Firebase App Indexing: Rules of Engagement - Google I/O 2016

[00:00:01]hello everybody thank you so much for coming today to this session my name is Timo I'm a product manager on Google search and I work on app indexing and here with me I have Fabien was a software engineer who also works on app indexing we're very excited to talk to all of you about app indexing today I'll start out with a quick overview of what happening is all about I'll tell you a little bit how you can use Google search to get more active users and to get keep those users engaged then farming is going to talk a little bit of how how you can get started with app indexing will conclude with a very exciting outlook of what we are going to do later this year around personal content with a couple of very exciting demos every day users come to Google billions of times with information needs and that happens in many countries more often on mobile than on desktop now your app can be relevant to these billions of information needs your app content can help all of these users that come to us with various needs that they have now the question is how can you actually connect your app with all of those users and their needs and that's what we're going to talk about today now the answer is firebase app indexing now with app indexing can get your app and its content into Google search that means you can acquire new users you can experience organic growth and you can keep those users engaged now one of the changes that we've announced this week is that app indexing is no part of firebase firebase is a suite of integrated products designed to help you develop your app grow user base and earn money epideictic is one of 15 api's that helps you the developers build amazing apps we in the grow pillar and that means that it can lead to more active users together with your app content and Google search we can delight all of those users to come to Google for with various information needs now who here today is familiar with app indexing awesome it's a good number so for those of you who are familiar with it you'll find that farming is a couple of interesting changes to announce know for those of you who are not familiar with it don't worry about it with firebase you have all the tools you need to get started at your fingertips now next let's talk about some of the products that we've pulled to help you grow your app and keep your users engaged now let's start with growth and installs through google search now here you can see on the search results page we can help you get your app discovered for very you know specific search intent such as IO 2016 we can show you results from apps such as you can install that app for example here all I have to do if I wanted to install that app step on the green button it goes to the place so can download and install the app if I have more you know generic information is such as you know google apps or racing games we show multiple apps to choose from now through app indexing we can also help rank these types of results better now having to install an app that creates a lot of you know friction between users and their needs as well as you know your app content now yesterday Ellie announced something really exciting at the keynote which is instant apps it's an amazing new experience that keeps you know user coming to you at faster now instead of having to download an app first I can simply tap on that result and they go right into the app work and find all the information that they need now this will ultimately reduce this barrier that stands between the user and your app content next let's talk a little bit about engagement is how Google search can help you with that once in a person stalls we can organically open results from search results page in your app here for example a search for i/o schedule can see there's a result from the app all I have to do now is tap on it and it goes right to the app or find all the information that I need through app indexing again you can we can help you rank those results better on the search results page with the google app we've put the power of Google search at our users fingertips for example here with the search box on many Android phones on the home screen all they have to do is tap on the search box type in the query and they're good to go earlier today I looked up various sessions in the i/o app now mine my own session included now if I want to get back to that session all I have to do is type in rules which is the title of the talk and I see a results appear here while I type in the Google app now when I tap on this it goes right back into the app we can find all the information such as the stage in session et cetera now the Google app helps reengage users with your app content like this for thousands of apps and it's really really easy for users just get right back in because all they have to tap on the search box and tell us what they're looking for now besides the search results page and the google app Google brings your app content to our users fingertips in the form of now and tap anywhere on Android here Fabian told me about a new movie Captain America that either we should check out now all I have to do is tap and press the home button and I get more information through Google now on tap here I get the card for Captain America you can see that there's a couple of app results as well now these episodes are there because these apps use our using app indexing now if a tap on the IMDB resolved it goes right into the app I find all the information that I need now that's really an amazing feature because it puts your app content in front of the users anywhere where they are on Android now let's talk about metrics a little bit more than 10,000 apps are using app indexing to grow there and keep their users engaged but it includes most of the top apps that users use every single day all over the world that translates to more than 200 billion app URLs in our search index which is truly an amazing number let's look at some of the success stories of partners that are actually using app indexing the Guardian saw an increase in CTR but almost 5% for apples over web or mobile web URLs Etsy saw an increase in daily app traffic where almost 12% and Aliexpress saw an increased transaction value by 200% now those are some truly amazing numbers that tell you the home port nap indexing is for these partners that any app really should use this technology to grow their user base and keep their users engaged now with that I'm handing it over to far beyond so you can tell all you need to know how to get started Thank You Timo so let's talk about what you need to do and how you can get started enabling all of these great features that we just saw working for your app and as Timo outlined the key is really to get your app into the Google search index because once it's in there we can then surface results for your app in all these great places like Google search now on tap the autocomplete feature and we can bring users right into the relevant screen in your app over the last year it's actually gotten quite a bit easier to index apps so that that's something we're really excited about and you'll see that in a moment when I step through there's three basic rules that you want to follow