Understanding recent changes to report metrics

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 impact all User and Device metrics and may affect the way you set up and understand your reports. Use the table below to learn how you can map the old metric names to new metric configurations 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.

Old metric name	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. Tip: For directly comparable total numbers, select Loss mechanism as your dimension and look at “Uninstalls.”
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 weren’t telling the whole story anymore. 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.

I regularly check the current (pre-July 2019) data and it's an important part of my workflow. What should I do?

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 some 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 reuse configurations you find particularly helpful.
• Use the Download option in the stats page to easily save the reports you generate as CSVs.

Is my old data going to change?

No. We are not recalculating your old data. There will be a clean switch to the new metrics on launch day.

Is there a counterpart in the new paradigm for all metrics that existed previously?

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.

What’s the difference between events, actives, and uniques?

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.

Will the metrics be changing in any of the downloadable and/or programmatically-accessible reports?

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 is likely to be an increase in this data for some apps.

Are there any metrics that are non-combinable?

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. But one of the key things 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.

Are there a few basic reports that you’d suggest configuring and saving?

Yes, here are a few favorites.

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.

Are saved reports viewable across all my Play Console account users?

No, just to you. But statistics URLs are shareable. If you configure a report 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.

Is everything available from day one?

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.