Play Console's new store listing CTR, and why your old numbers just broke.

If you opened Play Console this summer and your store listing performance looked better than it had in years, sit down before you celebrate. Google changed what the number means.

Google's help page now describes click-through rate as the percentage of store listing visitors who clicked a button: Install, Open or Pre-register. It says store listing reports were updated to focus on user intent, the click, rather than the successful install. The old conversion rate counted visitors who actually installed. The new rate counts visitors who pressed a button.

What exactly changed

Two things moved at the same time.

The numerator. A click is not an install. Someone can tap Install and abandon the download on a weak connection, run out of storage, or cancel. Every one of those used to be a lost conversion. Now each one counts as a success.

The denominator. Agencies tracking the change report that visitor counting changed from 10 July 2026 and that visit counts fell on average. Google's own documentation references both June and July 2026 for the rollout, so confirm the exact date in your own console.

Fewer visitors underneath, more successes on top. The ratio rises even if nobody touched the listing.

A worked example

Take an app with 40,000 store listing visitors and 9,600 acquisitions in June: a 24% conversion rate under the old definition. In August, under the new reporting, it shows 34,000 visitors and 9,860 unique clicks: a 29% CTR.

Same screenshots, same title, same short description. Five points of "growth" that never happened. The figures are illustrative, but the pattern follows directly from the two changes above.

How to reset your baseline

Treat it like a broken time series, because that is what it is.

1. Freeze the old data. Label everything before the switch as legacy conversion rate. It stays as history and never shares a chart axis with CTR.
2. Rebuild the baseline. Collect at least 28 days of CTR split by traffic source (search, explore, external), by country and by store listing. Custom store listings need their own baselines, because their audiences differ.
3. Compare like with like. CTR goes against CTR. If someone asks whether you are better than last year, the honest answer is that this metric can't tell you until next year.
4. Keep an installs number next to it. Divide acquisitions by unique clicks over the same window. That completion rate is where large APKs, low storage and slow networks show up, and it is exactly what CTR now hides.

Store listing experiments are still fine. They compare variants inside the same period, on the same metric. Just don't compare an experiment result with a pre-change conversion rate.

Real reference points, and why they are now history

These are real numbers from our client work, all measured under the legacy definition:

• A market-specific custom store listing for a 440K MAU app converted at 31.7% from 1.7 million visitors. The default listing converted at 18.7%. (case study)
• A smaller app converted at 27.7% on about 45,800 listing visitors while its install base grew 70%. (case study)

The gap between 31.7% and 18.7% still tells you something real: tailored listings beat generic ones by a wide margin. The absolute numbers no longer tell you how your CTR compares. Anyone quoting an "average Play Store conversion rate" today without saying which definition they mean is guessing.

What nobody knows yet

There is no public, CTR-era benchmark for Google Play we would trust. We are building one from the consoles we work in and will publish it once there is 90 days of clean data across categories. Until then, your own baseline is the only honest comparison.

To see both numbers side by side, use the free Play Store CTR and conversion calculator. It works out the legacy rate, the new CTR and your click-to-install completion rate, and sizes the install upside of a CTR improvement.

Questions people ask

Why did my Google Play conversion rate go up in July 2026?

Most likely because Play Console now reports click-through rate instead of conversion rate, and counts visitors differently. Clicks are easier to earn than installs and fewer visitors are counted, so the ratio rises without any real change.

Are store listing experiments still valid after the change?

Yes. Experiments compare variants within the same time window and the same metric. Only comparisons across the reporting change are broken.

What is a good store listing CTR on Google Play?

There is no trustworthy public benchmark yet. Build a 28-day baseline per traffic source and country, and improve against that.