Android Developer Story: SGN game ‘Cookie Jam’ increases user conversions with Store Listing Experiments

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Founded in 2010, SGN is a Los Angeles based mobile game developer with hit titles including Cookie Jam, Panda Pop, Juice Jam and Book of Life: Sugar Smash. They now have more than 200 employees and are one of the fastest growing cross-platform gaming developers.

SGN used Store Listing experiments to test multiple variants across their portfolio of games. For Cookie Jam, they saw an 8 percent increase in conversions simply by changing the background color of their app icon. They also saw increased installs following tests with the Panda Pop app icon and by changing the character in their Book of Life: Sugar Smash app icon.

Watch Josh Yguado, Co-founder and President of SGN, and Matthew Casertano, SVP of Game Operations, talk about how using Store Listing Experiments helped SGN improve their ROI, conversion rates and gamer retention.

Find out more about how to run tests on your Store Listing to increase installs and achieve success with the new guide to ‘Secrets to App Success on Google Play’.

Android Developer Story: Peak Games generates majority of global revenue for popular game ‘Spades’ on Android

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Founded in 2010, Turkish mobile games developer Peak Games started developing games targeted to the local market and is now scaling globally. Their game ‘Spades Plus’ is growing in the US and the game generates over 70% of its mobile revenue from Android.

Watch Erdem İnan, Business Intelligence and Marketing Director, and İlkin Ulaş Balkanay, Head of Android Development, explain how Peak Games improved user engagement and increased installs with Google Play Store Listing experiments and app promotion right from within the Developer Console.

Find out more about how to use run tests on your Store Listing to increase your installs and how to promote your app or game with Universal App Campaigns from the Google Play Developer Console.

Android Developer Story: Zabob Studio and Buff Studio reach global users with Google Play

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

South Korean Games developers Zabob Studio and Buff Studio are start-ups seeking to become major players in the global mobile games industry.

Zabob Studio was set up by Kwon Dae-hyeon and his wife in 2013. This couple-run business has already published ten games, including hits ‘Zombie Judgement Day’ and ‘Infinity Dungeon.’ So far, the company has generated more than KRW ₩140M (approximately $125,000 USD) in sales revenue, with about 60 percent of the studio’s downloads coming from international markets, such as Taiwan and Brazil.

Elsewhere, Buff Studio was founded in 2014 and right from the start, its first game Buff Knight was an instant hit. It was even featured as the ‘Game of the Week’ on Google Play and was included in “30 Best Games of 2014” lists. A sequel is already in the works showing the potential of the franchise.

In this video, Kwon Dae-hyeon, CEO of Zabob Studio, and Kim Do-Hyeong, CEO of Buff Studio, talk about how Google Play services and the Google Play Developer Console have helped them maintain a competitive edge, market their games efficiently to global users and grow revenue on the platform.

Android Developer Story: Buff Studio - Reaching global users with Google Play

Android Developer Story: Zabob Studio - Growing revenue with Google Play

Check Zabob Studio apps and Buff Knight on Google Play!

We’re pleased to share that Android Developer Stories will now come with translated subtitles on YouTube in popular languages around the world. Find out how to turn on YouTube captions. To read locally translated blog posts, visit the Google developer blog in Korean.

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Empowering successful global businesses on Google Play

Posted by Ellie Powers, Product Manager, Google Play

With more than 50 billion app installs over the past year from users across 190 countries, Google Play continues to see incredible growth thanks to developers like you creating amazing experiences. Play is now reaching more than one billion users every month.

In February, we announced that we had paid out more than $7 billion to developers in the prior year alone. This week at Google I/O, we’re introducing new and powerful tools to help you further grow your business, improve decision making based on smarter insights, and better engage your user base with more relevant content.

Acquire users from the Developer Console

Once you’ve built a great app, the next important step is to proactively find ways to promote it and grow a loyal user base. App install ads are one powerful way to do that. In the coming months, you’ll be able to quickly and easily set up ad campaigns right from within the Google Play Developer Console for the first time.

All you need to do is set a total budget and the cost you're willing to pay per user and we’ll scale your app promotion across our networks, including Google Search, AdMob, YouTube and the search ads we’re piloting on Google Play. With this new feature, you will will be able to better find the customers that are most likely to install your app.

Actionable insights with the Acquisition and Conversion Funnel

Whether you pay to acquire users or not, you want to know where they’re coming from. Through the Developer Console, you will soon be able to get a snapshot of how many users visit your Store listing, install your app, and make purchases. You’ll see where your most valuable users come from — across organic and paid traffic — and better understand where to focus your efforts.

