Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

Download source tracking now available on AMO

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

With the release of AMO 5.2 a few weeks ago, we made a tiny change to every add-on download button on the website that made a huge impact: we can now see what parts of the site add-ons are downloaded from.

This was previously a gaping hole in our metrics, and a subject of much contention among Nick and myself (see also: relevance of my add-on’s icon to its functionality).

With the help of Daniel Einspanjer on our metrics team, we’re now able to analyze whether an add-on download came from an AMO search results page, the add-on’s display page, the Firefox Add-ons Manager, or one of around 12 predefined sources we are tracking.

Some of the results were surprising, so without further ado, this is the breakdown of downloads for a single day on AMO (yesterday, in fact).

Pie chart of AMO's download sources

Keep in mind that this covers 1.7 million downloads, so even sources that only have 1% of the pie can be up to 17,000 downloads. We’ll be digging into where our unknown downloads are coming from, but right now we think they are mostly downloads coming from other websites.

We didn’t want to keep all this data to ourselves, so add-on developers will find a new view in their Statistics Dashboards called “Download Sources” where the sources for each individual add-on can be dissected.

But wait, there’s more!

Our source tracking system also allows developers to add their own tracking codes for external links to their add-on. By simply adding a src parameter to any add-on’s URL or download URL, that source will start being tracked and appear in the Statistics Dashboard.

For example, when we launched the Add-on Compatibility Reporter a couple weeks ago, we had tracking codes in all of the most important places: the announcement blog post, the Firefox 3.6 beta first-run page and release notes, the hacks.mozilla.org post, etc. You can see the results of our efforts below:

Screenshot of the Add-on Compatibility Reporter's Download Sources

There are some caveats to external source tracking, so be sure to read the full instructions by going to your Download Sources dashboard and clicking “learn how to track external sources”.

Have fun with the data, and if your research sparks an idea for how we can improve download conversions on a particular AMO page or another great idea, let us know!

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Posted in developers | 5 Comments »

How many Firefox users use add-ons?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

This is a question we’re asked often and have been trying to answer for some time. We’re very excited to say that we now know that answer: at least a third of Firefox users have an add-on installed!

We first tried to tackle this question last year, but the huge amount of data addons.mozilla.org processes led us to call for the help of the Mozilla Metrics Team. Thanks to the help of Simon Krueger, a metrics intern this summer, we now have some insight into the number of add-on users.

On June 22, addons.mozilla.org received 253.7 million add-on update pings, 244.7M of which were for Firefox add-ons. Firefox sends an update ping for each installed add-on once every day it is running, and at other unscheduled times such as installing an incompatible add-on and Firefox upgrades. Not all update pings go to addons.mozilla.org, however — only add-ons hosted there and add-ons that have not set their own URL to check for updates.

Of all of those pings, we counted 32.8M unique IP addresses. This means that the minimum number of active daily users with at least 1 add-on installed was 33.8M, or 33% of Firefox users.

But what about homes and businesses that have multiple computers behind the same IP address? To estimate a number that takes NAT into account, we looked at the number of blocklist pings Firefox sent on the same day, which is how we measure the number of Firefox active daily users. There were 98.6M blocklist pings that day from 61.5M unique IPs. If we apply that ratio to the add-on pings, our estimate jumps to about 52.6M add-on users that day, or 53% of Firefox users.

Usage Chart

For more information on the technical details of this analysis, please read Simon’s post at the Blog of Data.

It’s important to keep in mind that all of the above numbers are active DAILY users. To get the number of monthly Firefox users, we multiply ADU by 3.

A minimum of 33% of users having chosen to install add-ons is great news, and is higher than our previous estimates. It’s especially exciting that we have a new metric to track the success and adoption of add-ons as we launch new features and campaigns encouraging users to customize Firefox and make it their own.

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Posted in general | 20 Comments »

Add-on Statistics Issues

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

As a result of the outage at Mozilla’s primary data center, add-on statistics available to developers have not been processed since Sunday night. The Mozilla Metrics team is working to resolve this and as soon as statistics are available, we will post here again.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

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Posted in developers | 6 Comments »

A very busy month for the AMO team

Monday, March 16th, 2009

This last month, we’ve rolled out lots of bug fixes to AMO as well as quite a few enhancements to the site. For the comprehensive list, check out bugzilla. We’d also like to highlight some changes that we think will help both developers and users of add-ons.

