App Marketplace Metrics Glossary
Plain-language definitions for every metric AppRanks publishes across public app, audit, and comparison pages. This glossary explains what each number means, how we calculate it, and where it appears, so you can read our rankings and trend charts with confidence. Terms cover ratings and review counts, marketplace rank, visibility and velocity measures, and the audit scoring rubric. Each definition links directly to the surface where the metric is shown so you can see it in real context.
Ranking & visibility metrics
Where an app sits in the marketplace — category leaderboards, how those positions move, and how findable the listing is.
- Marketplace ranking is the position an app holds on a category leaderboard — for example, #4 of 218 in Shopify's Reviews category. Read the full definition →
- The numerical rank an app holds within a single marketplace category — for example, position #4 in "Reviews" out of 218 tracked apps in that category. Read the full definition →
- The top-ranked app in a marketplace category — typically the #1 position on the public category leaderboard. Read the full definition →
- The amplitude of an app's category-position changes over a rolling window — measured as the standard deviation of daily rank across (typically) the last 30 days. Read the full definition →
- Search relevance is how closely a marketplace listing's title, description, tags, and keywords match the queries merchants type into the marketplace search bar. Read the full definition →
Badges & editorial placement
Marketplace-awarded distinctions and editorial slots that surface an app beyond its organic ranking.
- An editorial slot on the marketplace where an app gets surfaced beyond its organic ranking — typically a hero card on a category page, a "new and trending" rail, a Spotlight badge, or a Cloud Fortified / Top Vendor… Read the full definition →
- The Spotlight badge is Atlassian Marketplace's curated-editorial designation, awarded to apps Atlassian's marketplace team selects for visibility in the rotating featured rails on Atlassian's homepage and category… Read the full definition →
- The Bestseller badge is Atlassian Marketplace's algorithmic top-installs designation, computed from rolling install velocity within each marketplace category. Read the full definition →
- The Rising Star badge is Atlassian Marketplace's velocity-of-growth designation, awarded to apps showing the strongest relative install acceleration regardless of absolute volume. Read the full definition →
- A Shopify-conferred quality designation that signals an app meets Shopify's published quality and performance criteria — fast initial load, accessible UI, good admin integration, no support backlogs. Read the full definition →
Review & rating metrics
User-feedback signals — how many reviews arrive, how recently, and how the ratings are distributed.
- The freshness of an app's most recent reviews — measured as days since the latest review and as the share of the total review pool that landed in the last 30 days. Read the full definition →
- A review burst is an abrupt spike in an app's review-arrival rate — typically defined as a single-day or 7-day review count that exceeds the trailing-90-day daily average by 3x or more. Read the full definition →
- The signed change in an app's average rating across rolling time windows — typically 7-day, 30-day, and 90-day deltas. Read the full definition →
Adoption & growth metrics
How many merchants actually run the app, and how fast that base is changing.
- The current number of stores that have an app installed and not uninstalled, as reported by the source marketplace. Read the full definition →
- Install velocity is the rate at which new merchants install an app over a rolling window — typically expressed as installs per day, week, or month. Read the full definition →
Pricing metrics
How AppRanks classifies an app's pricing posture — tier structure and free-plan availability.
- A named price level on an app's pricing page — typically Free, Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise, or platform-specific names. Read the full definition →
Audit & listing quality
Signals from AppRanks' independent listing audit — the overall score, the checks behind it, and the discipline they belong to.
- An out-of-100 score AppRanks publishes for each tracked app's listing, computed against a fixed rubric covering listing completeness, rating health, review velocity, merchandising, and ranking consistency. Read the full definition →
- Listing health is an aggregate read of how complete and well-maintained an app's marketplace listing is across the signals merchants and the marketplace's own quality systems look at: title length, description word… Read the full definition →
- App store optimization (ASO) is the industry-canonical acronym for the discipline of improving a marketplace listing's organic visibility — covering keyword research, title and description tuning, screenshot and video… Read the full definition →
Publisher & competitive landscape
Context around a listing — who publishes it, and how crowded and defensible its category is.
- The marketplace identity of the company or person publishing an app — a Shopify Partner, an Atlassian Partner, a WordPress contributor, etc. AppRanks tracks per-developer aggregates: total apps published, average rating… Read the full definition →
- A competitor moat is the durable advantage that prevents another app from displacing yours in the same marketplace category — typically a combination of accumulated reviews, install-velocity inertia, exclusive… Read the full definition →
- Category saturation is how crowded a marketplace category is relative to merchant demand — typically expressed as the number of competing apps within a single category divided by the marketplace's total app count, or as… Read the full definition →
Missing a term you'd like defined? Email [email protected] and we'll add it (or correct one that's wrong).