Google is beginning to roll out Play Store search ad placement for developers today, the company said in a statement on their blog post. With search ads now being available for developers, consumers will begin to see placement of advertisements within the Play Store app whenever they search for relevant keywords, provided that developers have purchased ad placements with those keywords. For example, should a user open up the Play Store in search of an app to help them find hotels, they could tap on the search bar up top and type in “hotels” or “hotel reservations” and users would be kicked back the list of results for different apps which fit this description along with a search ad for a specific app up top, in this case, something like Booking.com as shown in the image.
While this does provide users with potentially better possibilities of finding particular apps which they may have ended up missing, this also serves developers with a good chance to reach plenty of additional users. By purchasing Play Store ad placements, developers are extending their reach. The Play Store according to Google already reaches a total of 1 billion people in about 1190 different countries globally, but having access to the Play Store alone isn’t necessarily going to guarantee that a developer will reach users with their application(s). Google is helping developers by giving them a possible solution to increasing the amount of eyes which view their app. Whether or not they install it is another story, but at least now developers will have the option to try and increase their user base with the purchase of these ads.
Alongside these promotion tools for developers, Google is also giving developers new tools to help them track their conversion. Google has announced a new tool called “Android First App Opens” which lets developers see when users install an app for the first time after clicking on an ad for their application. Google states that this new tool also works across Search, YouTube, and Display. In addition to these new tools, Google states they’re going to be adding other solutions to make it simpler for developers to promote their apps via Google Play with “Universal App Campaigns” that will be coming up in a few weeks.