What Google announced for the Play Store at Google I/O 2023
App Store Optimization (ASO)
May 16, 2023
Last week Google held its annual I/O event. This year, the big focus was, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence. Even though AI was at the heart of Google’s plan for the future, they still had some news to share about new tools coming to the Play Store.
Custom Store Listings News
Custom Store Listings already allow Android developers to create up to 50 custom store listings. It’s a great tool to link UA and ASO. Now, developers will be able to target inactive users with Custom Store Listings. This special targeting option for CSL is a good opportunity to reduce churn and convert more long-term customers.
It will also be possible to directly link Custom Store Listings to Google Ads campaigns. Thanks to that, Custom Listings can be served directly on AdMob and YouTube for a more precise and effective targeting. This is not available just yet and should be “launching very soon”.
Google also hinted at the upcoming availability of machine translation for store listings (which should include Custom Store Listing) and may be useful for those with not much time or money on their hands.
Last but not least, Google is introducing Store Listing Groups to group Custom Listings by theme and quickly edit in bulk.
This could help edit Custom Listing faster by customizing a base listing. In itself, Custom Store Listing already is a useful tool, but this group feature might make handling them easier.
Promotional Content News
According to the Play Store presentation, over 25,000 apps and games already have access to Promotional Content (formerly LiveOps) and Google is planning to open it to more developers. Promotional Content, Google’s version of Apple’s in-app event, has found quite the success on the Play Store.
With a store-wide presence, Promotional Content has been driving conversion and user acquisition, just like it has on the App Store. It’s no surprise that this tool is successful, it’s a new way to drive user attention and boost conversion.
It’s also a great tool for seasonality, allowing developers to create striking visuals for short term events without having to switch their entire listing page. Which is why it’s no surprise that Google is doubling down on Promotional Content.
In addition to getting enhanced reporting (analysis of behavioral impact as well as individual event impacts), Promotional Content will also appear in more spaces in the store.
Promotional Content is already available on the homepage as well as dedicated tabs, now it will appear in more spaces on the homepage as well as Search (both with and without dedicated event visuals). This will boost Promotional Content’s visibility and ranking with dedicated surfaces to bring them to light.
If you haven’t tried it yet, now may be the time to start and give it a shot. Promotional Content may be the extra boost you’ve been looking for all along!
AI news
Finally, Google decided to bring more artificial intelligence to its mobile platform. The Mountain View firm is already looking into AI advertising, with tools to help advertisers create ads from scratch.
During the I/O, they also mentioned an upcoming AI tool that would help developers come up with textual metadata for their Listing Pages. So far this will only be available in English, and developers will still have final say on the text and be able to do small modification and choose whether or not they will want to publish the Listing Page with those informations.
However it can help free some time by automatizing the description (both long and short), which are also the less efficient part of listing pages. Not to mention that Google has already launched an automated translation tool to speed up that process as well.
Did you note any other news? What do you think about these new tools?
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