(Also, uploaded the slides from the AMO Editor’s session).

Thanks.

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!

Some of the metrics that I’ve been looking at attempt to measure add-on effectiveness and performance on the AMO site. For example, how much does having an add-on appear on the featured list help? What does it do from a number of add-ons downloaded perspective? What does it do to the active user count for that add-on?

For add-on downloads, I’ve been calculating the change in the 7-day moving average (this tends to eliminate day-of-week fluctuations). I compare the value before and after being on the featured list and note the percentage change. You would assume that with more “exposure”, the 7-day average for featured add-ons would universally increase across the period. But in fact, it doesn’t for all add-ons.

• Some of the newer add-ons to the AMO site (low counts to begin with) saw a tremendous increase in download counts, even upwards of 500%.
• Some add-ons had barely any change in their downloads, these were mostly “older” add-ons with reputations and history where the majority of downloads come from users searching for these add-ons by name. Adding them to the featured list did barely a dent to their download counts.
• Some add-ons’ download counts actually headed south after being on the list. I attribute it to either a lack of interest in the functionality, bad description or because having it featured did not affect the overall downward spiral for the add-on.

As for changes in active user counts, I looked at the total change in active users before and after the featured period. This is a great metric because it is an indicator of how many users have tried it and still have it installed. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the users are using it on a daily basis but at least they didn’t uninstall it. All add-ons on the list had large positive values in absolute terms but what’s keys is the relative change compared to the existing active user base. Some add-ons saw as little as 3% increase in their active users, others saw 354% increase.

Finally, I looked at a metric to measure likeability or retention (active users/download). For those users that downloaded the add-on, how many decided to keep it. That ratio ranged from 9.5% to 48.0%.

I hope this provided a little more metric science insight to the building of the featured list. I’m hoping we can do a similar analysis on the production AMO site to uncover add-ons who are movers-and-shakers and help our broader user base discover cool new add-ons and keep them as loyal Firefox users.