How to monitor your browser extension search ranks in the Chrome Web Store
Have one or multiple browser extensions published in the Chrome Web Store, but no idea how to keep up-to-date with their search rankings in the store?
I was facing the exact same challenge when I published my last browser extension, Parentheses Folding.
To improve the visibility of our browser extensions, it’s important to be discovered easily by potential users.
We improve our visibility by improving our store listing: title, description, images, etc.
But how do we know if our changes improve our visibility in the store.
Well, the way to check if we are more discoverable on the site, is to use the store search and actually do what people would do: Search for a browser extension that solves their problem. We search for the keywords that should guide users to our extension. We can then check our position in the search results. Based on the rank, we can compare to our previous checks, to see if we are ranking better after our improvements.
But honestly, this is a lot of manual work and there are potentially many different search terms we want to cover with our extension.
Because of this, I was trying to find a rank monitoring tool, that would allow us to periodically check our extension ranks for various keywords on the store in a given time period. To have a handy little dashboard that could provide an overview of the extension’s search appearance, which we can use to improve our rankings.
I just wanted to know the exact position of my extensions for the various search terms I am targeting to see how changes impact the visibility in the store.
Unluckily, I was not able to find such a monitoring service at all. It seems like everybody is doing this for Google, but no one is offering a service for extension developers and marketers promoting their extensions in the Chrome Web Store.
So I did what we - developers - do, when we can’t find a satisfying solution for our problem: We go ahead and built it.
Fast-forward: I built a web application that lets us monitor our browser extension ranking position for different search term in the Chrome Web Store.
We can add extensions in our accounts and create monitoring jobs for each of our extensions. Every monitoring job is described by a targeted search term and will be run daily to log the current position on the search results page.
And that’s it: Finally, we are able to see the ranks for each of our search terms and use this as a foundation to make data-driven decisions for our store listing and product development.
You can now use the service as well and start tracking with the Chrome Web Store Rank Monitor.