Optimize your Play store listing with experiments

Your Play Store listing is extremely important, as it’s often the first touch point users have with your app. Starting today, we’re making it easier to optimize this page with support for A/B tests. You can run experiments with different versions of text and graphics to see which are most effective in converting visits into installs on Google Play. In our pilot program, we were thrilled to see that some developers like Kongregate achieved double-digit improvements in their install rates so far.

Test your app automatically on real devices with Cloud Test Lab

With the large variety of Android form factors in the market, testing your app on real devices is a critical step to ensuring a positive user experience on any device. However, you may not have access to every device that your users do. So we’re integrating the newly announced Cloud Test Lab into the Developer Console, which will allow you to automatically test your apps on hundreds of popular physical Android devices for free. We’re going to be rolling out this pilot program gradually, so we’ll welcome your feedback on it.

For each APK you upload to an alpha or beta channel, Google Play will execute fully automated testing of your app against physical devices matching your app targeting criteria and output a report with a detailed analysis of issues, including screenshots and logs. Google Cloud Test Lab will roll out to all developers later this year; you can sign-up to become a tester in the Developer Console now.

Build a data-driven games business with Player Analytics

Google Play Games has activated more than 180M new users in the past six months and continues to be the fastest growing mobile gaming platform in history.

Over the coming months, we're adding new reports, player segments, game metrics, and event types to Player Analytics to help you manage your games business. We're also bringing enhancements to our live operations tools that will enable dynamic content updates that make games feel more alive and engaging, gameplay to respond to changing player needs, and more fun, personalized user experiences. As the bar for success in mobile gaming continues to rise, we’re continuing to evolve our tools to help you meet the soaring expectations of players.

Find great apps – developer pages and search results

There are several ways in which we are improving the discoverability of great apps and games on Google Play to help drive more engagement. Starting today, you can create a unique homepage on Google Play to promote your entire app catalog. With your own developer page, you are able to upload graphics, explain what your company is all about and pick a special app to feature. This gives you a single destination to promote all of your apps on Google Play.

We are also helping guide users with broad interests (e.g. “shopping”) in a new search results experience.

The focus is on organizing results in an intuitive way that allows users to narrow their intent -- such as grouping shopping apps into coupons apps and fashion apps. By doing so, users will be able to better see the range of apps that satisfy their needs, while also increasing the chances of discovering new and innovative apps that you’re building.

Family-friendly content in Google Play

Starting today, we’re making it easier to find family-friendly content on Google Play through new discovery features. On the Apps & Games and Movies & TV homepages, users can now hit the “Family” star to see a curated set of options for specific age groups. In Play Books, tap the “Children’s Books” star. These pages let you browse by age ranges to find content that’s the best fit for the family. If you’ve already opted-in your apps to the Designed for Families program and they’ve met the requirements, they’ll be included in the new family section so that parents can find suitable, trusted, high-quality apps and games more easily. Find out more about opting-in to the Designed for Families program.

Join us at Google I/O 2015

To learn more, tune-in live to “Developers connecting the world through Google Play” at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm GMT on May 29 on google.com/io.

If you’re at I/O 2015, come along to our breakout sessions where we’ll be talking about and demo’ing these new features. Find our sessions in the I/O 2015 schedule.

Check out developer.android.com/distribute over the coming weeks and months as we add I/O videos and more details about these and other new features.

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Integrate Play data into your workflow with data exports

Posted by Frederic Mayot, Google Play team

The Google Play Developer Console makes a wealth of data available to you so you have the insight needed to successfully publish, grow, and monetize your apps and games. We appreciate that some developers want to access and analyze their data beyond the visualization offered today in the Developer Console, which is why we’ve made financial information, crash data, and user reviews available for export. We're now also making all the statistics on your apps and games (installs, ratings, GCM usage, etc.) accessible via Google Cloud Storage.

New Reports section in the Google Play Developer Console

We’ve added a Reports tab to the Developer Console so that you can view and access all available data exports in one place.

A reliable way to access Google Play data

This is the easiest and most reliable way to download your Google Play Developer Console statistics. You can access all of your reports, including install statistics, reviews, crashes, and revenue.

Programmatic access to Google Play data

This new Google Cloud Storage access will open up a wealth of possibilities. For instance, you can now programmatically:

• import install and revenue data into your in-house dashboard


• run custom analysis


• import crashes and ANRs into your bug tracker


• import reviews into your CRM to monitor feedback and reply to your users

Your data is available in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which is most easily accessed using gsutil. To get started, follow these three simple steps to access your reports:

1. Install the gsutil tool.




• Authenticate to your account using your Google Play Developer Console credentials.




