Heads up! The Google Play ranking algorithm is now weighing user engagement and retention more heavily in Google Play rankings.

 

 

The Google Play Store team is rolling out a big ranking algorithm update, amongst a few other changes announced at the Google Play Developer Day via the 2017 Game Developers Conference. There were three major changes announced, with the major change affecting Google Play app store optimization listed first here:

 

 

Google's Android blog lists these additional details about this first point:

 

 

This update causes an immediate and significant impact, as it alters a long-held standard of the App Store ranking algorithm, which until now considered downloads and download velocity as by far the most important ranking signal. This standard incentivized app teams to focus on massive user acquisition, often favoring the acquisition of lower quality, low engagement level users over higher quality, high engagement level users, such as via a category boost campaign; simply put, lower quality users cost less and more could be bought with the same budget (sometimes for mere cents per download). Now, the incentive has adjusted, meaning that app teams will need to ensure their approach consists primarily of acquiring users that actually are "engaged" and "retained" within the app, rather than simply being concerned with acquiring a large total download volume.

 

Not only that, but Google is signaling that user ratings will be a more important factor in algorithm rankings, meaning that replying to user reviews and prompting users for reviews have suddenly increased in importance, from an already lofty level.

 

 

Confirming in 

 

Here are two charts illustrating this algorithm update, the latter showing that Google's algorithm may still be confused with regard to some keywords.