• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 20, 2021

As the demand for apps grow, it has become increasingly challenging for developers to get their apps discovered and convert new users into loyal customers.

On Thursday, Google released app advertising solutions during the week of I/O to help developers reach more people, improve marketing performance and provide better user experiences.

Even as mobile use continues to climb, 46% of the total time on websites is spent on desktop.

Supporting this trend, app campaigns on desktop -- Google’s flagship app advertising product that relies on machine learning to find the right users across Search, YouTube, Play, and Discover -- will now for the first time reach onto the desktop versions of Google.com and Google Display Network for campaigns running on Android.

The feature rolls out in June.

Those who click on an app advertisement in their desktop browser will be directed to the Google Play Store desktop website. From there, the user can choose to install the app directly onto any Android device linked to their Play account.

Growing a business based on apps means connecting with new users, but it’s also important to understand what happens after the app is installed. It’s important to measure the correct in-app events. 

That’s why Google Analytics for Firebase event creation and modification will allow marketers and developers to create and edit custom in-app events -- like logging a “purchase” at a confirmation screen -- without any code.

In addition, there is help to validate deep links that bring people directly to a specific destination or landing page within an app.

To make it easier for marketers to work with developers, this week Google announced a deep link validator and impact calculator. 

The tools allow developers to fix deep links that do not work, and understand the return on investment for implementing deep links from their Google Ads.

Shopee, an ecommerce company in Singapore, boosted its checkouts by about 126% by using deep links to send traffic to the app if customers already had it installed, for example. 

App deep-linking directs customers to the content in an app -- and often leads to more conversions, according to Google. But the path is not always linear. People search across various sites and apps before taking action, which makes it more difficult to pinpoint the ad that drove the purchase or event.

Marketers can now identify the specific mobile web ad clicks that led customers to the app to complete the purchase. This helps marketers make bidding for web campaigns more effective by providing a complete understanding of performance that includes in-app conversions.