Answering your questions about Chrome Web Store discoverability

[00:00] So I asked for your questions about Chrome extensions on Reddit, and almost all of you wanted to hear about Chrome Web Store SEO. [00:07] If you don't believe me, just take a look here. [00:10] There's somebody here asking about trends and what's being searched for. [00:13] If I scroll down slightly further, there's somebody here asking about keywords. [00:17] somebody else wants to know about keywords, and then someone just says SEO SEO SEO. [00:22] So here I am, and I'm going to try and answer as many of your questions as I can. [00:27] I also have a brand new feature to share. [00:36] Before we get started, welcome. If you don't know me, my name is Oliver, and I work on the Chrome team focusing on extensions. [00:43] I've been making videos on the Chrome for Developers channel for a while, but now I want to bring you into the studio alongside me. [00:50] This is the first episode in a new series called Developer Mode, where I'm going to be answering your questions. [00:57] With that said, let's jump straight in. [00:59] Most of these questions today are pulled from Reddit, but you can also reach out to Chrome for developers. We go by that name on Blue Sky and X. Now, MindlessPension786 wanted to know about trends and what users are actually searching for. I actually want to open up the Chrome Web Store because there's something I want to show you. [01:17] we have this new top charts feature. [01:19] In the new and notable category, we're showing a mix of new, up and coming, and recently updated extensions. You can also see the most popular extensions and trending ones.

[01:30] I think taking a look here can be a really good way to figure out what users are looking for and what you might want to build. This is also like data that we haven't shared on the Chrome Web Store before. So I think it's just really exciting to have this out here. [01:42] and I'm excited to see how this is useful for you as developers. [01:46] I also asked the team about sort of the common search queries and what users are searching for. [01:50] Games is the sixth most common query, and we don't see many developers building these. Actually, I can just do a search for games here. You can see... [01:58] There's quite a few games on here, but I think a lot of the times like this is taking a game which was built for the web and then just packaging it into an extension. I think there's still a lot of room for developers who want to experiment with what games work best in the browser. Themes are also very popular and building one is far simpler than building an extension. Here's the entire source code for a theme that I made. It's just really some keys in the manifest. [02:28] then tweak the values to your liking. [02:30] And you can see it's some simple keys where we're describing some colors that we want to change in the browser. [02:35] It's really just one file, so this is really easy to put together. And something that I've seen is that [02:41] Oftentimes when a new theme gets added to the Chrome Web Store, [02:44] it gets a lot of users in a very short space of time. So if you want something like really simple that you can build that might find an audience, then I think building a theme can be a really great place to start. [02:57] Apprehensive ebb2233, that was a bit of a mouthful, had a question about how to get visibility in the store, especially with it not always being possible to get picked for some of the spotlight and featured sections that we have.

[03:11] Now, there's a lot of truth to just building something good and waiting for users to come. I get to speak to quite a few developers, and often when the topic of promoting your extension comes up, they mention that there wasn't a specific moment where they can say that something they did made the extension take off. [03:27] Instead, they had an organic audience which grew over time. [03:31] That said, sharing your extension online can work really well. For example, I was speaking to a developer last week who said that posting on Reddit and Product Hunt really helped them. Actually, I want to show you an example. This is the Product Hunt page for Pretty Prompt, which is an extension by two developers that I was talking to recently. [03:49] You can see in the product time page they have a launch here. [03:52] They have some comments. [03:54] And this is really nice because they said that these comments both sort of validated the idea that this was something that users were excited about and helped them to find an audience. But it also gave them an idea for what additional features users were looking for. [04:07] You can also see I think somewhere here, yeah, like they're actually proposing to have a call with one of the users to learn more about their use case. And I think that can be really great. Anytime a customer [04:16] wants to give you feedback, sort of jumping on that, embracing it. That can be a really good way to sort of get an indication for what you should build going forward. [04:25] Maddie Duck asked how we choose extensions for categories like lifestyle. [04:30] Now these are largely based on your items category, which you can change in the developer dashboard. [04:35] If you see here, there's this category drop down, and this is really what impacts where you show in the store, at least for those

[04:41] sort of main categories. So you can see in the extension section, we have lifestyle and this is broken down into like [04:47] art and design entertainment games. Beyond that, everything is algorithmic. So in terms of like, what you see in this recommended section and this conquer the clutter collection, this is either algorithmic or editorial. And there isn't a single factor that influences it. [05:01] We used to have a way to actually self-nominate yourself for the collections. We don't have that today, although we've tried it in the past and perhaps we'll try it again one day. [05:12] Nervousstar8721 says, please give us a clear update on the ranking system in search results. They see that this changed in the last few months and now it's not as predictable and doesn't work as expected. Now, our team didn't roll out any major changes over the last few months, so it might just be that you were unlucky with the particular items that you were looking at. [05:31] That's not to say that nothing changed behind the scenes, but it shouldn't have got significantly less predictable. [05:36] However, we're constantly working on this. [05:39] It's a hard problem as we're trying to balance predictable results with letting new extensions find an audience. [05:46] Now we are trying to make discoverability easier in general, for example through the top charts feature I mentioned earlier. [05:52] Now, one thing I don't see developers talking about enough is ratings. [05:56] Ratings aren't everything, and we know that users will sometimes leave a negative rating if they encounter a bug or they don't know how to use your extension. [06:04] For that reason, if you don't have a perfect five stars, then don't worry. [06:08] That said, they are a very important factor in ranking as well as things like eligibility for the featured badge.

[06:15] Now, you shouldn't game the system because we do have checks and balances in place for that, but prioritizing user experience and encouraging users to leave positive reviews if they like your extension [06:25] can work really well. [06:26] If your extension has a rating of two or three stars, and you're looking for that one single, actionable and measurable step to take to grow your user base, [06:35] I really think this could be it. Now hopefully everything in this episode was helpful. [06:41] Before we wrap up, a word of caution. [06:44] I mentioned this briefly earlier, but despite everything we've discussed, don't worry too much about this. [06:49] Focus on building a good quality extension and everything else will follow. [06:54] How we rank items often changes, so relying on anything too specific might work. [06:59] but it's high risk. I've seen developers speculating that we use metrics that we totally don't. [07:05] For example, I recently saw that someone suggested we look at how often users use your extension, [07:10] That would be really interesting data. [07:12] but we don't have it as tracking extension usage is really hard. Some extensions run in the background and despite being really useful, the user just isn't interacting with them on a day-to-day basis. [07:24] For that reason, any obvious metric, like how often does the user open the pop-up, [07:29] isn't particularly useful [07:31] The reason I mention all of this is to try and demonstrate while trying to guess the algorithm is risky business. You might end up spending a lot of time optimizing for something that isn't really relevant. [07:41] So with that said, focus on having a high quality listing and building a good product.

[07:46] everything else will follow [07:48] Now that's all I have time for today. Given the number of questions on this topic, we might revisit it in the future. Please also drop a comment below if you have any tips of your own. [07:58] See you next time.