Play Console’s Play Points performance reporting now covers both promotions you create yourself and Google-funded Play Points promotions applied to your app, breaking out revenue, buyer counts and acquisitions with a split between direct impact (purchases made during the promotion) and post-promotion impact (purchases made afterwards by users the promotion brought in). That distinction is easy to get wrong without proper tracking. A promotion that looks flat on direct revenue can still be a strong acquisition channel if it’s pulling in buyers who convert later — and a promotion that spikes direct revenue but attracts no repeat buyers may be discounting purchases you’d have gotten anyway.
The risk without dedicated tracking is treating Play Points like a simple discount and measuring it only by immediate transaction volume. Google-funded promotions in particular are Google’s own budget subsidising the discount, not yours — so the revenue and buyer numbers you see in the report reflect Google’s spend as much as your own pricing strategy, and conflating the two skews any read on whether your own developer-created offers are working. Play-wide promotions are also reported as a single grouped row while app-specific promotions report per-promotion, so a report read at the wrong grouping level can hide which individual offer actually moved the numbers.
Data Points to Track
- Promotion type — developer-created offer vs Google-funded promotion — logged separately, since only one of them reflects your own discount spend
- Promotion ID and target audience, so app-specific promotions can be attributed individually rather than rolled into a play-wide aggregate
- Direct vs post-promotion revenue and buyer counts, tracked as distinct metrics rather than a single “promotion revenue” figure
- Country breakdown, since Play Points redemption behaviour varies significantly by market
- Acquisition count attributable to the promotion, separate from revenue, to capture users brought in who haven’t purchased yet
- Baseline (non-promotion) revenue and buyer rate for the same cohort window, so promotion impact can be measured as a lift rather than read in isolation
Setup Steps
- Pull the Play Points performance report from Play Console (Statistics → Play Points) rather than relying on aggregate revenue dashboards that don’t separate promotion-driven purchases.
- Filter by promotion type, promotion ID and country before drawing any conclusions — the unfiltered view blends developer and Google-funded promotions together.
- Export the report as CSV and join it against your own purchase and cohort data, since Play Console’s own view won’t show post-promotion behaviour beyond its reporting window.
- Tag acquisitions from the promotion window in your own analytics so you can track their retention and lifetime value independently of the report’s own post-promotion figures.
- Set a recurring export cadence — Play Console retains this data longer than six months once exported, but only if you’re pulling it regularly rather than relying on the console UI.
Actionable Insights
The most useful read on a Play Points promotion isn’t its direct revenue — it’s the ratio of post-promotion to direct revenue, which tells you whether the promotion is building a buyer base or just discounting purchases that would have happened anyway. A promotion with strong acquisitions but weak post-promotion revenue is a signal to check onboarding and early retention for that cohort specifically, rather than assuming the promotion itself underperformed. Compare developer-created and Google-funded promotions separately: because Google is subsidising the latter, a high revenue number there says more about Google’s targeting than your own pricing, and shouldn’t be used to justify a similar discount depth on your own offers.
Related Resources
Need help tracking this in your app?
Our team sets up analytics pipelines for mobile and web teams every day. Talk to us and get your first events flowing in under an hour.
Talk to an expert