Enhanced Developer Dashboards

Updated aggregations on dashboard

Add-on developers can now see more about how their add-ons are doing. On the Downloads and Active Daily Users views, you can now aggregate by week or month. You can also compare weekdays for any two weeks of data.  While we were in there improving things, Active Daily Users were also improved to count daily instead of just once a week.

Dashboard tables

In addition to improved graphs, we made it easier to view tabular data in the dashboard.  Using the very latest in HTML table technology, we present a table with the data in the aggregation you’ve selected under the summary area of the dashboard.  You’ll no longer have to export to a spreadsheet if you just want a quick view of your add-on’s performance.  We’ve also added a link to download the CSV right above the table- it’s functionality we’ve always had but it wasn’t as easy to find as we wanted.

Permalink download

Permalink Download

For the dashboards to be accurate, all your external download links should point to AMO.  In the past, this meant updating your links to point to a specific file version, as download links changed with every revision.  We’ve updated our “Add to Firefox” and “Download Now” buttons to link to a special permalink that will always serve the latest public version of an add-on.  Simple grab the URL from this link for use in your external referrals to AMO.  Please note: if you have a EULA set for your add-on, this permalink exists on the post EULA screen.

Link Sharing

Link Sharing

Sometimes there’s an add-on that you really love and want to share with friends, other times you just want to save your favorite add-on to a bookmarking service so you can keep it handy.  For these times, you can use our new Link Sharing feature.  You can use it to post add-ons to a variety of bookmarking/buzz sites.  If there’s any service we missed, let us know- we’re planning a few enhancements for this feature and always welcome feedback.

Editorial Subscriptions

For those of you nominating and updating add-ons in AMO, one of the frustrations we’ve heard is that the length of time for a re-review after a rejection is too long.  We’ve done some thinking on how to solve this, and one of the things we found was that there was no notification mechanism in place to let editors know when an add-on they’ve rejected has been updated.  Starting now, our editors will have the ability to get automatically notified when an add-on they’ve reviewed gets updated.  We hope that this will help minimize the frustration of getting an add-on reviewed and rejected for a problem that can be fixed quickly and easily.

What’s next?

As we discussed in our roadmap, we’re thinking hard about how we can make the experience better for add-on users and developers.  We’re focusing on initiatives that will help with discovery and support of add-ons, as well as enhance the developer experience by improving the workflow, analytics, and community around add-on development.  Coming up this next quarter, you’ll see changes to the end user experience that will make both featured and non-featured add-ons easier to find and discover.  Features like tagging to help users navigate to the next add-on they want, and Collections, which will make it possible for users to share and track lists of their favorite add-ons.

The sandbox process will continue to evolve, and the next step is building tools to speed up add-on review and help catch likely rejection causes before an add-on is submitted.  Finally, we’ll be opening experimental add-ons for download by logged-out users, thus making it easier for new developers to get reviews and feedback on their add-ons before nominating them for public status.

As always, we’re eager to hear what you think and very excited about the future of AMO.

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Posted in developers, end users, releases | 3 Comments »

Statistics Update

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Wil Clouser, our AMO Dev lead, has an update on our work with fixing our problems with statistics.

[Reprinted from his blog]

Add-on statistics have been intermittent for a couple months and are just recently getting the attention they need.

Our current process is to count download statistics once per day and update ping statistics once per week (update pings are a sampling of the complete set). The reliability of the script generating these statistics has been falling as our data size has grown and we’ve had several bugs filed regarding the numbers it’s produced. Most of the time they are relatively small fixes and the script continued to limp along.

Currently we’re facing questionable results in both sets of statistics (bug 468570 for update pings, bug 472538 for download counts). I’ve been debugging the update pings script and despite solving some problems we’re continuing to see the script fail to run properly.

Parallel to AMO development, Daniel Einspanjer has been working on a larger statistics parser that will aggregate data from many Mozilla sites into a dashboard with easy visualizations. It turns out he’s already processing the AMO logs and pulling out more data than us more often and in less time.

With a system like that available it doesn’t make sense for us to continue to develop (and, in this case heavily modify) our local statistics scripts. With that in mind, our next steps are:

  1. Verify the results we (used to) get with the AMO scripts match those of the new system
  2. Create a transformation script to push the data from Daniel’s project to the AMO database
  3. Turn off the AMO scripts
  4. Back fill statistics through at least November 15th, 2008 to replace our flailing stats. If the comparisons in step 1 reveal miscounting from before that we’ll back fill as far as we need to.

