With more than one billion users, Android has the largest installed base of any operating system. A contributor to that success is Dom Elliott, prior Head of Developer Marketing Communications (Marcomms) and current Product Manager at Google Play, who spent his time improving engagement with Android developers. By examining data from services including Youtube, Twitter, and an internal email marketing platform, his team could see the efficacy of marketing campaigns targeting game and app developers on the Google Play marketplace.
Google Play Marcomms uses multiple digital channels to engage with developers, and each platform has it’s own siloed analytics capabilities. At least once a month, Dom would login to each platform and run a series of reports, dumping the data into Google Sheets, and manually compile and aggrege for final delivery into a Google Slides deck used to communicate engagement to his team’s management. It was a lot of wasted hours; the team needed a real-time analytics platform capable of showing general trends across all the different channels. Although Dom and his team worked for Google, they were not engineers and did not have access to development resources or other internal Google assets: they only had access to the Google Cloud Platform. For this reason, the final solution needed to be serverless, maintenance-free, and run entirely in GCP.
To solve the Marcomms requirement, Google partnered with Red Pill Analytics, led by founder Stewart Bryson. The project team utilized an agile and iterative delivery methodology enabled by the collaborative features in Google Data Studio, and serverless event streaming data developed using Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions. With no infrastructure to provision, the project team delivered the data processing and analytics of a new digital marketing source every week, with the entire project lasting only three months.
In the end, GCP event streaming and data visualization services addressed the client’s low maintenance requirements. Stewart and his team focused on serverless solutions that could scale and continue running once the implementation was complete. The team used Google’s BigQuery Data Transfer Service to load data from Google services, and a combination of Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions to access non-Google services with public APIs. Organizing all the digital channel information in BigQuery made it easily accessible from Data Studio, providing a single view of engagement for all of Google Play Marketing Communications.
The analytics platform built by Red Pill Analytics allows for both a holistic and targeted understanding of Google Play users. Besides having deeper and more integrated analytics, the extensive time saving offered by the tool allows the Google Play team to focus on their core responsibility: enabling a more productive Android developer community.
In addition to Marcomms’ requirements for the project, Red Pill decided to add in sentiment analysis, which allows them to track attitudes and opinions on various channels. Dom found this feature to be the most surprising and beneficial feature of the entire project and particularly useful for LinkedIn and Twitter. Within a few hours of the latest Android release, Google knows whether the feedback is generally positive or negative and can respond accordingly. Out of all of the features from this project, sentiment analysis was unexpected but provided the largest value to the Google Play Marcomms team.