Measuring a Mobile World: Introducing Mobile App Analytics

Mobile is changing the way that people communicate, work and play, and much of the growing adoption and innovation we're seeing in the industry is driven by mobile apps. There are already more than 600,000 mobile apps on Google Play alone, and we expect to see continued momentum throughout the industry. Mobile is also becoming front and center for marketers and businesses. As more of them understand the value of mobile apps, sophisticated measurement tools are becoming core to how marketers and app developers invest, analyze and market their apps. 

That’s why today we’re announcing a new set of reports in beta called Mobile App Analytics that help marketers and developers better measure their mobile apps. The reports are tailored for mobile app developers and marketers, speaking the language that matters to them. They are designed to measure the entire mobile customer journey - from discovery to download to engagement. This enables the creation of app experiences that are more useful and engaging through data-driven decisions at each stage of the app lifecycle:

1. Acquisition and user metrics such as downloads and new users
2. Engagement metrics such as retention, crashes and conversions
3. Outcome metrics such as app sales and in-app purchases

Layout of new Mobile App Analytics reports

Here’s an outline of the new Mobile App Analytics along with screen grabs of selected reports:

Acquisition and User Analysis Reports - discover your best sources of new users

New and active users - measure the number of new and active users who launch your app everyday and analyze your most valuable segments. 

Google Play traffic sources - understand which traffic sources are driving new users and in-app conversions through Google Play to fine-tune your marketing initiatives. 

App versions - keep track of the distribution of active users over the older and newer versions of your app so you know what to support.

Device overview - check out the top mobile devices and OS versions that your app runs on, and optimize the experience for each device.

Engagement Reports - see how users interact with your app

User behavior - assess how loyal your users are, how frequently they use the app, and the engagement level of each loyalty group.

Engagement flow - visually see the screens, actions and paths users take to move throughout your application in order to optimize usage.

App crashes - see trends in crashes and exceptions that will help you troubleshoot problems on certain devices and operating systems.

Outcome / Business Impact Reports - identify whether users are accomplishing your goals

Goal conversions - set up conversion events in your app, like spending 10 minutes in the app, or clicking on ads to gauge success.

In-App purchases - if you sell virtual or tangible goods in your app, you can measure the number of purchases and the revenue generated.

The new reports are part of a holistic experience tailored for mobile app measurement, including a new and lightweight SDK v2.0 that’s easier to implement and is opt-out ready, with a streamlined back-end infrastructure.

We’ve also revamped our sign-up process, so new users can choose whether they want to start measuring their website or their mobile app. This means you’ll be just 3 clicks away from setting up your app analytics account and downloading the SDK.

We will be opening the beta up to whitelisted users in waves, so if you’re interested in using Mobile App Analytics for your app, please complete this beta signup form and we’ll get you started soon. We anticipate the reports will be available to all Google Analytics users by the end of the summer.

Also, if you are at Google I/O be sure to attend the Google Analytics session “Measuring the End-to-End Value of Your App” (from 11:30AM - 12:30PM today, June 29) where our lead engineers will tell you more about Mobile App Analytics and some other exciting things we’re working on.

Posted By JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team

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Announcing your two most requested features: offline document editing and Drive for iOS

In April, we introduced Google Drive, a place where you can create, share, and keep all your stuff. Today at the Google I/O conference we announced two new ways to get things done in the cloud: offline editing for Google documents and a Drive app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Offline document editing 

No internet connection? No big deal. With offline editing, you can create and edit Google documents and leave comments. Any changes you make will be automatically synced when you get back online.

You can enable offline editing from the gear icon in Google Drive and find more detailed instructions for getting set up in the Help Center. Note that you’ll need the latest versions of Chrome or ChromeOS to edit offline. We’re also working hard to make offline editing for spreadsheets and presentations available in the future.

Google Drive for iOS 

We launched the Drive app for Android phones and tablets a few weeks ago, and starting today, Google Drive is available for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

With the Drive app, you can open PDFs, photos, videos, documents and anything else stored in your Drive while you're on the go. You can also search all your files, add collaborators to documents, and make files available offline to view them even without an internet connection. For blind and low-vision users, the app also works great in VoiceOver mode. Learn more about what you can do with the app in our Help Center.

Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5.0+ and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet.

To learn more about Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start.

Posted by Clay Bavor, Product Management Director

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Watch our latest Hangouts On Air to learn how to get started with DFP Small Business and Mobile

This past month we hosted two Hangouts on Air to help publishers get started with DFP Small Business and to create mobile websites using DudaMobile’s free mobile site builder. If you missed either Hangout, don’t worry -- we've included short recaps below, and you can watch the recordings at any time from our YouTube channel.

