those who installed directly from Google Search results or on play.google.com/store, on all reports.

When you analyze the report by acquisition channel or nation (Play Store organic), you'll be able to see average revenue per user, conversion rate, and retention benchmarks if there's enough data. These benchmarks compare your app's performance to that of all similar apps in the Play Store based on its category and monetization approach. Benchmarks are a great approach to see if you're doing a good job with installs.

Running an advertising campaign is one strategy to increase your installs, and you can get started fast using AdWords campaigns. This area allows you to develop and track a universal app promotion. This campaign takes advantage of Google's machine learning algorithms to determine the optimum acquisition channel for your app and set a cost per install objective (CPI). AdWords will place advertisements on Google Play, Google Search, YouTube, in other applications via the AdMob network, and on mobile sites via the Google Display Network if you provide text, photos, and videos for the campaign.

You'll get more data in the acquisitions reports after your universal app campaign is up and running. Check out your AdWords account's reports for further information.

Promotions are another way to increase installations and engagement. You may use this section to create promotion codes and manage campaigns so that you can give away free copies of your software or in-app items. You may use the promotion codes in your social media marketing or in an email campaign, for example.

This section's last component is optimization advice. These suggestions are created automatically when we notice changes that might help your app run better. Among other things, optimization advice may propose languages to convert your app into based on where it's popular, identify the usage of obsolete Google APIs, determine when you could benefit from utilizing Google Play games services, or detect when your app isn't suited for tablets. Each suggestion comes with guidelines to assist you in putting it into action.

9. Financial statements

Play's analytics and testing capabilities are unrivaled, providing developers like Hooked with critical information that helps us grow and better understand and maximize our income.

You'll want to measure and analyze your revenue if you sell your software, in-app merchandise, or subscriptions. You may access many dashboards and reports under the financial reporting area.

The first report in this part gives an overview of revenue and purchasers. The report compares your revenue and buyer performance with the previous reporting period.

Separate reports break down income, purchasers, and conversions in-depth, providing insight into users' purchasing habits. Each report allows you to see statistics for particular periods, such as the previous day, 7 days, 30 days, or the whole history of the app. On the revenue and purchasers reports, you can additionally dig down into device and country data.

The conversions report aids in the comprehension of consumers' purchasing habits. The conversion rate table displays the percentage of your audience who buys things in your app and allows you to understand how recent modifications have affected conversion. The spending per buyer table shows you how users' buying habits vary over time as well as the lifetime worth of your paying customers.

Finally, if you sell subscriptions, the dashboard provides a full perspective of how subscriptions are functioning, allowing you to make more informed decisions about how to build subscriptions, reduce cancellations, and boost income. An overview, a thorough subscription acquisition report, a lifetime retention report, and a cancellation report are all included in the dashboard. You may also observe how effective free trials, account holds, and grace periods are at attracting and keeping consumers. Using this data, find ways to improve your marketing and in-app messaging to attract new members and decrease churn.

10. feedback from users

The ratings and reviews area is an excellent resource for learning from your peers. With the assistance of Google Translate, we are responding to them in their original language. As a result, customer ratings have significantly improved. In fact, on average, they're all 4.4 stars or above.

The importance of ratings and user input via reviews cannot be overstated. When considering whether or not to install your app, visitors to the Play Store look at its ratings and reviews. Reviews are also a great method to interact with your audience and get valuable input on your app.

Ratings provide an overview of all ratings, as well as time-based breakdowns by nation, language, app version, Android version, device, and carrier. You may go further into this information to discover how your app's rating compares to the industry standard.

There are two important things to look for while assessing this data. The first is the evolution of ratings over time, specifically whether they are increasing or decreasing. Ratings that are decreasing indicate that you should check recent revisions. Updates may have made the program more difficult to use or added bugs that cause it to crash more frequently. 

The second use is to search for places where the ratings are out of whack. Perhaps a language has a poor grade, implying that your translation isn't up to par. Alternatively, ratings may be lower on a given device, implying that your app isn't suited for that device. Finding and resolving bad rating 'pockets' might help you enhance your app's overall rating, especially when app upgrade chances are difficult to come by.

Users can rate your app without leaving a review, but when they do, the substance of the review might provide you insight into what's driving their rating. This is where the section on reviews and analyses comes in. It offers three types of information: current ratings, benchmarks, and topic analysis.

Users who edit their reviews also change the rating they offer, thus updated ratings might help you understand how this works. The data is separated among reviews in which you answered and those in which you did not. Responding to negative reviews (for example, informing a user that a problem has been resolved) typically leads to people returning and revising their rating higher, according to the research.

For each app category, benchmarks give an analysis of ratings based on popular review themes. So, for example, you can observe how customers are talking about your app's sign-up process and how those reviews are affecting your rating. You can also compare your rating and review count to comparable applications in the same category. Clicking a subject will lead you to the reviews that made up this analysis if you want to learn more.

