Recently Amazon added a feature to the developer console to let you see metrics for your skills. Previous to this you could get the same information, but you had to tweak out a personal report from Cloud Watch. That was rather tedious. Now you can get the info you want at your fingertips right away.

The information comes in two main graphs.

Firstly, it gives you the "Unique Customer Count". This is, effectively, a measure of the number of customers you have. They may use it once, or a hundred times, and they just register on this chart once. If you creating a broad skill, that you want to have a wide appeal, this is the graph you want to watch to measure your success.

Here is a recent one for three of my skills:

The clear high performer here is "Knock Knock". Everyone loves knock-knock joke, so that's not unexpected. Starlanes (a complex interactive game) and Tweet Poll (tweet driven election statistics) are more specialized, and have commensurately lower ratings.

The second graph is "Total Utterance Count". An "utterance" is a single interaction with Alexa. In other words, the number of times a user has talked to your skill. Another way of looking at it is that it represents the total time all users have spent looking at your skill. It's a good measure of overall success. A broad skill with limited interaction (like your typical fortune cookie skill) will be comparable to a focused skill with intent users.

Here is a recent utterance count for three of my skills:

We can see, again, that the broad appeal, although limited scope, of Knock Knock wins out here as well. As the graph is shaped quite similar to the total unique users graph, we can, pretty much, deduce that most knock-knock users listen to a single joke at a time.

It is notable, though, at times the Starlanes skill actually exceeds Knock-knock. Even though the usage base is small, the dedicated core of users makes quite intent usage of it!

These numbers give a great launching point for further analysis and planning. Knock-knock is getting great exposure, but needs work on interaction. Maybe it needs new jokes to keep people coming back more than once. Starlanes has some really dedicated users, but they are few in number. Maybe it needs better advertising, or an easier on-ramp to increase retention. Tweet Poll isn't performing well at either. Given the media coverage of elections, the expectations of it were higher. Either more number crunching or user polling is needed to determine how to change that.

It's a good step from Amazon to expose this information so easily. There are a lot more things it would be nice to be able to track (repeat visitors, length of sessions, etc). Also, since Amazon haven't listed overall uptake numbers for The Echo, it is a bit hard to establish context. But this is a start.