Understanding Alexa Skill Analytics: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
So, you’ve published a skill to the Alexa Skills Store and now customers are using it. What’s next? With the metrics dashboard, you can measure how customers are interacting with your skill so you can continue improving their experience over time. To help you get the most out of the metrics dashboard, this post walks through some of the top questions we get from the developer community about it.
- User Enablements refers to the total number of unique users who enabled the skill. Some users might enable your skill, but not launch it. It’s important to note that user accounts are not unique to the device. If a single user enabled the skill from both Alexa app and Alexa Skills Store, it will be counted as one user enablement.
- Unique Customers are determined by Alexa user accounts, not devices. If a customer launches your skill on multiple devices that are all registered to the same user account, this is counted as one Unique Customer.
Another reason why these numbers are different is that some users might have enabled your skill, but not launched it yet. Only users who launch a skill are included in the count of Unique Customers.
You can customize your reporting by selecting the Custom range button and choosing the time frame that you want to see. You can also use the Time Interval controls to change the date range (today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, or by selecting a custom date range). Using the Aggregation Period drop-down list, you can change how the data is grouped (every 15 minutes, hourly, daily, or weekly).
The number of Unique Customers changes depending on how you aggregate the data: per hour, per day, or per week. For example, consider the following scenario in which several customers use the same skill in the same day:
- Customer A uses the skill at 1:00 AM.
- Customers B and C both use the skill at 11:00 AM.
- Customer B uses the skill again at 3:00 PM.
When you aggregate the data by hour, you see one Unique Customer at 1:00 AM, two Unique Customers at 11:00 AM, and one unique customer at 3:00 PM. However, when you aggregate the data by day, you see a total of three Unique Customers. Thus, adding together the number of Unique Customers per hour does not necessarily give you the number of Unique Customers per day, because it doesn't account for repeat users. The metrics that you see on the Analytics page do account for repeat customers, which can help explain why you see differences when you aggregate the data differently.
The Summary section of the Analytics page shows the total number of Unique Customers for the entire date range that you select.
Yes. In the language drop-down list in the upper left, choose All to see combined metrics for all of the languages and locales in which your skill is available:
All metrics data is refreshed every two hours, with the exception of the retention metrics (refreshed weekly) and the enablements metrics (refreshed daily).
Yes, you can export charts, grids, and other metrics visualizations as PNG or JPEG images. You can also download the raw data in CSV format.
Don’t worry, we're here to help. If you run into more questions while using the metrics dashboard, a good place to start is the frequently asked questions about skill metrics. You can also post questions and chat with other Alexa skill developers on our developer forum, or connect with us through our contact form.
You can monitor the performance of your skill through usage metrics available to you in on the Analytics page in the developer console. These metrics give you useful information about how customers are using your skill, and can help guide your decisions on how to design your skill in order to improve the experience.