Google Play Console provides comparison data to allow you to contextualize and understand your app’s performance. This data is created from peer groups, which are sets of similar apps such as "Match-3 games," or sets that you've selected. Peer groups feature on many pages in Play Console.
Peer groups are explicitly created to provide useful and actionable comparisons, but they are also engineered to protect developer data and prevent other developers from accessing your app’s sensitive metrics.
There are two main types of peer group: curated and custom. The type used depends on the sensitivity of the data being generated.
Curated peer groups
When data is considered sensitive, business-critical, or is not public, Play Console uses peer groups that are generated by Google Play. We do not publish the exact make-up of these groups to protect developer data.
These peer groups are used for business metrics, such as user acquisition rates, Average revenue per Daily Active User, Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), and growth rates.
Here are some important things to know about curated peer groups:
- They are generated from the same high-quality review-team tagging systems that power the Play Store experience.
- To ensure useful comparisons, they exclude low-performing and abandoned apps.
- They're filterable. So, for instance, you can see a peer group’s performance for a specific country. This enables useful in-market comparisons.
- To protect developers’ anonymity and prevent a single app’s data being identifiable, they use at least 100 apps, and data is only provided in aggregate (median, or 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles).
You can find curated peer groups and their comparison data in the following pages:
- Store conversion analysis
- Compare to peers
- Reach and devices
- Android vitals
- Ratings and reviews
- Strategic guidance
Custom peer groups
For data that is not business sensitive, and which could be generated externally, Play Console uses peer groups that you can customize. These custom groups are shared by all users of your developer account, so edits are made for all of your team members.
There are two different types of custom peer groups depending on the type of data:
1. Aggregated peer data
For data that is not fully public, we only provide median and percentile values for the titles in your custom peer group, so that individual app data cannot be inferred. In addition there are some limits on your ability to customize your peer group:
- They must include a minimum of eight apps, and not more than 12.
- You can edit your custom peer group up to three times a month.
If you are an administrator, you can opt-out of being included in these groups. However, doing so means that you will not be able to access them either.
Examples of peer groups with aggregated data:
2. Unaggregated peer data
For data that is fully public, we show the individual data for all selected peers.
Examples of peer groups with unaggregated data:
There are no restrictions on the number of apps or edits to custom peer groups in this case.