Google Analytics 4 provides comprehensive, privacy-centric analytics to understand user behavior across both web and app—all in one place. Its AI-powered insights also help you optimize your campaign performance.
App marketers who use Google Analytics 4 have long benefited from advanced features that have proven to improve performance like tROAS bidding, audience exclusions, predictive audiences, and more. For example, Gameberry Labs, a game developer based in India, wanted to scale more profitably and acquire users who were more likely to complete in-app purchases. To achieve this, they began bidding on Google Analytics 4 events using a tROAS bidding strategy. In just 4 weeks, the company saw a 59% increase in D7 ROAS and was able to acquire higher quality users, resulting in a 6% increase in D7 retention rate.
And over the past few months, we’ve launched several new audience, performance, and measurement features for app marketers who use Google Analytics 4—here’s an update on what’s now available.
Robust audience tools
As an app marketer, you want to not only find, but also keep, your highest-value app users. Google Analytics 4 provides robust audience management tools to reach the right users. And you now have access to new audience features including:
- New unnotified users suggested audience: More easily engage existing app users who have not been reached with push notifications. This new suggested audience is especially useful to reach and engage your users, given only 37% of consumers are enabling push notifications when they download apps across different categories1.
- Seamlessly re-use app and web audiences: If you’ve created an audience in Google Analytics 4 across both your app and web users, we will automatically target only the relevant app users for your App campaigns for engagement.
- Access Google Analytics 4 Audience Builder in Google Ads: In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out the ability to create Google Analytics 4 audiences directly within Google Ads as well. This will enable you to efficiently build audiences in Google Ads as you set up and manage your campaigns.
Advertisers like Ratel, a European auto-subtitle generator app developer, have seen promising results with Google Analytics 4’s audience tools. The company wanted to scale its app reach and performance in its top markets and leveraged Google Analytics 4’s flexible segmentation options to target the right users in their iOS campaigns. By building an audience which focused on paying users and excluded free trial users, they were able to achieve 3X more in-app actions at a 157% lower CPA compared to previous campaigns.
— Ibrahim Ozdemir, Co-founder, Ratel
New unnotified users suggested audience
Additional performance uplift
App advertisers now have the ability to use additional consented, signed-in data to automatically optimize App campaign performance. You can enable the use of this aggregated data for performance uplift by activating Google signals in your linked Google Analytics 4 property. From experiments we’ve run, we’ve seen that for App campaigns for engagement on Android, enabling the use of consented, signed-in user data in Google Analytics 4 drove up to 10% increase in conversions per dollar.2
Comprehensive web-to-app conversion measurement
The path to conversion oftentimes extends across many user touch points and platforms, from web to app. However, with new privacy frameworks on platforms like iOS, measuring this performance can become complex. Therefore, we introduced a new privacy-safe URL parameter, known as gbraid, to enable better iOS app conversion measurement for web campaigns which deep link users into an app. Google Analytics 4 helps you integrate with this new parameter to provide full web-to-app iOS conversion coverage and power more comprehensive measurement and bidding optimization.
Better iOS campaign measurement and performance
Lastly, Google Analytics 4 enables privacy-centric solutions to help you better measure and optimize your iOS campaigns such as:
- Integrations with SKAdNetwork: Google Analytics 4 already helps you integrate your app with SKAdNetwork to get improved cross-channel install reporting and attribution, and now provides tools to configure your SKAdNetwork conversion value schema. Setting up your schema is important for better in-app event measurement and optimization, and now advertisers can do this through either Google Analytics 4, a Google-approved App Attribution Partner, or the Google Ads API directly.
- On-device conversion measurement: For apps with sign-in experiences, on-device conversion measurement uses consented, first-party email data to increase the observable conversions available for campaign optimization. And now, we’ve added support for more types of consented user sign-ins, like phone numbers. This solution works without any user-identifying information ever leaving a user’s device or being disclosed to external parties, including Google. Based on recent experiments, for apps with a majority of users logging in, implementing on-device conversion measurement drove a median 12% increase in user installs on Google’s owned inventory.3
- Geo-based conversion lift measurement: You now have the ability to run controlled experiments to more accurately understand the causal, incremental effects of your iOS App campaigns. This functionality works with your Google Analytics 4 events to report results and is currently available in beta. Reach out to your account manager to learn more.
New tools in Google Analytics 4 to set up your SKAdNetwork conversion value schema
Improved iOS cross-channel install reporting and attribution in Google Analytics 4
Many businesses are seeing performance success with using Google Analytics 4, particularly on iOS. For example, knowing its iOS users were some of its most profitable users, Revolut, a United Kingdom-based banking technology company, wanted to scale its iOS campaigns in its top markets. After implementing and beginning to bid on Google Analytics 4 events, Revolut saw a 12.5% increase in additional first-opens and achieved a 11.2% decrease in its CPI.
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“Through the strategic use of Google Analytics 4 events in our bidding strategy, we were able to witness a significant improvement in our iOS marketing campaigns’ performance.” — Marco Tracogna, Sr. Performance Marketing Manager, Revolut |
These are just a few of the newest features available to app marketers who use Google Analytics 4. Explore this guide to learn more about the full suite of App campaign measurement and performance features you can access with Google Analytics 4 to help you drive business growth.
Posted by Meng He, Group Product Manager, App Ads
1. Google Data/Storyline Strategies, US, Feb 2022 vs. Feb 2022. Total consumer data (n=1000) are online gen pop users who shop online, take care of finances online, or play games using apps on a monthly basis.
2. Google Data, Global, Google Ads, Nov 2022.
3. Google Internal Data, Dec 2022 experiment.