Getting started with DFP Small Business
If you’re thinking about using an ad server, just getting started using DFP or would like to learn some best practices you may have missed, then be sure to check out the video from our DFP Hangout.

In the video, DFP specialist Rishan first explains how an ad server works and the benefits it can provide to growing publishers. He then discusses orders, line items and your ad units, and the ideal way to set up each. Before closing, Rishan talks about the different ways to traffic direct ads versus other ad networks and enable dynamic allocation for non-guaranteed inventory.

Learning to build a mobile site
In our mobile Hangout, specialists from Google and our partner DudaMobile, work with Dan from ScienceDaily.com to build a mobile version of his website. You’ll learn about available resources and important questions to ask yourself when starting to ‘go mobile’ with your site and how to create mobile ads to monetize mobile traffic.

We hope you’ll join us for our future Hangouts -- be sure to stay connected with us by adding Google AdSense to your circles on Google+.

Posted by Jason Sanio - Inside AdSense Team

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Take your channels with you on the new YouTube app

Last year we redesigned YouTube with the goal to make it easy and enjoyable to follow the channels you love. We added a guide to the homepage to quickly access your channel subscriptions and a feed of activity showing you the latest and greatest videos from your favorite YouTube channels. Now in the new YouTube app for Android, we’re bringing that experience to the app, while making YouTube better both on the go and at home.

A guide to all your channels
With less screen space on your phone than your laptop or TV, we want to focus the YouTube app on just the stuff you care about. You now have a guide on the left side of the screen that gives you instant access to your channels, and a feed constantly updating with new videos.

Faster on the go
When you’re watching YouTube on the go, watching a video buffer is as fun as waiting for the bus to show up. To spend more time with your video and less time with the spinning circle of boredom, you can now preload and temporarily cache videos from your subscribed channels on your phone anytime it’s charging and your WiFi is connected. Just enable “Preloading” in the Settings menu. You’ll still need a connection to play the video, but once you do it’s smooth sailing through the latest from your subscribed channels and Watch Later queue.

Watch it on the big screen
Back at home and want to watch that amazing video on your big screen? While the video’s playing on TV, with the new YouTube app or mobile website you’ll be able to use your phone to find the next great video to watch, comment, like or subscribe. We’re working to make this broadly available across connected TVs and living room devices, so stay tuned for updates.

To check out the new app, visit the Google Play Store on your Android phone for the latest version. The new YouTube app features are currently just available on phones with Android 4.0 and above, and you’ll start to see these features appear on other Android versions in coming months. If you’re using m.youtube.com or other versions of the YouTube app, you can still access your subscriptions by signing in and selecting “Subscriptions.”

So whenever or wherever you’re ready for some great channels, trust your YouTube app will have them ready to watch.

Andrey Doronichev, head of YouTube mobile, recently watched “JEFF BRIDGES goes Face to Face with "Weird Al" Yankovic.”

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Mobile Mondays: Wrap up and SEO resources

As we wrap up the Mobile Monday series, we’d like to leave you with one final tip on improving search engine optimization (SEO) for your mobile site.

Although mobile may be a new space for you as a publisher, SEO for your mobile site should be as easy as creating your mobile site through the DudaMobile tool. That’s why we’ve consolidated resources from our Webmaster team to address common concerns around indexing content from your mobile site.


Read Google’s recommendations on building smartphone-optimized websites.

Watch this video to demystify the myth of mobile sites resulting in duplicate content.

Read this blog post for steps on how you can help Google index your mobile site.

If you missed any of our previous posts, here is a recap of the Mobile Mondays series, along with relevant mobile posts:

Is your site ready for mobile users?
Going Mobile - Why FindTheBest went mobile
Setting goals for mobile monetization
Mobile site or mobile app, what’s right for your business right now?
GoMo and DudaMobile offer a do-it-yourself mobile site builder
On Mobile, it’s as much about the user as it is the content
QLife receive 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search Ads
How to monetize your mobile friendly website

Also, don’t forget to check out the GoMo for Publishers webinar that will walk you through specific best practices on going mobile.

Posted by Tuyen Nguyen, Mobile Publisher Advocate, AdSense

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Be A Part Of ClickZ / Google Analytics Mobile Research

In our recent post on next generation of measurement, we discussed mobile as one of the fastest areas of digital channel growth. How fast? According to GA benchmark data, mobile now accounts for 8% of all conversions that we’re seeing in Google Analytics, and mobile conversions have grown by about 180% in just the last year. 

The staggering growth of mobile platforms, devices, apps and of course users has inspired an entire generation of marketers and entrepreneurs to take notice. But with such rapid change execution and adoption are all over the board. That’s why we’ve partnered with ClickZ to survey the industry and provide a reference point for the state of mobile marketing in 2012.

