(Image Credit: Google)
The app industry is a huge and growing business which offers a lot of potential, but also a lot of competition. Making the most amazing piece of software won’t make a difference to anyone if the app just gets lost in the depths of the vast app stores and never has a chance to gain the userbase it deserves.
Google has debuted new tools – first announced back in May at Google I/O – for creating powerful new “Universal app campaigns” along with detailed performance analytics to help grow your applications through allowing for more informed decisions.
Universal App Campaigns
The new universal app campaigns being provided by Google will automatically pull in images, video, and descriptions from your Google Play store listing to generate ad formats that look great wherever they are placed. Google has placed their vast advertising experience into creating a system which optimises your campaign to reach an install volume as close as possible to your target cost-per-install.
José Maria Pertusa, CMO of Linio, said: “With universal app campaigns, we only had to set up one campaign that drove more than 10,000 new installs in one month and install volume is continuing to trend up over time. We’re also seeing a 20% lower CPI compared to other channels.”
Universal app campaigns are found under ‘AdWords Campaigns’ in the ‘User Acquisition’ tab within the Developer Console.
Performance Report
If your app is seeing growth from a campaign, you want to see where it’s coming from and what users are doing. Armed with this information, you can invest more time into what is working for your software and less into what is not. The report will show how users are finding your application, if they are installing, and if they go on to make purchases after.
Along with the general performance report, you can also track links tagged with UTM in order to get more granular detail about how a particular marketing promotion is resonating.
Getting users to see your Play Store listing is the first hurdle, ensuring they press “Install” is next. We reported earlier in the year that Google was rolling-out a new feature which helps you to do this with A/B tests of Play Store pages to see which version in particular is performing best.
Conclusion
The new app campaign tools from Google should be of huge benefit to developers looking to market their software with detailed performance insights. Google says it will continue listening to developers for how to improve their tools – like the recent improvements to beta testing and Store Listing Experiments – in order to help you grow your app or game business.
A video below, created by Frederic Mayot of the Google Play team, shows you how to set-up your first universal app campaign and view the new data offered in the performance tab:
Have you tried Google’s universal app campaign tools? Let us know in the comments.
