We launched Report Toaster into the Shopify App Store 90 days ago. Over the weekend, we eclipsed 300 active users. If you read the blog post about our first 100 users, you'd know that we've added over 200 active users in the past 35 days! Very exciting, a little scary. Let's dig into how that growth breaks down.
Tracking App Listing Data
Let's start with a few words on tracking app listing traffic and installs. Shopify makes it possible to attach a Google Analytics tracking code to your app store listing.
From there it's pretty easy to add a goal within GA to track installs. From there, I've created a custom report in GA, which gives me the data I want to see on a daily basis.
This gives me the basic dataset I need. Not sure how much others are doing in this area, but let's just say I may go a bit overboard.
Next Level Sh*t
I don't want to go any further without giving credit where credit is due. I couldn't have figured all of this out alone. I'd like to thank Daniel of app store analytics and his blog for fueling my obsession.
I used this blog entry from Daniel to pull my GA data into Google Sheets and parse out all of the search params. Once I pulled the last 30-days of data into Google Sheets, that's when things got really interesting.
Installs seem to vary greatly day to day. I wanted to see how much they varied and how they trended based on the number of visits. I was able to create the chart above that plots visits and installs over time in a way that shows the correlation. That led me to question what our conversion rate might be.
I created the chart above to track our conversion rate over time. I was really surprised to learn that we are converting between 35% to 60% of visits into actual installs!
As I mentioned earlier, there is a definite pattern to visits and installs, depending on the day of the week. I created the chart above to dig a bit deeper. No surprise that the weekends are a bit slow, but Wednesday being an off day was surprising. Long live Tuesdays!
How Did We Get Here?
Now that we have some insight into our visits and installs, let's take the next logical step. How are our users finding us? Or as the great David Byrne once asked, How Did We Get Here?
The chart above breaks down how our users arrived at our app listing. As you can see, the vast majority are arriving via good old-fashioned search. Personally, I view that as good news because it means the traffic is completely organic. I can optimize our listing and improve our ranking, resulting in more visits and consequently more installs.
Of course, that leads us to the next question. Optimize how? The above table shows install counts corresponding to specific search terms. Not surprisingly, our top search terms are reports, report and reporting. This gives me some pretty obvious targets for optimization.
Bottom Line
As covered in our previous blog post about user growth, all of this is a moot point without positive reviews. We are currently up to 12 5-star reviews, which is probably the biggest factor in driving growth.
How do we get reviews? Every one of our reviews has come following a positive support experience. No other method of outreach has resulted in a single review. So I guess the the bottom line is that good customer support = reviews = growth.
Can't wait to see how things progress in the coming weeks. Check back with us to find out!
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