Salesforce AppExchange Marketplace Analytics
You published your AppExchange listing. Great! Now what? How do you know if anybody has seen it? How do you know if you used the correct wording to optimize SEO? And how do you compare the listing performance over time?
I’ll reply with an answer – have you heard of AppExchange Marketplace Analytics?
TL;DR Quick Overview of Marketplace Analytics
If you’re short on time and just want to take a look at the visualizations included in AppExchange Marketplace Analytics, jump to the Visualizations Overview section and scroll through the screenshots.
What is AppExchange Marketplace Analytics and what can I get from it?
Every Salesforce Partner who has at least one public listing on AppExchange (whether it’s an app listing or a consulting listing) has access to a set of visualizations displaying data related to its performance and how potential customers are interacting with it.
The insights you’re provided include:
- Listing views, unique visitors, and lead events over time.
- Listing interaction sources (e.g. are app installations usually done after finding the listing via Google search, or maybe directly from your website?).
- Top AppExchange searches (e.g. which search terms lead to the most visits or installations).
- Chat performance – if you’ve enabled AppExchange chat on your listing, here’s how it performs over time – how many leads were generated, how many conversations conducted, and meetings booked.
- Listing interactions by region – allows you to identify regions where your listing performs well and those that need more attention.
Where do I find it?
Before I flood you with screenshots, let’s quickly see where you should go to access all that cool stuff. Marketplace Analytics is available from your Salesforce Partner Community account:
- Log in to https://partners.salesforce.com/.
- Open the Publishing tab. You will be taken to the publishing console.
- Select Analytics.
Every user who needs access to Marketplace Analytics must have permissions to view the AppExchange listings. To verify and adjust user permissions, follow these steps:
- Go back to the homepage – https://partners.salesforce.com/ (obviously, you need to be logged in).
- Select Manage Users from the upper menu.
- Select the Listings checkbox next to each user that needs access to Marketplace Analytics.
Note: They will also gain access to all your listings and related features.
Visualizations Overview
Let’s take a look at the dashboards available to us. Most of the screenshots here are taken from the analytics of my app’s listing – Einstein Bot Intent Detector, but the dashboards are the same for any listing.
General Statistics and Filters
At the very top of the Analytics page, there are so-called "global filters" – allowing you to select the listing for analytics and the time period you want to analyze. Just below, you can see the general statistics:
- Tile Views – how many times the thumbnail of your listing was viewed by AppExchange users.
- Tile Hover – when somebody hovers over your listing thumbnail to see more details and pauses for long enough, this counts as a tile hover.
- Visitors – how many unique users have visited your listing (if the same person visited the listing multiple times in a 30-day period, this counts as a single visitor).
- Lead Events – these are events used to trigger lead creation on your Partner Business Org. This is not exactly the number of leads created, because you might have org-specific logic (e.g. deduplication) that prevents lead creation in certain cases.
- Installs – I don’t need to explain that, right? 😉
Activity Sources and Timeline
Scrolling down further, you will see statistics related to activity sources, which give you insights on where customers find your listing. You can check here information such as how many installs are initiated after finding your listing through Google searches or how many lead events are generated after visiting the listing from your company.
Additionally, you can see all those information in the context of a trend over time.
The possible activity sources include:
- X (Twitter)
- Web
- AppExchange Search
- AppExchange Recommended section clicks
- AppExchange Sponsored Search
The activities options are:
- Tile Views
- Tile Hovers
- Listing Visits
- Lead Events
- Installs
Lead Events and Timeline
Below the activity sources statistics, you can find the lead events breakdown and trend over time. It allows you to see how many lead events were generated in the given period and how this changed over time.
Note: In case you don’t remember, I described what lead events are here.
The possible events are:
- Chat Conversation (using the chat embedded on your listing)
- Demo watch
- Get It Now button click
- Learn More button click
- Test Drive usage
- Historical – special category used to aggregate events captured before April 2021
Chat Engagement
If you’ve set up the AppExchange chat for your listing, you can see related statistics in the Chat Engagement section. It displays the following metrics and how they changed over time:
- Number of conversations
- Meetings booked
- Generated leads
I took the above screenshot from Salesforce’s official documentation as I didn’t have any data to visualize for my app here.
Top AppExchange Searches
This section shows you which search terms were driving activity on your listing – for example, as you can see in the screenshot below, my listing was clicked and visited most frequently after searching for terms like "Einstein Bot" and "Intent."
Note: These statistics relate to AppExchange searches, not Google or any other browser.
Customer Engagement
The Customer Engagement section is similar to the Activity Sources Timeline, with the difference that it only shows the number of interactions with your listing without source information. The statistics are displayed in a time-trend format.
The displayed activities are:
- Tile Views, Hovers & Visits
- Resource Views (e.g. viewing the documentation you attached in the "resources" section)
- Demos, Test Drives & Saves ("Save" means that someone saved your listing to review it later using the "heart" icon)
- Screenshot Views
- Lead Events, Installs & Get It Now Clicks
Activity Summary by Region
This dashboard allows you to see which customer locations drive the most activity with your listing and which might require marketing attention.
You can filter results by both activity source and types (the possible values are the same as listed in the Activity Sources section).
Co-Marketing Insights
If you’ve purchased a paid promotion on AppExchange, you can track its effectiveness (e.g. see how many visits resulted from the promotion) in the Co-Marketing Insights tab.
Same as with Chat Engagement, I took the above screenshot from Salesforce’s official documentation due to the lack of data to visualize for my app.
Exporting Marketplace Analytics Data
You can export all of the above data, except for the region summary and co-marketing insights. Use the Download button at the top of the page. Each dashboard will be included in the export as a separate CSV file.
Marketplace Analytics vs App Analytics
If you are a Salesforce ISV/OEM partner who publishes AppExchange app listings (not consulting ones), you might feel that something is missing here. "Ok, great, I know how people find my listing and which search terms are most effective, but how do I know whether they are actually using the app they installed?"
This is covered by a separate Salesforce mechanism, which I have already written a post about – AppExchange App Analytics. Be sure to check it out 😉
Conclusion and subjective summary
Ok, you already know what to expect and what’s provided Out Of the Box – a simple analytics tool within your Partner Community account, allowing you to visualize key metrics.
In my final words, I’d like to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of Salesforce AppExchange Marketplace Analytics.
Strengths:
- It gives you a good idea of the traction and engagement on your listing.
- Provides tangible data on ROI for your paid AppExchange promotions.
- It can be valuable input to improve your SEO and marketing efforts both inside and outside of AppExchange.
- Helps you understand whether engagement is increasing or decreasing over time.
- Can tell you which parts of your listing are working well and which aren’t (e.g. customers eagerly use your test drive, but rarely view all the screenshots on the listing).
Weaknesses:
- There is no API! It would be soo cool to have this data integrated with external analytics sources or app usage analytics data. Unfortunately, this is currently only possible by manually exporting the data to CSV.
- The data is not very detailed – I’m sure there are valid technical reasons behind this, but still, this is only part of the marketing story. If it were combined with Google search terms analysis, data from your website, and custom link click source information, the tool would be much more powerful.
That’s all I have for you in this post. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section. And if you’re a Salesforce AppExchange Partner, don’t forget to check out our other articles about the journey of publishing the AppExchange app. You might also be interested in our Salesforce App Analytics product.
