Installation analytics for shareware and desktop software applications

Installation analytics is the technique of gathering installation statistics directly from the distributed software installers.

The developers can see even in real-time the stream of installations and uninstalls of their software, understand the impact of their advertising, detect remote problems immediately after the release.

Having installation analytics in your software is essential for your success in this brutally competitive internet.

Benefits of having installation analytics in your installer

1. Measure the size of your customer base:
   • The number of monthly installations.
     
   • The number of uninstalls and the uninstall ratio.
     
2. Get information about your users:
   • Get statistics about the countries of your users
     
   • Adapt your prices and payment options to match user's expectations and payment abilities by country.
     (a fixed price software can be considered cheap by customers in some countries and expensive by customers in other countries)
   • Get statistics about the preferred languages of your users.
     Decide your translation plans with this information in hand.
   • Monitor new version adoption: are your users keen to upgrade to your latest version?
3. Improve your marketing activities:
   • Create marketing funnels: Advertising -> Website visitor -> Download -> Installation.
   • Correlate your campaigns with peaks in installations and removals.
   • Understand which keywords bring more installations.
   • Understand which keywords have the highest uninstall ratio (users expected something different from what was advertised).
4. Understand the target platform
   • Get statistics about the operating system (E.g. Windows or MacOS) and exact version
   • Get platform bit size (32 or 64 bits)
   • Get statistics about the screen resolution
     
5. Be alerted about installer problems and incompatibilities
   • Monitor crash or exception reports
   • Correlate installation problems with the operating system to understand the cause of the error
   • Check if your software's minimum requirements are set too high
   • Quickly detect and fix problems of your installation software package.

Installation analytics with SoftMeter

We developed SoftMeter as an easy and quick solution to implement installation statistics into installer software packages.

Benefits of SoftMeter:

1. Easy to implement into your installer software package (see our ready examples: Inno Setup analytics, Installaware analytics).
2. Free.
3. No need for sign-up or account creation.
4. Works with Google analytics.
   You are probably already using Google Analytics to analyse your website traffic.
   Now, you can use the same reporting tool to analyse your software installations.
5. See beyond the installation: Optionally, you can also link SoftMeter in your software application. You will get deep knowledge on how your customers use your program, see the free vs registered users ratio and many more critical application usage metrics.