2. Find your reporting bucket ID on the new Reports section.




• Your bucket ID begins with: pubsite_prod_rev (example:pubsite_prod_rev_1234567890)




3. Use the gsutil ls command to list directories/reports and gsutil cp to copy the reports. Your reports are organized in directories by package name, as well as year and month of their creation.

Read more about exporting report data in the Google Play Developer Help Center.

Note about data ownership on Google Play and Cloud Platform: Your Google Play developer account is gaining access to a dedicated, read-only Google Cloud Storage bucket owned by Google Play. If you’re a Google Cloud Storage customer, the rest of your data is unaffected and not connected to your Google Play developer account. Google Cloud Storage customers can find out more about their data storage on the terms of service page.

Helping developers connect with families on Google Play

Posted by Eunice Kim, Product Manager, Google Play

There are thousands of Android developers creating experiences for families and children — apps and games that broaden the mind and inspire creativity. These developers, like PBS Kids, Tynker and Crayola, carefully tailor their apps to provide high quality, age appropriate content; from optimizing user interface design for children to building interactive features that both educate and entertain.

Google Play is committed to the success of this emerging developer community, so today we’re introducing a new program called Designed for Families, which allows developers to designate their apps and games as family-friendly. Participating apps will be eligible for upcoming family-focused experiences on Google Play that will help parents discover great, age-appropriate content and make more informed choices.

Starting now, developers can opt in their app or game through the Google Play Developer Console. From there, our team will review the submission to verify that it meets the Designed for Families program requirements. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding new ways to promote family content to users on Google Play — we’ll have more to share on this soon.

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Power Great Gaming with New Analytics from Play Games

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

A few weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced Play Games Player Analytics, a new set of free reports to help you manage your games business and understand in-game player behavior. Today, we’re excited to make these new tools available to you in the Google Play Developer Console.

Analytics is a key component of running a game as a service, which is increasingly becoming a necessity for running a successful mobile gaming business. When you take a closer look at large developers that do this successfully, you find that they do three things really well:

• Manage their business to revenue targets


• Identify hot spots in their business metrics so they can continuously focus on the game updates that will drive the most impact


• Use analytics to understand how players are progressing, spending, and churning

“With player engagement and revenue data living under one roof, developers get a level of data quality that is simply not available to smaller teams without dedicated staff. As the tools evolve, I think Google Play Games Player Analytics will finally allow indie devs to confidently make data-driven changes that actually improve revenue.”

Kevin Pazirandeh
Developer of Zombie Highway 2

With Player Analytics, we wanted to make these capabilities available to the entire developer ecosystem on Google Play in a frictionless, easy-to-use way, freeing up your precious time to create great gaming experiences. Small studios, including the makers of Zombie Highway 2 and Bombsquad, have already started to see the benefits and impact of Player Analytics on their business.

Further, if you integrate with Google Play game services, you get this set of analytics with no incremental effort. But, for a little extra work, you can also unlock another set of high impact reports by integrating Google Play game services Events, starting with the Sources and Sinks report, a report to help you balance your in-game economy.

If you already have a game integrated with Google Play game services, go check out the new reports in the Google Play Developer Console today. For everyone else, enabling Player Analytics is as simple as adding a handful of lines of code to your game to integrate Google Play game services.

Manage your business to revenue targets

Set your spend target in Player Analytics by choosing a daily goal

To help assess the health of your games business, Player Analytics enables you to select a daily in-app purchase revenue target and then assess how you're doing against that goal through the Target vs Actual report depicted below. Learn more.

Identify hot spots using benchmarks with the Business Drivers report

Ever wonder how your game’s performance stacks up against other games? Player Analytics tells you exactly how well you are doing compared to similar games in your category.

Metrics highlighted in red are below the benchmark. Arrows indicate whether a metric is trending up or down, and any cell with the icon can be clicked to see more details about the underlying drivers of the change. Learn more.

Track player retention by new user cohort

In the Retention report, you can see the percentage of players that continued to play your game on the following seven days after installing your game.

Learn more.

See where players are spending their time, struggling, and churning with the Player Progression report

Measured by the number of achievements players have earned, the Player Progression funnel helps you identify where your players are struggling and churning to help you refine your game and, ultimately, improve retention. Add more achievements to make progression tracking more precise.

Learn more.

