Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: apps

Google+: A case study on App Download Interstitials

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Many mobile sites use promotional app interstitials to encourage users to download their native mobile apps. For some apps, native can provide richer user experiences, and use features of the device that are currently not easy to access on a browser. Because of this, many app owners believe that they should encourage users to install the native version of their online property or service. It’s not clear how aggressively to promote the apps, and a full page interstitial can interrupt the user from reaching their desired content.

On Google+ mobile web, we decided to take a closer look at our own use of interstitials. Internal user experience studies identified them as poor experiences, and Jennifer Gove gave a great talk at IO last year which highlights this user frustration.

Despite our intuition that we should remove the interstitial, we prefer to let data guide our decisions, so we set out to learn how the interstitial affected our users. Our analysis found that:

9% of the visits to our interstitial page resulted in the ‘Get App’ button being pressed. (Note that some percentage of these users already have the app installed or may never follow through with the app store download.)
69% of the visits abandoned our page. These users neither went to the app store nor continued to our mobile website.

While 9% sounds like a great CTR for any campaign, we were much more focused on the number of users who had abandoned our product due to the friction in their experience. With this data in hand, in July 2014, we decided to run an experiment and see how removing the interstitial would affect actual product usage. We added a Smart App Banner to continue promoting the native app in a less intrusive way, as recommended in the Avoid common mistakes section of our Mobile SEO Guide. The results were surprising:

1-day active users on our mobile website increased by 17%.
G+ iOS native app installs were mostly unaffected (-2%). (We’re not reporting install numbers from Android devices since most come with Google+ installed.)

Based on these results, we decided to permanently retire the interstitial. We believe that the increase in users on our product makes this a net positive change, and we are sharing this with the hope that you will reconsider the use of promotional interstitials. Let’s remove friction and make the mobile web more useful and usable!

(Since this study, we launched a better mobile web experience that is currently without an app banner. The banner can still be seen on iOS 6 and below.)

Posted by David Morell, Software Engineer, Google+

Rolling out the red carpet for app owners in Search Console

Friday, May 22, 2015

Wouldn’t it be nifty if you could track where your indexed app content shows up in search results, for which queries, which app pages are most popular, and which ones have errors? Yeah, we thought so too! So we’ve equipped our freshly renamed Search Console with new reports to show you how Google understands and treats your app content in search results.
Our goal is to make Search Console a comprehensive source of information for everyone who cares about search, regardless of the format of their content. So, if you own or develop an app, Search Console is your new go-to place for search stats.

Add your app to Search Console

Simply open Search Console and enter your app name: android-app://com.example. Of course, we’ll only show data to authorized app owners, so you need to use your Google Play account to let Search Console know you have access to the app. If you don’t have access to your app in Google Play, ask an owner to verify the app in Search Console and add you next.

Connect your site to your app

Associating your site with your app is necessary for App Indexing to work. Plus, it helps with understanding and ranking the app content better.

Track your app content’s performance in search

The new Search Analytics report provides detailed information on top queries, top app pages, and traffic by country. It also has a comprehensive set of filters, allowing you to narrow down to a specific query type or region, or sort by clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions.

Use the Search Analytics report to compare which app content you consider most important with the content that actually shows up in search and gets the most clicks. If they match, you’re on the right track! Your users are finding and liking what you want them to see. If there’s little overlap, you may need to restructure your navigation, or make the most important content easier to find. Also worth checking in this case: have you provided deep links to all the app content you want your users to find?

Make sure Google understands your app content

If we encounter errors while indexing your app content, we won’t be able to show deep links for those app pages in search results. The Crawl Errors report will show you the type and number of errors we’ve detected.

See your app content the way Google sees it

We’ve created an alpha version of the Fetch as Google tool for apps to help you check if an app URI works and see how Google renders it. It can also be useful for comparing the app content with the webpage content to debug errors such as content mismatch. In many cases, the mismatch errors are caused by blocked resources within the app or by pop-ups asking users to sign in or register. Now you can see and resolve these issues.

To get started on optimizing and troubleshooting your own app, add it to Search Console now. If you want to know more about App Indexing, read about it on our Developer Site. And, as always, you’re welcome to drop by the help forum with more questions.

Posted by:
Hillel Maoz, Engineering Lead, Search Console Team (favorite app: Flipboard) and
Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst (favorite app: Spotify)

The four steps to appiness

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Webmaster Level: intermediate to advanced

App deep links are the new kid on the block in organic search, and they’re picking up speed faster than you can say “schema.org ViewAction”! For signed-in users, 15% of Google searches on Android now return deep links to apps through App Indexing. And over just the past quarter, we've seen the number of clicks on app deep links jump by 10x.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from developers and seen a lot of implementations gone right and others that were good learning experiences since we opened up App Indexing back in June. We’d like to share with you four key steps to monitor app performance and drive user engagement:

1. Give your app developer access to Webmaster Tools

App indexing is a team effort between you (as a webmaster) and your app development team. We show information in Webmaster Tools that is key for your app developers to do their job well. Here’s what’s available right now:

Errors in indexed pages within apps
Weekly clicks and impressions from app deep link via Google search
Stats on your sitemap (if that’s how you implemented the app deep links)

...and we plan to add a lot more in the coming months!

