What’s behind the numbers in the G Suite Marketplace?
Awesome Table has recently joined the very exclusive club of apps that have reached the 10M user milestone on the G Suite Marketplace, like Lucidchart. Perfect time to give a bit more visibility on this number of users and follow-up on my article Add-ons and the Google Apps Marketplace from 2016.
In the G Suite Marketplace, apps can be installed either by admins of G Suite domains or by individual users. When installed by an admin, Google takes the number of G Suite accounts on that domain and add it to your total number of users.
So, to reach 10M users, you don’t really need 10M installations but installations by big domains. In fact, in the developer console, you have access to more info and specifically the number of domains (or admins) and individual users who installed your app.
We launched Awesome Table on this marketplace only 2 years ago and it has been installed by 4.6K domains, some of them big enough to push the total count of users to 10M.
As we published several apps on this marketplace, it is interesting to compare them:
As you can see, Form Publisher and Yet Another Mail Merge have been installed by more domains than Awesome Table, which is not very surprising as we published them on this marketplace before Awesome Table.
But Awesome Table has been installed by bigger domains or more broadly inside domains (as admins can choose to enable an app for all users or for a specific organizational unit), because it is required when you publish an Awesome Table view in your intranet and want it accessible by everybody.
If we compare those numbers to the add-on stores, available in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides & Forms, the user acquisition rate is far lower… For example, YAMM is available both in the Sheets add-on store and in the G Suite Marketplace. In the add-on store, we get on average 6K new installations every week, ie: 6000 new users are directly installing the app via the add-on store every week, for a total number of unique installations which passed 1M last June (YAMM is the most installed add-on for Google Sheets) — while the total number of individual installations in the G Suite Marketplace from the beginning is only 4.9K.
As Gmail add-ons are only available in the G Suite Marketplace, it will be interesting to see how well they are performing and — as it gives more visibility to the store — if it helps more individual users to discover and install other apps from the G Suite Marketplace.
