How can I see the number of total installs for my chrome extension?

Question

I'm distributing a chrome extension through the Chrome web store and I'm having trouble finding anyplace where the web store tells me how many "total installs" my extension has. I want to be able to know how many people in total have installed my extension since I first uploaded it.

Some quick searching on google yielded the following article in the google help section, but I can't find a "details" page that actually shows the "weekly installs" figure. Check it out here. In addition, there's no explanation of where I would get "total installs" on that page.

I also found this discussion, which did not contain the answer either.

Answer 1

Anonymous is incorrect. That is not the total number of installs. What that is, is the number of weekly users (people actively using the extension), and this is tallied weekly.

If you want to see the daily number of people installing the extension, you can see that on the Recent Stats page:

You can get to this page from your Developer Dashboard by clicking on "Stats":

Unfortunately, Google Chrome does not give a way to see the total number of people who installed the extension.

However, I personally came up with a way to find out myself:

1) When user installs the extension, it opens a php page on my server (one time only, only for initial installation) which is a php page which I immediately redirect to another page (I redirect it to a welcome page), but on that php page when visited tallies 1 for each time the page is opened.

2) On a second javascript page on my server, it gathers these tallies and adds them up, displaying them in a nice format for me to see and monitor the number of installs.

You can make it even more complex, updating the javascript page with new code for each version, so you can see how many installs for each version, or even how many installs each day. It just depends how much time you want to spend writing javascript (and your programming level).

Yes, my method is pretty complicated, and it took a lot of time writing the php and javascript code. However, it is the only way.

Here is what my tracking page looks like:

As you see, it's nothing fancy because only I will ever see it (I even password-protected the page), but it allows me to easily track my installs at any time.

Answer 2

Given that it's not possible to get solid reporting on new installs from the Developer Dashboard, you might want to consider tracking installs with Google Analytics.

Since for best results you should be adding tracking and getting usage insights by using GA anyway, you could create a custom event or a Welcome page that will be triggered for first time users. You could use the same tactic for those who are uninstalling your extension.

Because the official guide has not yet been updated, check out this tutorial does a good job covering how to How to add Google’s Universal Analytics tracking to a Chrome extension.