Google just took another step in its mission to give Android developers better tools to analyze and monetize their apps.
The company has officially announced that it has integrated Google Analytics into its Google Play Developer Console for Android developers. Google had said that Analytics was coming to the Developer Console at its I/O conference in May this year.
See also: Making Android Pay: 5 Tips To Topping The Charts On Google Play
Android developers can now download the Google Analytics software developer kit (SDK) and place it into an app and upload it to the Google Play Store. The Analytics SDK is also available for iOS apps.
Google Analytics for the Developer Console has four main aspects:
Google Play Referral Flow: Helps developers figure out where Google Play traffic is coming from (search, marketing campaigns, blogs or media articles etc.). This feature helps marketers figure out how successful their campaigns are and where the best traffic comes from.
Views in Google Play: Referral Flow shows how many people have viewed the app in Google Play.
Installs: Once figuring out where the traffic came from through the Referral Flow, Analytics tracks users that actually clicked and downloaded the app through Google Play.
New Users: Goes beyond the straight download numbers to show people that have opened the app and begun to use it and become “Active Users.”
The goal for Google is to show not just the raw number of views and downloads, but also how much people have engaged with the app and what version of Android they are using. With the Analytics SDK, developers can know what Android API Level their users are employing. This is beneficial information for developers that need to know how many people are using older versions of Android, such as versions 2.3.7 Gingerbread that may not have certain capabilities that are in newer versions of the operating system.
Google employs “flow visualization” in Analytics to show how a user got to the app and what actions they took within the app.
