This blog was written by Sayantan Roy, Senior Program Manager in the Partner Center Engineering Team at Microsoft.
Independent software vendors (ISVs) form a key part of Microsoft’s commerce ecosystem. Microsoft has always believed in working closely with our ISV partner community so that their customers’ needs are met and they have the best experience with the Azure ecosystem. ISVs create IPs for cloud developers, and they need business metrics reports to see how their offers are being used by customers. Using smart analytics, ISV partners can monitor their commercial marketplace offer listings, act on performance results, and enhance relationships with their customers and resellers.
Microsoft Partner Center is envisioned as a one-stop experience for ISVs to publish their offers to Microsoft’s commercial marketplace (either Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace) and monitor their offer performance through various analytics reports. We have created several reports that help ISVs to observe sales trends, evaluate key business drivers, and understand how customers are using their products. For an ISV with offers in AppSource or Azure Marketplace, the insightful data visualization available in Partner Center provides a holistic view on key business metrics around customers, order, usage, ratings and reviews, and Marketplace Insights.
With the availability of rich analytics in Partner Center, a partner can view performance data across various dimensions and intuitively answer key questions, such as and not restricted to:
How can I track offer engagement, measure customer interest, and evaluate marketing success?
Marketplace Insights Reports present metrics and data on customer engagement with the product details page of a partner’s commercial marketplace offer. The reports cover metrics for page visits, unique visitors, and calls to action (CTA) on an ISV’s listings. The metrics can be viewed across different geographies.
The following visualization shows the trend of page visits and unique visitors on the product details page. For the various categories of your marketplace offers’ CTAs, you can see the monthly trend.
How can I understand the usage pattern trend of my offers, orders, and customers?
You can understand what drives your business by looking at rich analytics reports distributed across the summary, customer, orders, and usage sections in Partner Center. Partner Center provides various visualizations that show historic trends for Orders and Usage against key business dimensions, such as Offers and Sales Channels.
How has overage trended for your offers with custom meters?
With the availability of marketplace offers with metered services, you can create any offer type with nonstandard units. For such offers, you can observe the overage trend for your offer against all the metered dimensions.
How have I fared in terms of orders and usage for existing and new customers?
While it’s important for you to retain your existing install base of customers, it’s also important to know how you are faring in terms of newer customers and overall customer growth in the period. The following widget shows your customer growth trend and how you have fared with respect to existing, new, and churned customers.
How can I do an analysis when business performance metrics are not meeting target?
While analyzing your business performance, if you observe that the rate of order growth has not met your target, you can perform a detailed analysis by looking at all the individual visualizations in the Orders report. For example, the following report shows the trend of the distribution of the orders across different offers, thereby helping you to detect growth issues with any offer type.
How can you understand who are your most valuable customers?
A customer leaderboard enables you to look at your top customers based on orders and usage. The reports are augmented with intelligent insights, so you can do an analysis of your top customer’s orders by different offers or usage by different offers.
Additionally, a Pareto visualization would enable you to analyze how the top “x” percentile of customers contributed to the overall orders or usage during the period.
In addition, the rich set of filters available across all the reports enables you to view cross-sections of data for focused analysis. You also get options to download the detailed data sets for all reports. Partner Center enables you to drill down data from a macro-market level to a customer level, thereby allowing you to analyze performance at varying granularities. We encourage you to give us feedback using the “thumbs up/down” control on each of the visualizations so that we can improve the usability experience.