Last month I have published my extension Facebook Backup for downloading photos and videos from Facebook groups and pages. When I wanted to check it’s usage, I have found out, that there three different ways, how it can be measured.

Developer Dashboard

These statistics are for free since they are available directly in Developer Dashboards. They are showing number in impressions, installation, total users, and uninstalls.

Developers Dashboard - Usage

Google Analytics in Developer Dashboard

In developer dashboard is’s possible to set up Google Analytics code.

Developers Dashboard - Google Analytics

This allows tracking visits of detail page as well as from which location the extension was installed. Visited pages looks like this:

  • /webstore/detail/ext/free/... - view of detail page
  • /track_install/search/ext/free/... - installation from search page
  • /track_install/detail/ext/free/... - installation from detail page

Google Analytics in extension

It’s possible to integrate Google Analytics directly into extension and track usage in the same way as any other web page. It should be also possible to track installations also from here, but I haven’t implemented it yet.

Statistics

Combining all these different sources should provide an easy way for measuring number of current users as well as their growth. For example usage growth could be received from:

  • Number of istallations minus number of uninstallations from Developer Dashboard
  • Change in total current users from Developer Dashboard
  • Change in number of active users for various time period

Raw data are available in following google docs.

Observations

  • Number of installations reported in developer dashboard is lower than number of installations from Google Analytics.
  • Growth in user count doesn’t much difference between installations and uninstallations.
  • Total number of users is not cummulative sum over difference between installs and unistalls.
  • Total number of users is somewhere between number of active users in last 14 and 30 days.
  • Total number of users should represents number of users whose Chrome browser checked for an update within the last week. (in 2012)
Tags:
facebook, google-analytics, chrome-extension,
Archive
2017-06-26