if you want to get this engagement and growth for your app first your app needs to support URLs so that you can actually link right into the right place second you need to call our API so that we can actually better understand the content in your app and three you wanna make sure you can keep an eye on you know the impact you're getting from following the first two rules right how many more active users you're getting and if there's still room for improvement optimization in your app to get even more out of it we'll step through these one by one in a second starting with supporting URLs let's do a quick show of hands who here has an app or has worked on an app that supports URLs how great about half and how many of you have worked on app indexing specifically so getting your app into the index all right cool excellent so let's talk about URLs first URLs were invented for the web right and so web sites support URLs naturally you have different web pages each one comes with their own URL and that's what you see in the address bar at the top of your browser as you navigate the web but for apps it's a little less natural to support URLs and we really have to think about it and write specific codes to actually handle the URLs in our apps and make sure the right screen comes up when your app is started with a URL but it it's really very important to do that right because when we want to find relevant content for our users we don't want to send them to your app just launch the app but we actually want to take them straight to the right place right so this is really one of the one of the building blocks of app indexing next you know there's a question of if you have a URL like the one that's on screen here how do you actually know that there's an app that can handle this type of URL how do you know this might potentially link into an app and how do you find out what that app might be so we somehow need to link up the website with the app or with the set of apps that can also show that content and it turns out in the web world we actually have a very similar challenge where a web browser needs to find out what Webster it should go talk to to actually get the webpage you want to look at right so when you type a URL into a browser the browser uses something called the domain name system or DNS to resolve the domain name into an IP address which basically tells it what server to talk to and so that's worked really well for the web and over the last year we've actually seen a very similar system being established for resolving a domain name into a mobile app and actually it's it's two systems one for Android and one for iOS but they work very similarly in fact almost almost identically and I'll step through how exactly it works in just a moment what they do these systems is they allow you to create this connection linking from your website to the app and basically declaring hey this is the app or this is the set of apps that can handle my URLs and then also the other way around have the app declare you know what are the kinds of URLs I can handle and then with this two-way connection that's really then what helps us understand that space so let's look at how this specifically works on Android and then I'll go into iOS second and I'll just continue to use the i/o app as an example as I step through because many of you might already have that installed in your phone today and so you can actually check out some of these things right after the session yourself and then also we'll be publishing the source code for the i/o app light year after the conference so you can go see the implementation behind of this behind all of this so every Android app has something called the Android manifest and here's an example of the i/o apps manifest more specifically of the intent filter section and that's where it declares that it can handle any URL in the domain events that Google become that starts with the path IO 2016 / schedule / anything and then there's this little attribute that you can see auto verify equals true that's a very new attribute from API level 23 that tells us that we have this two-way connection meaning that the system can go talk to the website and the website will verify and confirm that in fact this is the app that it wants its URLs to link into and also if you add this attribute what you'll actually get starting from Android 6.0 marshmallow is that your app will be set as the default handle for these types of URLs right when it's installed so that means that even the very first time a user taps on one of your URLs anywhere on their phone be that a messaging app or or the web or anywhere they'll be taken straight to your app and they want to get this disambiguation dialog that you might know that will ask you you know if you want to open this in the in a browser or or in this app so that's another great benefit you get there but for any of this to work the server side has to also check out right the other connection the other side of the connection so how this works is you host a small JSON file at the predefined path on your website that refers back to the app by package name and certificate fingerprint and that part is really important right for Google for example to understand that it's okay to link results from search for these types of URLs directly into this app because that's something we really don't want to do unless we know you know the website owner actually wants these this traffic to go into this particular app right instead of the website on the iOS side we have something called entitlements as part of the app itself and again that's where you would refer to the domain for which the app can handle URLs and on the server side again a small JSON file different one but you know similar in spirit where you point back to the iOS app by iTunes ID again a fixed predefined path on your website where this goes and you know an interesting difference here actually between the iOS and the Android system with iOS the path prefix that kind of defines what exact set of URLs the app can actually handle is defined with the server-side configuration file on iOS while with Android this is part of the app itself in the intent filter so now you've got this two-way connection set up and of course you still have to write the code to actually you know bring up the right screen and so forth in your app and I'm not gonna go into details about that here but at least now we have a clearer system for you know finding the right app to link in to just given a URL but until recently actually many of us have still been using custom URLs and let me give you an example of what I mean by custom URLs I mean URLs that use a custom scheme so not HTTP this is an example of how this might look like for the i/o app and for a particular session so these links are broken in several ways so I wanted to take a moment to try to discourage you from using these as much as possible if you can at all help it one of the issues here is that we do not have this system here right where we can somehow reliably resolve any part of this to an app so it's really not exactly clear what app this should actually link into and then also it really doesn't work across platforms so if you want to share this URL with a friend to send them a message