Don’t miss out on your chance to participate in this survey and shape the future discussion of our industry:

Click here and take the 2012 mobile marketing & apps survey.

As a bonus for completing this ClickZ/Google Analytics industry survey, you will be one of the first to receive the results once it's been compiled in a report. 

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics team

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‘Hangout on Air’ and learn how to build a mobile site in minutes

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience? With 44% of Americans owning a smartphone, publishers have the opportunity to meet their users’ expectations by delivering a mobile experience that’s on par with the desktop experience.

If you haven’t yet developed a mobile-optimized site, we’re here to help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.  In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.  It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!



Join us tomorrow, May 24th at 1pm ET/10am PT and watch as we showcase how ScienceDaily.com can use the mobile site builder to build a mobile-friendly site--live on air.

You’ll also hear from the CMO of DudaMobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in

1. Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 24 at 1pm ET/10am PT
2. Go to the Google AdSense+ Page
3. Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream

If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them on Google+ with the hashtag #GoMoSite.

Posted by Joseph Corral, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

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Join us at the AdSense GetMo Exhibition in London

We’ve talked a lot recently on our blog about how mobile usage is rising at a rate faster than any other technology to date. To keep up, it’s important for your business to develop a mobile strategy.

If you’re located in the London, UK area (or are willing to travel to London!) we’d like to let you know about the GetMo Exhibition we’re hosting on Wednesday, 30 May. During this event, you’ll have the opportunity to learn more about mobile trends. You’ll meet mobile site developers from the GetMo site to hear how they can help you develop a mobile site with their offerings.

The agenda will feature sessions including:

• Mobile Industry Trends with Ian Carrrington, Mobile Advertising Sales Director
• A glimpse into the world of Android with Richard Hyndman, Developer Advocate
• Offerings available from GetMo vendors
• GetMo publisher panel

Spots are filling up, but if you’d like to attend the upcoming event, fill out our interest form before Thursday, 24 May. Although we won’t be able to accommodate all requests due to space constraints, we’ll do our best to include as many interested publishers as possible. We also recommend ensuring you’re opted in to receiving ‘Special Offer’ emails so we can reach you in the future.

We hope to see you in London at our GetMo Exhibition!

Posted by Marta Lysiak - AdSense Optimisation Team

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Mobile Mondays: QLife receives 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search Ads

QLife is a leading hospital finder, drug database and health-care information website. QLife’s mobile application, “Medicine Search” is one of the biggest health-care applications in Japan. The app enables users to search for information on a range of medicines. QLife reached 2.5 million downloads of their app after the 3/11 Japan Earthquake, when Japanese consumers sought to pay greater care and attention to their family’s health-care.

Recently, QLife’s Executive Producer, Yoshimasa Mine spoke to us to describe why they choose to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications and AdMob mobile advertising, and shared some optimization best practices.

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Why and when did QLife choose to start building a mobile application?

In 2008, when the iPhone was introduced to the Japanese market, there was a mobile industry event, Mobitec, where I felt the potential of high-end mobile. Mobile phones are a device that's always with a consumer, regardless of whether they're at home, at work, or at play. This was a good match with our business of providing a medicine search service - a search that is done instantly at a time of need.

Next, we took a look at our own company's data. We began to see large increases in traffic from mobile, even more than PCs. We wanted to build and encourage mobile activity to complement desktop traffic, particularly during holidays and weekends where we saw mobile traffic surging.


Why did you decide to monetize your mobile app using AdSense and AdMob?

We originally started using AdSense on our desktop site. As a health-care review site, we need to protect our objectivity and integrity to our users. As a result, advertising is the best solution for monetization, over paid reviews from other health-care services and companies.

We chose AdSense because of the quality of the ads, the content matching technology, and the limited number of sales resources we had internally.  Serving relevant ads is important to our business; we view ads as useful content for our business, and irrelevant ads have not been successful in bringing revenue to us.

We used to use only AdMob to monetize our application. But last year, when Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps was released, we decided to implement it for two reasons. First, we already used Custom Search Ads for our desktop site. Secondly, we’ve heard that using both Custom Search Ads and AdMob will increase CTR because Custom Search Ads will show more related ads in search results.  


What did you see as a result of implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps?
We’ve seen revenue from mobile increase by 560% after implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications. We’re seeing CTRs, CPCs, and RPMs maintain healthy levels in line with our internal benchmarks. Ad engagement tends to be higher with users who own our free app.

When we compare how these perform to our desktop site, we find that the mobile app generates lower CPCs but higher CTRs for us.To increase more app downloads, we are working hard to create high quality content to meet our user's needs. 

