Amazon Adds Alexa Skill Activation Metrics to Developer Dashboard
Amazon today introduced Alexa skill activation metrics so developers can track how often users enable their skills and success rates for account linking. Alexa developers have been able to see total users and session data for years and earlier this year charts were added to depict retention statistics. However, enablement reflects new users and that is something that has been harder to see in the earlier data. In theory, developers can use this to understand rising or falling popularity or the effect of promotion efforts.
The more important metric may be for skills that enable account linking. Developers can now see conversion rates for users that initiate the account linking process and then complete it. And, that means you can finally measure abandonment rate. You can also see how many times a user initiated the process before completing it and a cumulative total for these metrics. The value here is that developers now have the ability to measure the impact of changes in the call to action or account linking flow on conversion. With that said, very few Alexa skills have gone down the account linking path because it introduces too much friction into the user acquisition process. Generating user discovery is hard today so developers I spoke with suggested it’s rarely worth the risk to introduce a barrier into the conversion process even if it can provide a better user experience.
Alexa Skill Analytics Dashboard. Image courtesy of Amazon.
New Alexa Activation Metrics Are For Developers Expecting to Scale
More data is generally a good thing. To be clear, these tools are more about the future than today. Most skills are not in a position to make use of these metrics due to low volume of usage and even fewer are using the account linking feature. These metrics do present the type of tooling that developers accustomed to serving users at scale will require. And, for those skills looking to drive monetization or social sharing enabled by account linking, it provides much needed visibility.
With that said, there are many advantages to using a third party analytics package such as Dashbot or Chatbase to supplement what Amazon provides. Amazon’s metrics may eventually surpass these offerings, but today they provide additional data in more actionable formats and also offer analysts a consistent view across voice assistants. Let us know what you think about the new Alexa skill activation metrics on Twitter.
Follow @bretkinsella Follow @voicebotai
Amazon Updates Alexa Developer Console and Adds Retention Statistics
