Google Play Explore

What is Google Play Explore?

Google Play Explore is an organic traffic source that includes all visitors arriving at an app listing while exploring and navigating (what the App Store equivalent refers to as browsing.) Android users can also find apps through the personalized ‘For You’ tab which highlight apps curated by Google Play editors that they think a user might like and therefore brings those to the surface for easy finding. This is an explorative, not a searching traffic source, which encourages users to navigate through the Google Play store.

Explore traffic is very different to search traffic which sees users landing on a product page having actively searched for a brand or keyword that they’re specifically looking for.

Why Google Play Explore is Important?

Explorative traffic is not an app’s target audience, which makes this traffic source an important channel that sits untouched by user acquisition (UA) teams who are always looking to bring new users to an app listing. 

Having an app seen by users from the explore traffic source gives great exposure to a broad audience that wouldn’t have been exposed to it usually, such as via a targeted paid campaign (a frequently used marketing tool that brings high-quality visitors to a product page.) This makes Explore traffic users truly organic and therefore crucial, as in order to increase impression numbers and drive growth, app developers / marketers want to get as many eyes on an app as possible.

Google Play Explore and ASO

Working together, UA and ASO teams are always supporting each other to find ways of bringing fresh, organic traffic to an app listing, which makes Google Play Explore users a crucial source that both teams are engaging with. 

Explore traffic is unique; these users are on the hunt for apps and games to download and play. They’re not searching specifically for a brand / app / game category which will immediately exclude an app that isn’t what they’re looking for, nor are they arriving via a paid campaign which comes at a financial cost. Explore traffic therefore for ASO teams is an optimizable opportunity; by presenting these users with an optimized product page, their efforts are always to turn users from an impression number to an install number. 

As ASO concerns the process of analysis and A/B testing to drive impressions and installs, more traffic = more data = more basis for hypotheses. By crunching the data on where users come from and how they arrived at a listing, it’s possible to better understand user behavior.