How long did it take to implement Custom Search Ads on mobile apps?
We took some time to implement Custom Search Ads on our app, since changes won’t go live until our users update their version of our app. It took us three to four days including the test period to implement this.

Could you share any publisher best practices you’ve found across using Custom Search Ads and AdMob?

1. Show Custom Search Ads on search result pages. Use AdMob on other content pages.
2. We also use the AdMob House priority level to serve direct ads to users.
3. With Custom Search Ads, you'll see a variation in the number of ads that show, depending on the amount of organic search results you're delivering.  We'll always place one ad above search results. We'll also choose to show another ad below when there are more than five search results. In doing so, we can maximize revenue while complying with the program policy, which permits only one ad per view.

What’s next for QLife?

We've found a lot of success with the medicine/health-care search and service business. We'd like to expand our business in a couple of new directions.

First, we're interested in growing our business as an app developer for the health-care and medical service sector. We saw good success with the consumer application, and so our reputation as a medical app developer has increased in the industry overall.

We're looking to take our app to new global markets. There is a need for a quality medical and health-care search service anywhere in the world. With a publisher solution like AdSense, we are excited to expand and monetize our business beyond our home market in Japan.

Finally, I’m excited to announce that we just launched a new iOS app, Find Clinic that seeks to help people easily find and access hospitals at home and abroad. We’ve implemented Custom Search Ads for mobile apps on Find Clinic as well, and look forward to seeing similar successes!

Posted by Tatsuo Sakamoto, Account Strategist

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Mobile Mondays: On Mobile, it’s as much about the user as it is the content

For this Mobile Mondays post we’ve invited Netbiscuits to offer you best practices and tips for creating a good mobile experience for your users.  Netbiscuits is a leading cloud platform for the development and delivery of next generation web apps across all mobile devices and connected platforms.

Cultivating a user-focused mobile experience isn’t just about shrinking your existing website to fit a mobile screen. In a single day, a connected consumer interacts with your brand and consumes your content across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and game consoles. To meet consumer demand for instant, optimized access, marketers must design engaging “connected experiences” that respond differently for each device as they each present unique size, capability, and content consumption challenges.

In solving these challenges, marketers need to focus on a responsive design that takes the multiplatform world into account and allows for a device-optimized “Content Centric” user experience. The layout should morph depending on the size and shape of the device’s screen ensuring the experience adapts as new devices are introduced in the marketplace.

Touch enabled devices have evolved the digital user experience by providing users with a “Parallel Response Experience” to their request as opposed to a “Sequential Response Experience” found in a traditional “Point and Click” mobile user experience.  Designing a “Parallel” mobile experience with many touch enabled features ensures a more natural flow of information which  dramatically increases site effectiveness. For example, instead of re-using a traditional website interface, many mobile commerce clients use a drag and drop interface for placing items in a shopping cart which has greatly increased sales on touch enabled devices.

Along with the design layout, responsive design must adapt a content centric approach to the user experience. Your users must be served content based on the topics for which they have shown interest as well as based on time of day, weather, or geographic location. A system remembering the items in your shopping cart has been an essential element of a cohesive e-commerce experience for some time. But this concept can be expanded upon by associating a broader range of content to the individual that results in the serving of an article that interested the customer earlier in the day or weather information for an upcoming trip. To foster a good user experience, this needs to be done in a streamlined, accurate manner that limits clutter.

One of the more challenging attributes of going mobile is the varying screen sizes of tablets and smartphones. When it comes to tablets, we advise clients to take a layered approach to designing and delivering a “one-page” experience. By embedding or layering a video or photo gallery on top of a page, consumer engagements and actions happen without forcing the user to leave the page.

Being responsive to the user’s device and serving appropriate content is done by using analytics. The insights gleaned from mobile, including device models, screen resolution, device capability, service provider, and preferred user language cannot be matched by traditional marketing activities. Compared against geographic location, savvy marketers use this data to define product offerings and regionalize discounts.

Once you understand these strategic points, you should also keep in mind these simple best practices:

• Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is an integrated solution where CMS, CRM and commerce updates should occur at the same time and in the same systems as updates to your traditional website.  
• Research! Engage your team, friends and family to get insights on how they use their mobile devices. Conduct a competitive analysis to learn how your competitors illustrate and deliver their product and services. 
• Design your site to solve the main problems or situations customers might find themselves in. Consider what features, tasks or existing site elements translate best on mobile and implement them.
• And finally, don’t simply duplicate your traditional website. Consumers want and expect a different experience on mobile.

Posted by Craig Besnoy, Managing Director, The Americas, Netbiscuits

Visit Netbiscuits.com to learn more about the Netbiscuits platform.

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