A better way to track your promotions on Google Play Billing

Posted by Neto Marin, Developer Advocate

Promotions can be a valuable tool to increase user engagement or attract new users by offering content or features to a limited number of users free of charge.

We are happy to share an improvement in the Google Play Developer API that makes it easier to track your promotions from your own backend. Starting today, the API for Purchases.products will return "Promo" as a new value for the field purchaseType when the user redeems a promo code. Now, the possible values are:

• 0. Test (test purchases)
  
• 1. Promo (Promo code redemption purchase)

For purchases made using the standard in-app billing flow, the field will continue to not be set in the API response.

Please note: This state is only returned by the Purchases.products API. For subscriptions you may use Free Trials to offer free of charge subscription periods.

For more details about how to create and redeem promo codes, check the In-app Promotions documentation. For more details about the server-side API, check the Google Play Developer API documentation.