These steps will let us meet the immediate goal of getting the statistics we offer now to be reliable and complete. In the future we can look at pulling additional data from the new metrics system. The target date to switch to the new system is the end of next week, Jan 31 2009. Once we make the switch we can evaluate how long the parsing takes and give an estimate of how long back filling will take. As always, let me know if there are any concerns.

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Posted in developers | No Comments »

1 Billion Add-on Downloads

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

This morning, addons.mozilla.org reached a huge milestone: we served our 1 billionth add-on download since we started keeping track of downloads in 2005.

Graph showing total number of add-on downloads over time

This number only includes downloads from addons.mozilla.org, but as many add-ons are hosted elsewhere, we can be sure the actual number is even higher. This is a very exciting week for Firefox add-ons, with the launch of Fashion Your Firefox yesterday, offering a new way for first-time add-on users to customize their browser.

This amazing feat was made possible by the huge community of add-on users, developers, and enthusiasts, as well as non-Firefox applications that embrace Mozilla add-ons like Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Sunbird, Komodo, Flock, and Songbird, to name a few.

At 1.5 million add-on downloads per day and increasing, I’m confident our next billion will arrive even more quickly than the 3.5 years it took for the first. If you’re not using an add-on yet, try one out. They’re pretty popular.

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Posted in developers, end users | 14 Comments »

State of the Add-ons Ecosystem

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

This is a first in a series of blog posts that will try to articulate some background about add-ons in order to explore potential product directions for the Mozilla add-ons site (AMO).

First some facts and figures to help set the context and scale for Firefox add-ons.

  • There are more than 180 million active monthly Firefox users (more than 60 million daily)
  • There have been more than 800 million add-on downloads since the inception of AMO
  • There are about 150 million active daily add-ons (Each add-on downloaded from AMO pings once a day)
  • AMO hosts about 5600 add-ons and 800 themes
  • We believe that there is a sizable number of add-ons not hosted on AMO (more than 1000?)
  • The AMO site has about 4-5 million page views and more than 750,000 user sessions daily
  • Every day 10-20 blog/news articles are published reviewing or mentioning some Firefox add-ons

Basically, there is a TON of user and developer activity here.

Why are add-ons important?

  • They are core to the Mozilla’s mission to offer “choice & innovation”
  • Customization is a key differentiator for Firefox. Huge momentum versus Internet Explorer, Safari (no official site), and Opera
  • Add-ons have become a platform for innovation and experimentation and it’s relatively easy to get started
  • Many startups have made their bet with the Firefox user base as the entry point
  • Major web properties invest in building & distributing add-ons
  • We believe that Firefox users who have installed add-ons tend to be more loyal

AMO’s Core Principles

Given the above, the AMO site’s function is to present end users with add-ons, keep them up to date and support the developers who publish these add-ons. The AMO development team focuses its efforts around four main guiding principles:

  • Help users find and discover add‑ons in their local language
  • Ensure the highest quality for what gets published
  • Create a satisfied ecosystem of add-on developers, editors and translators
  • Create the most comprehensive add-ons directory on the web

In my next posts, we’ll explore the various constituents (End Users, Developers, Translators & AMO Editors) that make up the add-ons ecosystem and their unique needs.

(Note: we should recognize that even though the AMO site only supports official Mozilla products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird. To look at the entire ecosystem, we need to examine the many XUL-based applications and their support for add-ons. Many applications have their own dedicated add-on site such as the ones for Flock, Songbird, eMusic, and Komodo.)

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Posted in developers, end users | 7 Comments »

Add-on Stats-a-holic

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Mozilla aspires to be as public as possible with its data and stats. (See Blog of Metrics) We are trying to do our part with AMO and share information about activity we are seeing on the site. Fligtar has two great posts about site metrics during last week’s Firefox 3 launch and the great work that the AMO editor community has done.

We also encourage add-on authors to publish stats about their add-ons. This can be enabled for AMO-hosted add-ons with a flip of a setting accessible at the bottom of your stats chart.

You can view all public add-on stats such as download and active user counts @ https://addons.mozilla.org/statistics/

Happy analysis!

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Posted in general | 2 Comments »

AMO hits the 600 million add-on downloads mark (since inception)

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

This week AMO reached a pretty significant milestone – 600 Million add-ons delivered. Wow! There’s a great post on the Mozilla blog of metrics summarizing the results. That’s fresh downloads and doesn’t even include updates to add-ons being delivered on a regular basis.

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Posted in general | 2 Comments »