or post it on social media you you can't really write because if your friend opens this on a mobile computer or a desktop computer rather then that's not gonna do anything on a desktop computer and so in these cases you still have to then send the web URL which works anywhere because it opens the web page but then if your friend does receive it on a mobile device then now that's not gonna go into the app right even if they have the app installed because now you would first have to translate back from the web URL to the custom URL and now you'd have to have like some sort of big mapping table or translation rule so long story short by using web URLs HTTP URLs you can actually sidestep a lot of these headaches and so that's what I would recommend but let's say your app does support HTTP URLs so now you're ready to test and if you want to just test your rap in isolation let's say you maybe you haven't gotten the server-side file deployed yet for enter it you can just launch your app from the Android debug bridge with a view intent and and passing the URL even a test out and that should launch your app and get you straight to the right screen if you know if you've done everything right and then once you've got the connection in both ways established if you have the little JSON file for for Android or or iOS or both deployed on the website then the easiest way to test is probably to just send yourself a bunch of URLs in an email or something and just tap on them on your device and then that should go straight into into the right screen and so that's all the basics you know that is required for your results to start showing up on google it might still take a day or two for us to actually pick it up and to start showing these results to users so in the mean time what you can do you can check out our brand new preview tool you can find this as part of our documentation which is launched to the earlier this week you can enter any of your URLs and will instantly show you a preview of how your results are going to look like on mobile for your users so that's kind of cool so with that let's go on to the next slide and talk about the second rule calling the API as a user uses your app and browses the content in your app you can call the API with the URL and the title of the current screen and that helps us better understand how your app works and what content is important to users and that can actually also be an interesting signal for us to help rank these results on Google search another place where this is really important is the autocomplete feature that teemo showed you earlier here we have very limited real estate on the screen we can fit a max of maybe five or six results tops so we want to make sure to really show only the most relevant results and so in this case here just knowing that I've looked at my own session before in the i/o app that's a very strong signal for us that there's you know Ally high likelihood I might want to get back there right and that that's important content for me and so that's what we would join autocomplete if I just type a few characters and with one tap I'll be right back in the app and in terms of the code that we asked you to add for this it should be fairly minimal it can basically be the cell down to three lines per activity or per type of screen that you have the first one is constructing the URL for the current session again this is the example from the i/o app second putting together the action object with the title and the URL that describes what is happening and you see that we use the view action here we also support other action types such as listen or purchase or bookmark depending on what it is the user does but viewing will be one of the more common ones and then third you call the start method to indicate that the action is now starting and there's a corresponding end method as well that would be called by the i/o app as you navigate away from the session details screen again and if you have instantaneous actions in your app like you know bookmarking something or purchasing something then you can just call the end method straightaway and and be done with it and to make it you know as simple as possible to do this we've added support to Android studio one of the things Andrew Sileo will do it'll tell you if there's any issues with both you know your implementation of URL support in general or your implementation of calling the API and it'll also help you generate most of the code that you need to write to call the API and it can also help you generate most if off dr2 intent filters and then you can also test right from within Android studio we have a feature where we can essentially simulate you know linking into your app with a given URL and Android studio will show you what parameters were passed to the API in this instance and then also show you a little preview of that page in Europe on the iOS site the API is even simpler and a little bit more limited currently which is asked that you add a single call when the app starts up to to register the app on the device and so now you already essentially know everything there is to get your app into the index and now you really want to make sure it actually worked right and you're actually getting more active users and you want to see if there's any issues or maybe what you can optimize and tweak to get even more out of this so one thing you definitely want to do is track refer traffic meaning you know keep track of how many users find their way into your app through Google and a way to make this simpler or like to make this simpler for you we've added this method get referred directly on the Android activity object a little over a year ago with API level 22 and you can think of it similar to the HTTP referer header right it tells you where a user is coming from in terms of a URL so in our example here if a user is coming from Google calm in a web browser then the refer will be google.com and if the user is coming in through the Google app which could be any of you know Auto completions or now on tap all of these things then the URL would be the second URLs and you see on screen here the Android - app URL notation is just a way that we use to put both like a package name and the URL inside the app into one URL so we can kind of package it all into one one string so if your traffic is coming from any of these - refers you know the user came in Google and you can lock it accordingly in your analytic solution if you don't have an analytic solution yet by the way you might have heard about this new offering also under the firebase umbrella that we launched yesterday firebase analytics which offers unlimited reporting for free for your app so that might be a strong candidate to consider here and then from our side we also offer some analytics we have a tool called the search console that you can log into and you can verify that you own a given app and then we'll show you metrics on you know how many results are we showing for your app how many clicks are these results getting and also how many installs are happening as a result of people discovering your app on Google search and that's basically it so make sure to support your else and many of you already do second call the app indexing API so we can better