As of July 2019, we made major updates to our metrics to make your stats more comprehensive and useful. The changes give you a broader set of options when configuring your reports.
The changes have an impact on all User and Device metrics and may affect the way that you set up and understand your reports. Use the table below to find out how you can map the old metric names to new metric configurations in order to generate reports that are compatible with your previous data.
You can find out more about these updates on the Android Developers site.
Tip: Remember to click Save report if you want to regularly revisit these statistics.
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New metric configuration |
Notes |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Installs by user |
Users > User acquisitions > New users |
|
|
Uninstalls by user |
Users > User loss > All users |
You may notice an increase as we can now more accurately pinpoint when a user becomes inactive and if a user is lost more than once in a day.
|
|
Installs on active devices |
Devices > Active devices |
You may see an increase, as we are using a greater number of signals to generate a more accurate measure. |
| Installs by device | Devices > Device acquisition > New devices | |
|
Uninstalls by device |
Devices > Lost devices > All devices |
You may notice an increase, as we can more accurately identify when devices become inactive and if a device is lost more than once in a day. |
|
Updates by device |
Devices > Device updates |
|
|
Install events |
Devices > Install events |
|
|
Uninstall events |
Devices > Uninstall events |
There may be an increase, as we can more accurately identify when users become inactive |
Frequently asked questions
Why are we making this change?Our old metrics were no longer telling the whole story. The market and technology has moved on and we want to ensure that our metrics continue to be useful for developers. App teams are getting ever-more capable and sophisticated, and require more nuanced and detailed data to make better business decisions.
Re-acquisitions, for example, are now a critical aspect of many apps’ growth (a majority in some cases). New technologies (like peer-to-peer) have become important to the spread of apps and we are exclusively positioned to explain that to developers. Similarly, many developers also grow their audiences via pre-installs, and want to help them understand how successful this is for their growth.
The way that you access data is still the same. The Statistics page interface remains unchanged, and you can still generate downloadable CSVs. We’re automatically mapping new metrics to old ones in the downloadable CSVs, so these should continue to work just as before.
Here are a few tips:
- If you need to access data that’s comparable to the old metrics, use the table above to configure the new metrics to match them.
- Remember to click Save report if you want to regularly revisit these statistics and use the configurations that you find particularly helpful again.
- Use the Download option in the stats page to easily save the reports you generate as CSVs.
No. We are not recalculating your old data. There will be a clean switch to the new metrics on launch day.
Basically, yes. If you need to access data that’s comparable to the old metrics, use the table above to configure the new metrics to match them. However, some metrics such as user and device acquisitions are now being counted more accurately, so there is likely to be an increase in this data for some apps.
An event is every time something happens. For example, every time a user installs an app.
Uniques are the number of users or devices that experience an event. For example every individual user who installs an app.
Imagine that you have two users. One installs an app once in a week; the other installs, then uninstalls and then finally re-installs it during the same week. Over that week, there will be three user-acquisition events, but only two unique users acquired.
Actives are the number of active devices that an app is installed on, or the number of users who have at least one active device on which the app is installed. Think of it as a snapshot of the size of an app’s install base or audience size.
Active devices are devices that have checked in with Google at least once in the past 30 days.
We’re automatically mapping new metrics to old ones in the downloadable CSVs, so these aren’t changing and should continue to work just as before.
Some metrics, such as user and device acquisitions, are now being counted more accurately. There will likely be an increase in this data for some apps.
It depends on what you are trying to achieve. But one of the key things that we wanted to enable with these updates was to make the metrics more transparent and comparable.
For example, you can now compare unique user acquisitions and unique user losses (aggregated by month) to get a good indication of your audience growth rate. You could not do this before as our previous user-install and user-uninstall metrics were not comparable.
Yes, here are a few favourites.
To get better insights into your user growth (calculate how many people have tried your app before):
- Metric 1: User acquisitions > New users
- Metric 2: User acquisitions > Returning users
- Dimension: Countries, then add your most important countries as separate plots (by clicking Add country)
To understand if your growth is more influenced by acquisitions or retention:
- Metric 1: User acquisitions > All users
- Metric 2: User loss > All users
To see if app quality is correlated to device loss:
- Metric 1: Devices > Uninstall events
- Metric 2: Monitor and improve> Crashes (or Monitor and improve> ANRs)
- Dimension: Devices
To get a snapshot of how many people and devices your app is reaching:
- Metric 1: Users > Active users (30-day rolling average)
- Metric 2: Devices > Active devices (30-day rolling average)
- Dimension: Countries
- Tip: Use the 'Change analysis' chart below the time series to quickly see the dimensions with the largest changes over your time period.
No, just to you. But statistics URLs are shareable. If you configure a report that you want to share, just copy the whole URL and send it to another user. As long as they have access to Play Console and the app, they’ll be able to see exactly the same report.
No. Because of how data aggregation works for unique devices and users, weekly metrics will start to appear two weeks after launch. Monthly metrics will be available once there’s a single full month’s data, and quarterly metrics once there’s a full quarter’s data.