Google updates its Play Console from time to time. It serves as a centralized portal for developers to deploy their apps, monitor their performance, identify trends, and manage releases, among other things. Now, the company has introduced a set of new metrics and benchmarks so developers can better analyze their app's store performance.
This update essentially enables developers to better understand their apps' usage and identify opportunities to improve. It features new metrics as well as benchmarks to compare your app against. Some of these new metrics include the ratio between daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs), their individual growth rates, 28-day returning users, average purchase value, average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), and purchases per buyer, among others.
The stats page now also presents visuals which draw comparisons from peersets of apps and games from 250 categories such as "Comics" and "Audiobooks". You can further filter these by region to get more granular metrics to benchmark against your own apps. Google has noted that:
The data powering these new metrics comes from users who have agreed to share their app activity with Google, and is modeled to better represent the whole population. The data simply records if an app is opened in the foreground. Users have control over their data and can opt out of sharing it, or delete individual events, in myactivity.google.com.
Additionally, these new developer metrics are our first to use differential privacy - an advanced technique that provides increased privacy protections across datasets. You can find out more about this approach in our technical blog.
[...] The data is generated from a large number of apps and games, and the peer groups, driven by Play Store’s advanced tagging system, do not share the performance of individual apps.
Google has stated that this is only the first step in a multi-year effort aimed at bringing more insights to all developers, and the company will be looking to expand these capabilities in the future.
