Manage your Chrome Web Store Item

This page describes how to manage an extension or theme ("item") that was previously submitted to the Chrome Web Store.

# About the lifecycle of an item in the Chrome Web Store

All Chrome Web Store items go through an automated review process. In some instances a manual review is required, especially when sensitive permissions are requested. For this reason review times and/or approval times can take longer. Since a Chrome Web Store item goes through several stages, it's important to keep track of your item's status. See the lifecycle diagram below:

# Check your item's status

The status of your item appears in the developer dashboard next to each item. The status can be Published, Pending, Rejected, or Taken Down.

To stay informed of your item's status, you can:

• Enable email notifications. There are mandatory emails like take down or rejection notifications that are enabled by default. To receive notification when your item is published or staged, you can enable email notifications in the Account page.

  

• Check your publisher email. After enabling email notifications check your inbox often. To ensure that CWS emails don't get flagged as Spam, add chromewebstore-noreply@google.com to your contacts so that you receive all communications in a timely manner.

# Comply with Chrome Web Store policies

To ensure a positive experience for your users follow the developer program policies. These policies may change, so check the new announcements page frequently.

If your extension has been determined to violate one or more terms or policies, you will receive an email notification that contains the violation description and instructions on how to rectify. You can also find this information in the Status tab of your item.

If you have been informed about a violation and you do not rectify your item will be taken down. See Violation enforcement for more details.

# Improve ratings and reply to user reviews

Ratings and reviews help people decide whether or not to try out an extension. Not only do they leave a positive impression, but can also increase your ranking on the Chrome Web Store.

Users can leave comments in the Reviews tab of your store item; you can also post replies here to those reviews. Each user can only rate an extension once, but they can update their rating or review at any time. You can edit your reply at any time to provide the user with updates.

Users are more likely to improve their review if you respond and address their concerns promptly. To receive email notifications when users post reviews or update existing reviews, you can enable Item Reviews in the Account settings of the Developer Dashboard.

The Rating tab in the developer dashboard provides an overview of your extension’s ratings, including the total number of reviews and ratings over time.

# Provide user support

To ensure the best user experience and build a great extension it's important to collect, evaluate, and follow up on user feedback. You can manage your extension's user feedback in two ways:

• By using the built in CWS User Support tab, or
• By using a dedicated support site.

Users will be able to communicate with you using the Support tab of your store item.

# Using the User Support tab

Having a Support section on your extension's Chrome Web Store page allows users to easily report issues and suggest new features separately from leaving a review. To enable user feedback on your extension, the Visibility option (located in the Support tab area) must be switched on.
The Support Visibility option switch is located in the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard, in the Support Tab section of Account Options.

In the User Support tab of the developer console you can view, respond and manage user feedback. Use the Type dropdown to filter user input by feature request, bug report or question. You can assign a status to each request, and can respond to each inquiry. Each ticket includes the extension version, browser type and operating system to help you reproduce bugs more efficiently.

# Using a dedicated support site

You can set up a dedicated support site for your users, so that the support link goes there instead of the default forum experience. This site can be anything you like, such as:

• A discussion group using Google Groups or some similar service.
• A form-handling site that lets users submit feedback or support tickets.
• A public information site with your product road map or other details.

Once you set up the site, go to the Store Listing tab of the developer console and add the link to the Support URL field. Your support link will then take users to your dedicated site.

# Track your store listing performance

Understanding your Chrome Web Store listing metrics can help you evaluate how changes to your store listing have affected conversion rates. For example, you can identify countries with a high number of visitors so you can prioritize internationalization of your extension for those countries. You can also export all the reports described below as CSV files.

# Impressions

The impressions metrics track the number of users that discover your extension while searching or browsing the Chrome Web Store. An impression occurs when your extension is featured in any collection or direct visits to your store item.

# Daily installs and uninstalls

You can track customer acquisition and churn using these reports:

• Track acquisition using the daily install report.
• Monitor user churn using the daily uninstalls analytics.

These numbers include new and returning users. You can configure this data by country, language, operating system, or time period using the “filter by” dropdown menus.

# Weekly users

You can monitor weekly user retention for different groups of users, categorized by country, language, operating system, and item version.

# Google Analytics

To track store item metrics, you can opt in to Google Analytics 4 by clicking Opt in to Google Analytics under Additional metrics on the Store listing tab. After opting in you will receive an email notification.

The Chrome Web Store manages the account for you and makes the data available in Google Analytics. Chrome Web Store grants you access only to non user-level data. For group publishers, all developers within the group, regardless of their role within the group, are granted access to data for items owned by the group.