Making Rankings and Evaluations higher for customers and builders

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Scott Lin, and Tat Yang Koh, Product Managers at Google Play

Rankings and evaluations are vital. They supply worthwhile quantitative and qualitative suggestions in your customers’ reported expertise of your app or sport, and the broader service that you just supply. That’s why they’re one of many indicators folks use when deciding what to obtain on Google Play.

We’ve heard from each Play Retailer customers and builders that rankings and evaluations might be extra useful. That is very true when rankings from one space unfairly influence one other — like when a bug that solely impacted a single nation negatively impacts the app’s score in every single place; or when constructive enhancements in a pill expertise are ignored due to the variety of customers on telephones. So we’re beginning a multi-quarter program of enhancements to make rankings extra personalised and indicative of the expertise every particular person consumer can anticipate, and to make them simpler to navigate and use for builders:

• From November 2021, customers on telephones will begin to see rankings particular to their registered nation
• Early in 2022 customers on different form-factors akin to tablets, Chromebooks, and wearables will begin to see rankings particular to the system that they’re on

We perceive that many builders intently monitor the rankings that their potential customers see, so we’re ensuring you’ve got loads of discover about these upcoming adjustments. We’ve additionally made enhancements to Play Console that can assist you perceive your rankings and evaluations – particularly throughout form-factors.

Adjustments to Google Play Console

Machine sort insights

Increasing your assist for various system sorts is among the most vital and impactful adjustments you can also make to your consumer interfaces. Including tablet-optimized layouts or higher mouse and keyboard assist for Chrome OS may end up in a step-change within the high quality of your customers’ expertise, which in flip influences their rankings and evaluations.

New Machine sort rankings insights can be found in Play Console
rankings overview and breakdown pages

To make it simpler to identify alternatives throughout varied system sorts and observe the influence of enhanced experiences, we’ve added new Machine Kind dimensions to the rankings web page. We’ve additionally added a Machine Kind filter to your evaluations so you possibly can simply see how your pill customers are score you, or what your customers on Chrome OS say of their evaluations.

Extra versatile date and interval choices

A lot of you’ve got informed us that you just wish to entry extra granular knowledge than our selectors allowed. So, we’ve damaged down your segmentation choices and made them simpler to make use of. Now you can independently choose the time interval you wish to plot (from the final 28 days by to your app’s full lifetime), and the way you need your rankings knowledge to be aggregated (each day, weekly, or each 28 days). This lets you entry extra granular knowledge over longer intervals of time.

Choose any time vary and aggregation interval independently
to search out the rankings knowledge you need

Obtain knowledge simply

We’ve additionally enabled CSV downloads of your common knowledge and score distributions. Mixed with the brand new knowledge choice choices, you possibly can simply question and obtain way more of your knowledge and carry out offline evaluation. For instance, you could possibly obtain your complete historical past of each day rankings distributions and correlate it in a spreadsheet with customer support contacts.

Entry and obtain all of your knowledge together with rankings breakdowns
immediately from the overview web page

All of those adjustments are stay in Play Console now. Go to Rankings evaluation and Evaluations to strive them out.*

Upcoming adjustments to rankings in Google Play

Rankings assist folks resolve which apps to obtain and they’re considered for that includes and placement on Play Retailer. However as a result of the app expertise can fluctuate relying on the consumer’s area and system sort, mixture rankings don’t at all times inform the entire story. That’s why, beginning in November 2021, we’re going to alter the rankings that particular person customers see primarily based on the place they’re registered, and later within the yr what system they’re utilizing.

From November, which means customers on telephones will see particular rankings for the nation or area they’re primarily based in. So a consumer in Japan will see app rankings generated from these submitted by different Japanese customers.

Early subsequent yr we’ll additional replace rankings to replicate the system sort customers are looking Play on, whether or not it’s: tablets and foldables, Chrome OS, Put on, or Auto. It will give customers a greater impression of the expertise that they will anticipate for the system they’re utilizing. We suggest you check out your form-factor rankings at the moment – particularly for tablets the place development may be very sturdy – to see when you ought to spend money on optimising your customers’ experiences.

We perceive that as a developer you’ll want to be sure you perceive and get forward of any main shifts in your user-visible rankings. So not less than 10 weeks earlier than any change in Play Retailer, we’ll routinely analyze the change your app can anticipate to see and attain out to any developer that may see a change of extra that 0.2 stars on any system sort in a key market (one with >5% of your retailer itemizing guests). This offers you time to plan if you wish to make key adjustments to your app.

These adjustments in Google Play will begin to roll out from November with nation or region-specific rankings. Look out for messages about your rankings in your Play Console Inbox in the direction of the top of this yr, and don’t neglect that you may get forward by checking your rankings by nation and device-type at the moment.

*Please observe you want a Play Console account to entry these hyperlinks.

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