understand the content and we can better rank your results and if you already support URLs in your apps then this is really the only the only rule you have to follow in addition basically and then three make sure to log into the search console to see if you have any issues and to see the benefits that you're getting and you know what you might potentially be able to optimize further you can find all of this and more at cheetahs CEO slash app indexing but before you do that I'm gonna give it back to Timo for the exciting last part thank you so much for being I hope everybody knows a little more now what it takes to get your app and its content do Google search now we'd like to talk about something very special that's going to come later this year that revolves around personal content now so far we've talked about how to get your public app content to Google search so you can grow your user base and keep your users engaged but everyday users all over the world interact with or creates a lot of personal information whether that's messages that you send or receive documents to create no playlist that you listen to or photos that you take now all that all of that data is really important for many many different user needs as our users have every single day for example wouldn't be amazing if we could just find that message from a best friend that talked about this awesome in a sushi place to check out this weekend just by typing a few characters will be great to find a shopping list when I'm at the grocery store we also miss I could just you know having a few characters and get back to that playlist before my Sunday morning run know your app content can help with many of these different user needs and that's why we excited to announce today that later this year we're going to let you index personal content on Android we're going to extend app indexing to let users find anything in their apps through the Google app now when we design this addition to app indexing we sort of follow three core principles which are privacy control and simplicity first of all personal app content stays on the device and doesn't leave the phone it means that we will search over that data on the phone next you as the developer will be in control over the lifecycle of that data you determine when Condor gets indexed updated or removed and finally if we go to the three advanced ones well there you go we had simplicity in mind when we bought this Fabien already explained how easy it is right now to get that content into Google search just a few lines of code and want to keep it as simple as that all it'll take just a few lines of code and your personal content will be indexed on the phone now let's look at some of the cool experiences that we could actually enable with that addition we've worked with some very special partners in an early access program to demo some really cool use cases that this edition will be able to unlock for that you need a little bit of help from five in here hope you can see the screen all right I don't know whether okay fair enough so my friend Henry sent me a message before telling me about a great a great session so check out on Friday totally forgot the title for it so let's see whether we can get back to that all we have to do is tap on the search box here tap on the search box and all we have to do is type the name okay it's too bright I don't know whether we can adjust so what I want to do is find a message for my friend Henry was talking about this session to check out so all we have to do is have insiders demonstrators type the name in the search box and normally you see completions for that and instead what we will show is a contact card for that contact as well as a message from that app in this case Henry sent a message through viber and all we would have to do is tap on the result and it goes right into the app where it can then read the message in that conversation and now that seems to be better yes okay how about this we just go for it and then you just have to imagine that you see the right things just do it like this a little purple that's good okay anyway Henry's telling me to check out Google's vision for machine learning which is tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.

[00:29:51]sounds like a great talk that should totally check out now okay this is gonna be now really tricky but right we need to go down a little bit to see what else we got that there you see vision all right going into the next one if we go back to the home screen now by the way who went to the concert last night awesome was amazing wasn't it now we happen to go as well and Fabien sent me a message actually with a video that he took now all we have to do is search for Fabien then we see there's a messaging Glide X and so all we have to do is tap on it and let's see whether we can play that back looks like a lot of fun awesome now going back to the previous message tomorrow morning 9:00 a.m. I remember had breakfast planned with with Adam so again let's try to find the message because I've totally forget the time can we tap on it search for item and there it is that's a message in LinkedIn all we have to do is tap on it we jump right into it and there we go 8:00 a.m. on Friday thank you now 8:00 a.m. I guess have to get up a little earlier tomorrow fair enough I love eating yogurt for breakfast the other day I started reading an article was called how yogurt affects the brain that I never finished reading but I did save that one in pockets so now if I want to go back to it all I have to do is type in part of the title and we can tap on it it goes right into the app where I can then go ahead and read it on my way home tonight Thank You favi I'm sorry for the technical difficulties now these examples really show the power of that data and user needs so through the Google app we can let users find anything that they're looking for in the app several roles around the person life with the personal data all through the Google app by tapping on the search box typing in a few characters and they see your app content right there and all of this will be powered through app indexing later this year now here are the partners that we've worked with in this early access program they've done an amazing job in enabling these experiences and we're looking forward to working with more of you later this year now if you're interested in this have a look at this link here and share your interest with us later this year we will follow up with more information around availability of this extension of app indexing now quick summary we showed that with app indexing you can get more active users you can grow your app you can driving reengagement all through these various Google search features such as a search results page the Google app now on tap or instant apps and Farben explain three simple rules as it takes to get your content into search and later this year you'll see some really cool features around personal content now here's more information about both app indexing twelve firebase comes out with us with various sandboxes code labs and other sessions happy to talk more with all of you and with that thank you all so much for coming we hope you're as excited about getting your app into search as we are thank you