Firefox/Aurora/Grow Usage (phase 1)

Summary

This wiki page describes our initial plan to grow Aurora channel usage in the short term. Future plans will be created to grow it long-term

Non-goals

• We will not be discussing growing other channels
• We will not be dealing with how to encourage users to be on the latest version of Aurora (the update stratification problem)
• We will not be discussing long-term (>1 million) growth opportunities
• We will not be discussing ways to use marketing funds to drive new user adoption

Current usage

We're around 60,000 ADUs on the Aurora channel as of 2011-06-14 (it fluctuates a bit though)

Goal usage

• Low: 100,000 ADUs
• Regular: 250,000 ADUs
• Stretch: 500,000 ADUs

We would like this increase over a 6 week period (one Aurora cycle).

Potential audience

We decided to focus on those running betas of Firefox 4 because:

1. They have shown willingness to run pre-release software
2. We aren't pulling from users running modern beta builds, which could hurt us in the future
3. They aren't doing themselves a favor by running old builds
4. They aren't doing us a favor by testing older, unreleased builds
5. They don't seem to be moving off these builds
6. We already started an update billboard for them, so less work

This is the current breakdown, excluding "pre" (nightly) versions:

This gives us a potential audience of 522,311 ADUs.

Ability to hit goals

Assuming we can offer the update to everyone:

Low

• 100,000 ADUs (desired) - 60,000 ADUs (current) = 40,000 ADUs (needed)
• 40,000 ADUs (needed) / 522,311 (potential) = 7.6% uptake needed to hit goal

Regular

• 250,000 ADUs (desired) - 60,000 ADUs (current) = 190,000 ADUs (needed)
• 190,000 ADUs (needed) / 522,311 (potential) = 36.3% uptake needed to hit goal

Stretch

• 500,000 ADUs (desired) - 60,000 ADUs (current) = 440,000 ADUs (needed)
• 440,000 ADUs (needed) / 522,311 (potential) = 84.2% uptake needed to hit goal

Details

• Prompt or minor update?
  • We will try the billboard first, in your face and we can have a message on it
  • If that doesn't work, we will go to unprompted
  • These users should already have a minor update sitting there waiting for them, not sure why they aren't installing/restarting
• Last prompt wasn't localized
  • We should localize as much as possible for maximum impact
• We will direct these users to Aurora via homepage snippets as well and track conversion
• We will aim to implement / have all updates live on July 5th

Possible future directions

• Change to an unadvertised update
• Override users' choice in the snippet using new Firefox 4-specific snippet features (?)
• Targeted/scary homepage snippets?

Action Items

• Create en-US billboard (bug 651604) - Christian [done]
• Make sure billboard can still be used (bug 661009) - Grace
• Localize the billboard (bug 653323) - Grace
• Talk to metrics to get reporting needed to determine success status (bug 668115) - Christian
• Show only Aurora homepage snippets for these users (bug 664793) - Grace
• Track homepage snippet conversion rate (separate for general Aurora snippets) (bug 664791) - Grace
• Talk to RelEng to get the update snippets created (bug 666046) - Christian
• Look to include / remove the exclusion for the channel pref.js file so that the user stays on the channel the update was built from (talk to clegnitto or rs)