Google today announced that it has worked with 20 advertising partners to bring its app install analytics in Google Analytics to iOS developers. To enable this functionality, Google worked with partners like inMobi and Millennial Media to set up an open tracking system that allows developers to track the success of their app install ads and the lifetime value of the users they acquired through these ads.
As Google’s VP of Product Engineering Brian Radowski told me earlier this week, developers now have plenty of options to run app install ads to get new users to their services, but once they have done that, they need to understand how these users interact with their apps.
In addition, they also probably want to see how their different ads performed on different networks once users land on the Google Play listing page for a given app. So to understand this conversion funnel, Google automatically generates a report for developers in the Google Play Developer Console that tracks impressions of the app in the Play store (and whether they were organic or paid), how many users installed the app and how they monetize within the app.
Developers don’t have to install any special tags to make this work. That’s what makes this service different from using Google Analytics, which takes quite a bit of work to set up. The idea here is to make it easy for developers to get started. Then, as their needs evolve, they may want to move over to Google Analytics for its more customized tracking options.