Manage your in-game economy with the Sources and Sinks report

The Sources and Sinks report helps you balance your in-game economy by showing the relationship between how quickly players are earning or buying and using resources.

For example, Eric Froemling, one man developer of BombSquad, used the Sources & Sinks report to help balance the rate at which players earned and spent tickets.

Read more about Eric’s experience with Player Analytics in his recent blog post.

To enable the Sources and Sinks report you will need to create and integrate Play game services Events that track sources of premium currency (e.g., gold coins earned), and sinks of premium currency (e.g., gold coins spent to buy in-app items).

Take your apps on the road with Android Auto

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate

Starting today, anyone can take their apps for a drive with Android Auto using Android 5.0+ devices, connected to compatible cars and aftermarket head units. Android Auto lets you easily extend your apps to the car in an efficient way for drivers, allowing them to stay connected while still keeping their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. When users connect their phone to a compatible vehicle, they will see an Android experience optimized for the head unit display that seamlessly integrates voice input, touch screen controls, and steering wheel buttons. Moreover, Android Auto provides consistent UX guidelines to ensure that developers are able to create great experiences across many diverse manufacturers and vehicle models, with a single application available on Google Play.

With the availability of the Pioneer AVIC-8100NEX, AVIC-7100NEX, and AVH-4100NEX aftermarket systems in the US, the AVIC-F77DAB, AVIC-F70DAB, AVH-X8700BT in the UK, and in Australia the AVIC-F70DAB, AVH-X8750BT, it is now possible to add Android Auto to many cars already on the road. As a developer, you now have a way to test your apps in a realistic environment. These are just the first Android Auto devices to launch, and vehicles from major auto manufacturers with integrated Android Auto support are coming soon.

With the increasing adoption of Android Auto by manufacturers, your users are going to be expecting more support of their apps in the car, so now is a good time to get started with development. If you are new to Android Auto, check out our DevByte video, which explains more about how this works, along with some live demos.

The SDK for Android Auto was made available to developers a few months ago, and now Google Play is ready to accept your application updates. Your existing apps can take advantage of all these cool new Android Auto features with just a few small changes. You’ll need to add Android Auto support to your application, and then agree to the Android Auto terms in the Pricing & Distribution category in the Google Play Developer Console. Once the application is approved, it will be made available as an update to your users, and shown in the cars’ display.

Adding support for Android Auto is easy. We have created an extensive set of documentation to help you add support for messaging (sample), and audio playback (sample). There are also short introduction DevByte videos for messaging and audio as well. Stay tuned for a series of posts coming up soon discussing more details of these APIs and how to work with them. We also have simulators to help you test your applications right at your desk during development.

With the launch of Android Auto, a new set of possibilities are available for you to make even more amazing experiences for your users, providing them the right information for the road ahead. Come join the discussion about Android Auto on Google+ at http://g.co/androidautodev where you can share ideas and ask questions with other developers.

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Creating Better User Experiences on Google Play

Posted by Eunice Kim, Product Manager for Google Play

Whether it's a way to track workouts, chart the nighttime stars, or build a new reality and battle for world domination, Google Play gives developers a platform to create engaging apps and games and build successful businesses. Key to that mission is offering users a positive experience while searching for apps and games on Google Play. Today we have two updates to improve the experience for both developers and users.

A global content rating system based on industry standards

Today we’re introducing a new age-based rating system for apps and games on Google Play. We know that people in different countries have different ideas about what content is appropriate for kids, teens and adults, so today’s announcement will help developers better label their apps for the right audience. Consistent with industry best practices, this change will give developers an easy way to communicate familiar and locally relevant content ratings to their users and help improve app discovery and engagement by letting people choose content that is right for them.

Starting now, developers can complete a content rating questionnaire for each of their apps and games to receive objective content ratings. Google Play’s new rating system includes official ratings from the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) and its participating bodies, including the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), Pan-European Game Information (PEGI), Australian Classification Board, Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) and Classificação Indicativa (ClassInd). Territories not covered by a specific ratings authority will display an age-based, generic rating. The process is quick, automated and free to developers. In the coming weeks, consumers worldwide will begin to see these new ratings in their local markets.

To help maintain your apps’ availability on Google Play, sign in to the Developer Console and complete the new rating questionnaire for each of your apps. Apps without a completed rating questionnaire will be marked as “Unrated” and may be blocked in certain territories or for specific users. Starting in May, all new apps and updates to existing apps will require a completed questionnaire before they can be published on Google Play.

An app review process that better protects users

Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.