We’ve noticed that very few developers have access to Webmaster Tools. So if you want your app development team to get all of the information they need to fix app-related issues, it’s essential for them to have access to Webmaster Tools.

Any verified site owner can add a new user. Pick restricted or full permissions, depending on the level of access you’d like to give:

2. Understand how your app is doing in search results

How are users engaging with your app from search results? We’ve introduced two new ways for you to track performance for your app deep links:

We now send a weekly clicks and impressions update to the Message center in your Webmaster Tools account.
You can now track how much traffic app deep links drive to your app using referrer information - specifically, the referrer extra in the ACTION_VIEW intent. We're working to integrate this information with Google Analytics for even easier access. Learn how to track referrer information on our Developer site.

3. Make sure key app resources can be crawled

Blocked resources are one of the top reasons for the “content mismatch” errors you see in Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report. We need access to all the resources necessary to render your app page. This allows us to assess whether your associated web page has the same content as your app page.

To help you find and fix these issues, we now show you the specific resources we can’t access that are critical for rendering your app page. If you see a content mismatch error for your app, look out for the list of blocked resources in “Step 5” of the details dialog:

4. Watch out for Android App errors

To help you identify errors when indexing your app, we’ll send you messages for all app errors we detect, and will also display most of them in the “Android apps” tab of the Crawl errors report.

In addition to the currently available “Content mismatch” and “Intent URI not supported” error alerts, we’re introducing three new error types:

APK not found: we can’t find the package corresponding to the app.
No first-click free: the link to your app does not lead directly to the content, but requires login to access.
Back button violation: after following the link to your app, the back button did not return to search results.

In our experience, the majority of errors are usually caused by a general setting in your app (e.g. a blocked resource, or a region picker that pops up when the user tries to open the app from search). Taking care of that generally resolves it for all involved URIs.

Good luck in the pursuit of appiness! As always, if you have questions, feel free to drop by our Webmaster help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

An update to the Webmaster Tools API

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Webmaster level: advanced

Over the summer the Webmaster Tools team has been cooking up an update to the Webmaster Tools API. The new API is consistent with other Google APIs, makes it easier to authenticate for apps or web-services, and provides access to some of the main features of Webmaster Tools.

If you've used other Google APIs, getting started with the new Webmaster Tools API will be easy! We have examples for Python, Java, as well as OACurl (for fans of command lines).

This API allows you to:

list, add, or remove sites from your account (you can currently have up to 500 sites in your account)
list, add, or remove sitemaps for your websites
get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps
get a time-series of all kinds of crawl errors for your site
list crawl error samples for specific types of errors
mark individual crawl errors as "fixed" (this doesn't change how they're processed, but can help simplify the UI for you)

We'd love to see what you're building with our APIs! Feel free to link to your projects in the comments below. Should you have any questions about the usage of the API, feel free to post in our help forum as well.

Posted by John Mueller, fan of long command lines, Google Zürich

Android app indexing is now open for everyone!

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Webmaster level: All

Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.

App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.

Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.

Getting started is easy

We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:

As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.

We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You can publish them in one of the following ways:

Add a rel=alternate <link> element to specify the corresponding app URI.
You can insert it in the <head> section of each web page, or in your sitemap. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
Use the App indexing API

There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during app indexing. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:

We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.

Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

App Indexing in more languages

Friday, May 30, 2014

Webmaster level: all

In April, we launched App Indexing in English globally so deep links to your mobile apps could appear in Google Search results on Android everywhere. Today, we’re adding the first publishers with content in other languages: Fairfax Domain, MercadoLibre, Letras.Mus.br, Vagalume, Idealo, L'Equipe, Player.fm, Upcoming, Au Feminin, Marmiton, and chip.de. In the U.S., we now also support some more apps -- Walmart, Tapatalk, and Fancy.

We’ve also translated our developer guidelines into eight additional languages: Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

If you’re interested in participating in App Indexing, and your content and implementation are ready, please let us know by filling out this form. As always, you can ask questions on the mobile section of our webmaster forum.

Finally, if you’re headed to Google I/O in June, be sure to check out the session on the “Future of Apps and Search”, where we’ll share some more updates on App Indexing.

Posted by Erik Hendriks, Software Engineer

Webmaster Central Blog

Google+: A case study on App Download Interstitials

Rolling out the red carpet for app owners in Search Console

The four steps to appiness

An update to the Webmaster Tools API

Android app indexing is now open for everyone!

App Indexing in more languages

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