Firefox’s Adoption Funnel

Ken Kovash

4 responses

We’ve done a bit of work over the past couple years trying to understand and improve Firefox’s conversion and adoption funnel.  The Firefox “funnel” encompasses several aspects of a person’s experience with Firefox, including – (1) finding firefox.com or mozilla.com, (2) downloading Firefox, (3) installing Firefox, (4) and using Firefox for the very first time.

Despite all of our efforts, there are always more improvements for us to strive towards.  For example, the Metrics team has started taking notice of one area that has seemingly been a blind spot in the past:

  • What happens to people in the moments between landing on firefox.com and seeing the download button?  (Blake will soon outline more specificity around this question.)
  • And what happens to people in the moments between clicking the download button and actually completing the download process (i.e., getting the full file)?

We’ll plan to discuss these questions and user experiences in much greater detail in follow-up posts.  The key takeaway for now is that we believe there are additional “funnel” improvements to be made – improvements that can easily translate into millions of additional happy new users of Firefox.

(image attributable to http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanteage/ under a creative commons license.)

4 responses

  1. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    Why not show people who just clicked the download button some of the cool things that they are going to get as soon as they install Firefox to further encourage them to install it after downloading it instead of risking the chance of the file just sitting on their computers?
    I mean really pump it up and highlight some of the most appealing features (Security, Add-ons, Personas etc). “You’re just moments away from joining millions of others from around the World using the browser that doesn’t suck!”
    Something along the lines of the first run page presentation.

    Most people know how to install a program nowadays so give less visibility to the actual install instructions on the page after clicking the download button ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.6.2&os=win&lang=en-US), or just reduce the size of it and keep it at the top, but throw in some enticing eye candy below it.

  2. another_sam wrote on :

    I’d like to share couple of thoughts with you. Posting them on a random post is the only way I found.

    1.- Somehow you could know which users are more “technology savvy” and which are more “regular users”. This could serve you to assess metrics of the “regular users” with priority, or at least to establish a new correlation on usage patterns. Eg of the first part: A user who never entered about:config, with few or no add-ons installed and bare use of the preferences menu could be considered as a “regular user”.

    2.- Watch the add-on updates adoption rate. If they are not as they should be, monitor and analyze how people acts in front of
    http://people.mozilla.org/~beltzner/images/fx3-major-update-yay-addon-updates.png
    because last week I caught my father failing miserably at it. He simply didn’t read s*it and closed the window with the upper-right X button. So now I shock-induce there is a lot of people failing the same way out there.

  3. Xerxes wrote on :

    snip:
    ===
    “You’re just moments away from joining millions of others from around the World using the browser that doesn’t suck!”
    Something along the lines of the first run page presentation.
    ===

    this all sounds way too Microsoft-ish, with an angry sarcastic touch of Apple, IBM, etc. to me, if the browser isn’t what a user thought it would be they won’t use it any further than the install and handful of uses.

    sounds like you’re trying to be everything to everybody. that ain’t gonna happen, ever.

    Don’t waste your time and ours with all the ‘what if’, make it work, make it secure, and let me control whether or not i use your browser, or something else. or Hell I’ll just write my own and forego this interweb bazaar of browser builder crybabies.

    what ever happened to computers being fun? you’re starting sound like every other tech company these days. and this is the same attitude that killed Netscape, remember Netscape?

    there’s too many already
    http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/design/browsers_list.php3

    and if you can’t remember then look here to the past and ask yourself, where are they now?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

    1991
    WorldWideWeb (Nexus)
    1992
    ViolaWWW · Erwise · MidasWWW · MacWWW (Samba) · Libwww Line-mode
    1993
    NCSA Mosaic · AMosaic · Cello · Lynx (2.0) · Arena
    1994
    IBM WebExplorer · Netscape Navigator · MicroMind SlipKnot (1.0) · TradeWave MacWeb · IBrowse · Navipress · Argo · Minuet · Internet in a Box · Spyglass Mosaic · TCP/Connect II
    1995
    Internet Explorer 1 · Netscape Navigator 2.0 · OmniWeb · WebRouser · Sun WebRunner (HotJava) · Grail · Internet Explorer 2 · Delrina Cyberjack · AOL Web Browser for Macintosh · eWorld Web Browser for Macintosh · NetShark · WebShark · Opera · AMSD Ariadna · UdiWWW
    1996
    Arachne 1.0 · Internet Explorer 3 · Netscape Navigator 3.0 · Oracle PowerBrowser · Apple Cyberdog · INRIA Amaya (.9) · AWeb · VaporWare Voyager · tcpCONNECT4

    just a thought.

    Xerxes

  4. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    @ Xerxes

    I hardly think that Mozilla let alone anyone with half a brain would even consider using “You’re just moments away from joining millions of others from around the World using the browser that doesn’t suck!”
    It was a joke. And I just don’t see how any of your comments relate to the topic and content of this post.
    One other thing. Why would you mention the death of Netscape and then point to a page where Netscape Navigator is listed and that includes a download link for a dead browser?
    “there’s too many already”
    Sounds like present tense to me. 😐