Add-ons and the Google Apps Marketplace

Post date: Aug 25, 2016 10:16:53 AM

Add-ons can be installed from each add-on store in Docs, Sheets or Forms, but add-ons creators can also publish them on the Google Apps Marketplace.

Main benefit: Admins can install an add-on for the whole domain or a specific organizational unit. They will make a one-time authorization for everyone, meaning end users won't have to.

It's also the only way for some users to have access to add-ons as admins can forbid users to install add-ons by themselves.

What's behind the number of users in the marketplace?

Yet Another Mail Merge & Form Publisher are pretty popular on the Google Apps Marketplace. As of August 2016, YAMM has 1,187,761 users and Form Publisher has 1,773,934 users.

'Potential users' would be more relevant here than users, as this is in fact the aggregated number of people who have access to the add-on on each domain (so if an admin of a domain with 100K users installs the add-on, but no one is using it, it will still count for 100K users on the Google Apps Marketplace listing).

In that regard, the number we can see in the add-on store is far more accurate as it represents the number of people who have really tried the add-on (it doesn't mean they are currently using it but it's still installed on their Google account).

Listing domains who have installed via the marketplace

Anyway, as we have also just launched Awesome Table on the Google Apps Marketplace and have another app, Groups Directory, there, I wanted to see what was behind this number of users, and specifically which domains have installed one of those apps via the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you have created an add-on, you can use the Marketplace API to retrieve the list of domains who have installed your add-on via the Apps Marketplace. You can use UrlFetch to make calls to that API, and use the OAuth 2 lib to get a valid auth token (note that you'll need to use a client ID from the Developers Console Project of your add-on).

Here's the performance of the 3 apps since January 2016 (nb of domains who have installed each app, by month, after removing duplicates - e.g.: when an admin reinstalls multiple times the app for his domain). Groups Directory can only be installed from this marketplace, while YAMM & Form Publisher are also available in the add-on stores.

What about usage?

So YAMM & Form Publisher have a good number of users on the Marketplace and also a nice installation rate - on average more than 140 new domains are installing them every month. How does it translate in terms of usage? Well it's a bit sad.

I'm storing user profiles in Firebase so I can compare the list of domains who have installed with the list of all users of my add-ons. 48% of the domains who installed YAMM have never used it. Meaning that an admin installed the add-on, granted permissions for everyone but then not a single user, including the admin, actually tried the add-on... And it's even worse for Form Publisher where 76% of the domains have 0 real user of the add-on.

So I really don't know why those domains are installing the add-ons. Maybe they think they are installing standalone web apps and don't try to open a Google Sheet or a Google Form...

In fact, of the 1,187,761 users registered for YAMM, there are only 4,832 actual users (people who have at least sent 1 email with YAMM). That's less than the number of new users I get every week via the add-on store.

To sum up, the add-ons seem to perform pretty well in the marketplace as many admins are willing to install them, but we are missing a step to transform them into real users. It's easier in the add-on store where people install and can directly begin to use as they are already in the doc, sheet or form editor.