Google Makes It Easier For Developers To Promote Apps And Track Listing Page Performance

Google first announced Universal App Campaigns, a product that allows developers to easily advertise their apps, at its I/O Developer Conference in May. Now, almost half a year later, this service has gone live in the Google Play Developer Console. Google is also launching a new performance report for developers that allows them to see how well their Play Store listings and promotions are performing.

What makes Universal App Campaigns different from Google’s other advertising product is that it focuses on making the process as easy as possible (though you give up a bit of control in return). These campaigns will then appear in Google Play and Google Search, as well as on YouTube and the wider Google Display network.

Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play, told us when the company first announced this product that the company wants to allow developers to say “here is my money and this is what I want to pay per user,” and then let Google handle things for them.

The service automatically pulls images, video and descriptions from the Play Store and then generates ads for Google’s different ad formats based on this information. The system automatically optimizes the ad campaigns to get developers as many installs as it can for the cost-per-install limit they have set.

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In addition to this new ad campaign service, Google is launching its new user acquisition performance report today. Using this new report, developers can easily track how well their Play Store listings are performing in the Developer Console without having to go through Google Analytics.

The new report shows developers how many people have visited their listing pages and how many of them went on to install the app and made purchases within it.