To assist in this effort and provide more transparency to developers, we’ve also rolled out improvements to the way we handle publishing status. Developers now have more insight into why apps are rejected or suspended, and they can easily fix and resubmit their apps for minor policy violations.

Over the past year, we’ve paid more than $7 billion to developers and are excited to see the ecosystem grow and innovate. We’ll continue to build tools and services that foster this growth and help the developer community build successful businesses.

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How Google Analytics helps you make better decisions for your apps

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Knowing how your customers use your app is the foundation to keeping them happy and engaged. It’s important to track downloads and user ratings, but the key to building a successful business is using data to dive deeper into understanding the full acquisition funnel and what makes users stick around.

Google Analytics is the easiest way to understand more about what your users are doing inside your app on Google Play, while also simultaneously tracking your users across the web and other mobile platforms. To show how Google Analytics can help, we've created a new "Analyze" section on the Android Developers website for you to check out. We provide guidance on how to design a measurement plan and implement effective in-app analytics – and take advantage of features only available between Google Play and Google Analytics.

The Google Play Referral Flow in Analytics

Google Analytics for mobile apps provides a comprehensive view into your app’s full user lifecycle, including user acquisition, composition, in app behavior, and key conversions. Our Analytics Academy course on mobile app analytics is also a great resource to learn the fundamentals.

Eltsoft LLC, a foreign language learning and education app developer for Android, recognized early on how impactful Google Analytics would have on the company's ability to quickly improve on its apps and meet user needs.

Analytics has really helped us to track the effectiveness of the changes to our app. I would say six months ago, that our success was a mystery. The data said we were doing well, but the whys were not clear. Therefore, we couldn’t replicate or push forward. But today, we understand what’s happening and can project our future success. We have not only the data, but can control certain variables allowing us to understand that data. - Jason Byrne, Eltsoft LLC

Here are some powerful tips to make the most of Google Analytics:

1. Understand the full acquisition funnel

Uniquely integrated with the Google Play Developer Console, Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive view of the Google Play Referral Flow. By linking Analytics to the Developer Console, you can track useful data on how users move through the acquisition flow from your marketing efforts to the Google Play store listing to the action of launching the app. If you find that a significant number of users browse your app in Google Play, but don’t install it, for example, you can then focus your efforts on improving your store listing.

2. Unlock powerful insights on in-app purchases

Monitoring in-app purchases in the Google Play Developer Console will show you the total revenue your app is generating, but it does not give you the full picture about your paying users. By instrumenting your app with the Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, you’ll get a fuller understanding of what paying users do inside your app. For example, you can find out which acquisition channels deliver users who stay engaged and go on to become the highest value users.

3. Identify roadblocks and common paths with the Behavior Flow

Understanding how users move through your app is best done with in-app analytics. With Google Analytics, you can easily spot if a significant percentage of users leave your app during a specific section. For example, if you see significant drop off on a certain level of your game, you may want to make that level easier, so that more users complete the level and progress through the game. Similarly, if you find users who complete a tutorial stay engaged with your app, you might put the tutorial front and center for first-time users.

4. Segment your audience to find valuable insights

Aggregated data can help you answer questions about overall trends in your app. If you want to unlock deeper insights about what drives your users’ behavior, you can slice and dice your data using segmentation, such as demographics, behavior, or install date. If something changes in one of your key metrics, segmentation can help you get to the root of the issue -- for example, was a recent app update unpopular with users from one geographic area, or were users with a certain device or carrier affected by a bug?

5. Use custom data to measure what matters for your business

Simply activating the Google Analytics library gives you many out-of-the-box metrics without additional work, such as daily and monthly active users, session duration, breakdowns by country, and many more variables. However, it’s likely that your app has many user actions or data types that are unique to it, which are critical to building an engaged user base. Google Analytics provides events, custom dimensions, and custom metrics so you can craft a measurement strategy that fits your app and business.

6. No more one-size-fits-all ad strategy

If you’re a developer using AdMob to monetize your app, you can now see all of your Analytics data in the AdMob dashboard. Running a successful app business is all about reaching the right user with the right ad or product at the right time. If you create specific user segments in Google Analytics, you can target each segment with different ad products. For example, try targeting past purchasers with in-app purchase ads, while monetizing users who don’t purchase through targeted advertising.

By measuring your app performance on a granular level, you will be able to make better decisions for your business. Successful developers build their measurement plan at the same time as building their app in order to set goals and track progress against key success metrics, but it’s never too late to start.

Choose the implementation that works best for your app to get started with Google Analytics today and find out more about what you can do in the new “Analyze” section of developers.android.com.

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