A month and a half ago I released the first Search Engine Roundtable app for both iOS and Android. Not only is the user experience in the app pretty slick and makes for a really nice mobile read, it also has full App Indexing API integration and I promised to share the results with you.
Updated App Features
But first, we rolled out new versions of the app recently and I wanted to share those details.
(1) You can now swipe your finger across the screen to jump from one article to the next. You no longer have to click back and select an article, you can just swipe through the articles quickly by swiping your finger from right to left when you are on an article screen. This works on both iOS and Android now.
(2) Obviously bug fixes and tweaks in the optimization.
(3) For iOS, we now support Apple Watches. So you can read the news on your Apple Watch. This is how it looks:
The App Icon:
The article lets you scroll through all the content:
You can bookmark them to your native iOS app to read later by hard pressing on the story:
So make sure to download the revised app for iOS and Android.
App Indexing Stats In Google Search Console
So when we first launched the app, the data was awesome. I was seeing thousands of impressions on my app in the search results, very few clicks - because folks didn't have the app installed yet. Clicks started to come in. But then it died off. First I thought it was the due to the search analytics bug but after that was fixed, the data still showed very few impressions, if any. Here is the graph, click to enlarge:
So I asked John Mueller about this in the Google+ hangout yesterday and he said it was just timing. He thinks, although he isn't 100% sure, that when the app first launched, there was an experiment to show app content more often in the search results. Then the Search Analytics bug hit and at the same time, that experiment potentially ended. So with that, the impressions dropped. He said, I simply need more people to install the app - so go ahead!
He said at the 55:55 mark:
I think what probably happened was that the timing was kind of awkward, especially with regards to that Search Console bug that we had there. Where maybe we were running an experiment before and Search Console bug happened and then we stopped that experiment and refreshed the Search Console and now it looks like because of that bug, the numbers went down. It was actually because we stopped that experiment.
Here is the embed:
So go ahead, download the iOS and Android versions and I'll keep you updated on the stats.
Forum discussion at Google+.
