Posted by Adriana Puchianu, Developer Marketing, Google Play
Based in the UK, Playdemic
is a free-to-play mobile games developer. Their leading game Golf
Clash is designed to provide a short and fun, competitive experience. It
uses a simple and accessible game mechanics based on one-thumb gaming which has
generated substantial user engagement, with an average of 44 minutes played over
three sessions a day. Golf Clash is now played by more than 1.5 million players
every day whilst the average revenue per user is equal to other platforms.
Watch Paul Gouge, CEO & Co-founder, and Gareth Jones, Head of Production,
discuss how Playdemic uses live game operations ("live ops") to continuously
engage players and grow their business on Google Play. Live ops are also
referred to as "running games as a service"; they include the strategic
distribution of content and interactions with players that are limited in time
and are designed to increase engagement and monetization.
Watch more developer stories and learn about other features and best practices
you can use to succeed on Google Play with the updated Playbook
app.
Posted by Fergus Hurley, Product Manager, Google Play
Poor app performance is something that many users have experienced. Think about
that last time you experienced an app crashing, failing to respond, or rendering
slowly. Consider your reaction when checking the battery usage on your own
device, and seeing an app using excessive battery. When an app performs badly,
users notice. In fact, in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, we
noticed that half of the 1-star reviews mentioned app stability.
Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better
ratings and reviews. This leads to better rankings on Google Play, which helps
increase installs. Not only that, but users stay more engaged, and are willing
to spend more time and money.
At Google I/O 2017, we announced
the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. Android vitals is
designed to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can
improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance.
Android vitals in the Google Play Console
Android vitals helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance.
The dashboards are useful for engineers and business owners alike, offering
quick reference performance metrics to monitor your app so you can analyze the
data and dedicate the right resources to make improvements.
You'll see the following data collected from Android devices whose users have
opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:
Stability: ANR rate & crash rate
Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames
(700ms)
Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive
wakeups
See how Busuu increased their rating from 4.1☆ to 4.5☆ by focusing on
app performance
Busuu is one of the world's largest language learning apps. Hear from Antoine
Sakho, Head of Product about how Busuu increased user ratings.
Learn more about engineering for high performance with tools from
Android and Google Play
Read our best
practice article on Android vitals to understand the data shown in the
dashboards, and how you can improve your app's performance and stability. Watch
the I/O session to learn about more tools from Android and Google Play that you
can use to identify and fix bad behaviors:
Learn more about other Play Console features, and stay up to date with news and
tips to succeed on Google Play, with the Playbook app. Join the beta and install it today.
Thank you for your feedback on our recently launched The AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement and letting us know how it has helped you grow your online business. Now you can download the guide in 2 additional languages: Portuguese and Spanish.
Download the guide today, and like thousands of other AdSense publishers, learn how to engage with your users like never before. The guide contains useful advice and best practices that will help you drive engagement on your site, including:
Tips to help your audience become familiar with your brand
Best practices to design delightful user journeys
Ideas on how to develop content that resonates with your audience
Ways to make your content easy to consume
Reasons why you should share the love with other sites by referring to good sources.
Ready? Download your free copy of the #AdSenseGuide now in any of the following languages:
Hutch is a London based mobile studio focusing entirely on racing games, with
more than 10 million players on Google Play. For their latest game, MMX Hill
Climb, they used A/B testing and game analytics to improve the game design and
experience resulting in more than 48 mins daily active usage per user.
Watch Shaun Rutland, CEO, and Robin Scannell, Games Analyst, explain how they
were able to deliver a more engaging user experience in this video.
Drawing new visitors to your site is only half of the battle. Having a plan for them to follow once they get there is the key to encouraging repeat visits and building a meaningful relationship with your readers.
To engage user-focused design for your site, it’s important to consider the following:
1. Keep It Simple
Gating desirable content can be a great way to learn more about visitors by prompting them to fill out a form or sign up for your newsletter to access it. However, roughly 67% of users will abandon an effort to obtain information or purchase something online if there are too many steps to take. Make sure your users get what they need in as few steps as possible. Matched content is another way to keep visitors from checking out too soon by increasing your odds of presenting them with content they are directly interested in.
2. Identify User Moments
People often look for inspiration and ideas while they complete a task online. Anticipating your visitors’ needs can help you set up your site to better serve them so you can capture and capitalize on these important moments. Whether they are purchasing something or just browsing, presenting this information in the right format can greatly increase the amount of time they spend on your site.
For example, if you’re an eCommerce site selling chocolates, having recommendations alongside each product such as gift boxes, complementing candy, and drink pairings can get your site visitor thinking about the holidays or gifts for their loved ones.
3. Create engaging Calls to Action
Bold “sign up” buttons and friendly prompts or reminders move visitors to take action. From bold colors and text to exaggerated size and other visual clues, there are a number of ways to make these important actions stand out on your site and even fun for users to engage with. In fact, our own AdSense team tested different campaign graphics on our marketing campaigns and saw higher implementation and engagement rates.
Did you know that roughly 61% of users abandon a site if they don't find what they’re looking for right away?1 As hard as you work to get visitors to your site, you have to work even harder to keep them there.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a clever hack to keeping your users engaged. However, if you understand the intent of your users and provide unique content that’s relevant to their interests, you’ll be on your way to increasing engagement on your site.
Download our guide to audience engagement to learn more about best practices and tips to drive better results for both your users and business. Get your free copy today.
We’d love to hear your feedback on how this guide, connect with us on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide.
Research shows that “29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs.”
In a world where people are making split decisions about what to consume, it’s increasingly challenging but critical for publishers to figure out how to effectively engage their audiences on their sites. To help lay the foundation to a winning engagement strategy, we’ve created the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.
This guide help you drive toward your goals for growing your site – from defining your brand voice to tips to make your site’s content easy to consume. Don’t waste another moment developing web pages that leave you with little opportunity to engage with your audience. Download the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement here.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
How to help your audience become familiar with your brand
Best practices to design delightful user journeys
How to develop content that resonates with your audience
Ways to make your content easy to consume
Why you should share the love with other sites by referring to good sources
Check out the guide and share your feedback with us on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide. We’d love to hear what you think.
Hey game developers, back in March you may remember we added new game statistics in the Google Play Developer Console for those of you who had implemented Google Play Games: our cross-platform game services for Android, iOS and the web.
Starting today, we're providing more insights into how your games are being used by adding country, age, and gender dimensions to the existing set of reports available in the Developer console. You’ll see demographics integrated into Overview stats as well as the Players reports for New and Active users.
In the Overview stats you can now see highlights of activity by age group, most active countries, and gender.
With a better understanding of your users’ demographic composition, you'll be able to make more effective decisions to improve retention and monetization. Here a few ways you could imagine using these new stats:
You just launched your new game globally, and expected it do particularly well in Germany. Using country demographic data, you see that Germany is much less active than expected. After some digging, you realize that your tutorial was not properly translated to German. Based on this insight, you immediately roll out a fix to see if you can improve active users in Germany.
In the Players stats section the new metrics reveal trends in how your app is doing across age groups, countries, and gender.
After Looking at your new demographics report you realize that your game is really popular with women in their mid-20s. Your in-app purchase data corroborates this, showing that the one female hero character is the most popular purchase. Empowered by this data, you race to add female hero characters to your game.
Additionally, if you're already using Google Play game services, there's no extra integration needed! By logging in to the Google Play Developer Console you can start using demographics to better inform your decisions today.