Topics give details on the keywords that were used in your app's reviews and how they influenced the ratings. You may dig down from each term to examine the details of the reviews in which it appears, giving you a better picture of what's going on. This feature analyzes reviews in the following languages: English, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

Individual reviews may be found inside the reviews section. The default view displays the most current reviews in all languages from all sources. To refine the list, use the filter option. Take note of the option to choose all reply statuses. Filter the reviews to see which ones you haven't responded to yet, as well as which ones you have responded to and people have modified their review or rating since then. It's simple to respond to reviews; simply click comment to this review in the review.

You may come across reviews that violate the Comment Posting Policy on occasion. By clicking the flag on the review's title, you may report these reviews.

There is a section dedicated just to beta input. When you perform an open beta test of your app, any feedback you receive from testers is stored here; it isn't included in your production app's ratings and reviews, and it isn't available to the public. You can filter reviews, comment on reviews, and examine the history of discussions with people, just like you do with public feedback.

10. Sections of the global Play Console

I've just looked at the Play Console features offered for each app so far. Before I go any further, I'd want to give you a quick rundown of the Play Console's global features: games, order management, download reports, notifications, and settings.

The Google Play games service includes several elements that assist boost user engagement, including:

• Leaderboard Is a location where gamers may compare their results to those of their friends and compete against the best.

• Set goals in your game that players may complete receiving experience points (XP).

• Saved Games – save game data and synchronize it across devices so that players may pick up where they left off.

• Multiplayer – real-time and turn-by-turn multiplayer game brings players together.

Player analytics compiles useful data about your game's success into a single location, along with a collection of complimentary reports to assist you in managing your game's business and comprehending in-game player behavior. When you integrate Google Play games services with your game, it comes as standard.

You may establish a daily spending goal for your players, then track their progress in the target vs. real chart and compare their spending to benchmarks from comparable games in the business drivers report. The retention report may be used to measure player retention by new user cohort, and the player advancement report can be used to see where players are spending their time, suffering, and churning. Then use the sources and sinks report to help you manage your in-game economy, such as making sure you're not giving away a resource quicker than gamers are utilizing it.

You may also go into the nitty-gritty of player behavior. Use the funnels report to compare the cumulative event values for any event by new user cohorts, or use the cohorts report to construct a chart from any sequenced events, such as accomplishments, expenditures, and custom events. With the player time-series explorer, you can see what happens to your players during important periods, and with the events viewer, you can build reports based on your own Play Games' events.

Order management gives you access to all of your users' payments. This area will be used by members of your customer support team to locate and refund payments (including partial refunds) for in-app items and subscriptions, as well as cancel subscriptions.

Download reports getting information like crash details and application not responding errors (ANRs), as well as reviews and financial reports. Installs, ratings, crashes, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), and subscriptions data are now available in aggregate. These files can be used to study the data collected by the Play Console using your tools.

Crash alerts, installations, ratings, uninstalls, and security problems are all addressed through alerts. There are notifications for game features that may be restricted because they aren't being utilized appropriately, nearing limits or exceeding quota for API requests, and other things for games that use Google Play games services. In the notifications area of the settings menu, you may choose to receive email alerts.

Settings provide you a variety of choices for managing your developer account and the Play Console's behavior.

User accounts & privileges is a configuration feature under the developer account that I'd like to emphasize. In the console, you have total control over who has access to your app's features and data. You may give each member of your team view or edit access to the whole account or just certain areas. You might, for example, give your marketing lead edit access to your shop listing, reviews, and AdWords campaigns but not to other areas of the console. Another typical application of access rights is to limit access to your financial reports to those who need to see them.

When consumers hit your developer name in the store, you should set up your developer page to display your applications or games as well as the company's brand. A header picture, your logo, a brief description, your website URL, and a featured app may all be included (a full list of your apps is automatically visible).

11. Install the Play Console app on your device.

The Play Console is seen in a web browser in the screenshots throughout this piece, but there is also a Play Console app for your Android smartphone. Quickly access statistics, ratings, reviews, and release information for your app. Receive key alerts, such as when your latest release is live on the store, and take rapid actions, such as responding to reviews.

It's available on Google Play.

12. Keep yourself informed.

There are a few different methods to keep up with the newest and best from

Google Play:

•  In the upper right-hand corner of the Play Console, tap to view notifications about new features and updates to be aware of.

• Sign up to get regular updates and advice, including our monthly newsletters.

• Follow us on Medium for long-form content from the team, including best practices, business strategies, research, and industry perspectives.

• Start a discussion with us by connecting with us on Twitter or Linkedin.

• Download the Playbook app for developers on Google Play for curated content (including all of our blog and Medium pieces) and YouTube videos to help you build a successful business, and customize your notifications.