Google Play New Developer Console Update: How To Make The Most Out Of New App Marketing Capabilities?

Privacy and security initiatives to protect developers and users

Initiatives related to data security, including a "privacy sandbox" already announced a few months ago, have little impact on app store optimization. Privacy-related announcements, including filling out your data security form by July 20, this section is not expected to have much impact on Play Store listing conversion rates.

Android vitals will soon be available at the country level via the Google Play Developer Reporting API. While the primary beneficiaries of this tool will be product teams, ASO teams may also benefit when investigating changes in their app or keyword rankings.

What's more, Google's in-app update API lets developers notify users when an updated version of their app is available, and helps them view release notes and download updates without leaving the app. In this case, ASO will benefit from increased retention rates following more frequen app updates.

Custom Store Listing: going one step further than Apple

Custom Store Listings now support referral traffic by allowing developers to create custom URLs for any of their custom store listings. Each app publisher is granted a maximum of 50 custom store listings per app and allows each app to be localized in multiple languages. So Google Play pages now able to display different screenshots and promotional videos, these CSLs are very similar to Apple Store Custom Product Pages (CPP).

With dedicated analytics and metrics for each CSL, you can analyze its performance, achieve improvements over default store listings, and even measure the revenue impact of specific campaigns you drive for specific CSLs. Therefore, now the ASO strategy also needs to keep pace with the times and use the segmentation method to maximize the performance. Need to update your ASO strategy? Don't hesitate to consult our ASO expert team for free.

On the other hand, Google has the very popular UAC (Universal App Campaigns) product Google Ads and can easily integrate CSL into Google Ads. Although we haven't seen this option in the Play Store console yet, the feature is expected to arrive in due course.

LiveOps: move to an event-driven store

Another great marketing tool promoted by Google is LiveOps. Similar to In-App Events, LiveOps products are likely to be rolled out to more developers. Google shared that apps running LiveOps during the closed beta period saw an average 5% increase in registered active users and a 4% increase in revenue compared to equivalent apps not running LiveOps.

Another benefit of LiveOps is also the "offer" LiveOps type, which allows developers to grant discounts, offers or free rewards to users during LiveOps events, a feature currently lacking in Apple's in-app events. This feature is great for acquiring new users and returning visits users, there are huge benefits to gaining more visibility in Google Play. In particular, offers are the campaign type, which can have a huge impact in terms of appeal and conversion rates.

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Google Play Commerce: additional feature to facilitate monetization

Several improvements to the Play Commerce system allows developers to monetize their apps. Not only has Google expanded its library of payment methods to include more than 300 local payment methods in 70 countries, but it has also expanded pricing options with ultra-low price points that allow you to price your products as low as 5 cents in any market. It allows you to adjust prices to better reflect local purchasing power, run locally relevant sales and promotions, and support microtransactions such as tipping. These adjustments can help you improve your conversion rate and then increase your revenue.

Google has updated its in-app messaging API to allow developers to display messages to users whose payments have been declined, helping prevent technical churn when users lose access to certain app features after forgetting to update their purchase information. Such a simple step could be the key to maintaining revenue, as Google shared that early users who tried the feature saw their subscription recovery rates double.

Google Play Store Listing Experiments: have a more effective A/B test

After the beta, the new Google Play Store Listing Experiments represent a considerable change in the way Google views experiments.

In the new Google Play experiment you need now, as part of the Google Experiments setup wizard, you need to configure your test by choosing a few parameters:

• Minimum Detectable Effect (MDE) = Factor in determining the smallest "boost" you wish to accept as the threshold for declaring a test winner (rejecting the null hypothesis that "there is no meaningful difference in performance between test variants). The higher the test, the less sample is needed (as the test is less sensitive and can only detect meaningful bumps, although the test is more likely to conclude that no bumps were found). 

• Confidence Level = Likely to be a better-known factor, which basically means the probability that the result is not false, for a 90% confidence level you will receive a result that will be a false positive 1 out of 10 experiments. 

• Experiment goal - You will now need to choose between the first download and the first download reserved by D-1 as the metric you use to measure the performance of each variant.

Depending on the test configuration, you will receive an estimate of the sample size required to end the test, and an estimate of how long it will take to end the test based on your traffic.

If you don't understand data science or statistics, you can set up ineffective experiments that hurt your performance metrics and affect your organic traffic. But don't worry, if you have questions about how to set up your experiment, you can consult our team of ASO experts for free, who can provide you with a professional guide to optimize your ASO strategy.