Thanks to everyone who participated in the first Marketing Test Kitchen initiative: “Add to Apps" button. Overall, it was a huge success. The number of vendors using “Add to Apps” buttons grew significantly, causing a large increase in installs driven by button traffic. Before kicking off the second Apps Ecosystem Marketing Test Kitchen initiative, we want to recognize the winners of the first one.

Congratulations to the 6 winners, who will get additional exposure on the featured and notable section of the Marketplace front page:
Outright, Producteev, Insync, Mavenlink, Zoho and Manymoon

Established vendors such as Manymoon and Zoho improved performance of existing buttons and newer folks like Outright and Producteev added buttons to capture new business. If you didn’t get your button up for last week’s contest, that doesn't mean you shouldn’t do it now! Adding a button helps improve your overall performance in the Marketplace and will prepare you for future initiatives.

Now let’s take a look at the next Marketing Test Kitchen...

The Next Challenge:
Publish your most compelling customer success stories by Thursday, Dec 2nd on your own blog and share it with us at marketing-test-kitchen@google.com. We will feature a few of the top stories on the Google Enterprise Blog (see examples here and here) and also rotate the winning vendors into the featured and notable sections on the Marketplace front page. Note we will feature every submission in the Marketplace Success Stories blog, so just by submitting a story you will end up on the front page of the Marketplace.

It’s easy to participate: Find a compelling customer, tell their story, publish it on your blog, share it with us, and track your performance.

What makes a compelling customer?
It is important to find a customer that demonstrates the value of your integrated features with Google Apps. Make sure that your customer gives explicit approval for using their story. Here are some qualities of a compelling customer.

• Highlights the value of your app: For example, their use of your app in conjunction with various other web apps, such as other Marketplace apps.
• Hard data to support success: Numbers that justify strong gains are important, ie: 50% productivity gains, 10% increase in revenue, 20% reduction in IT costs.
• Passionate about Google Apps and the cloud: A genuinely passionate customer can explain the advantages of a cloud-based business and more easily help prospects understand and transition.

How can I make it easily consumable?
You can use the standard template from the developer site or find a more creative way to deliver it. You can create your own format that tells the story of the customer’s success. Here are some ideas to go beyond a typical blog post:

• Be visual: Use tools such as Picnik and Aviary to tell your story with compelling visuals (or choose another creative tool).
• Organize your presentation: You can use Google Presentations or SlideRocket to succinctly tell your story.
• Use video: Shoot or animate a video of your customer telling their Apps Marketplace story.
• Be creative: Combine the above ideas, write a story, or come up with something totally different.

To get a feel for different tones and stories, read some customer stories from various vendors on the Marketplace Success Stories blog. Also check out this example of a strong customer story that uses many of the above elements.



It’s easy to be a part of this new Marketing Test Kitchen. Just find a compelling customer, use a clever way to tell their story, publish it to your blog and share it by email. If you need more time, email us with your ideas as well! Make sure to track the performance of your blog post (and all other marketing efforts) through Google Analytics, learn how to code links and track traffic on the developer site.

Come up with the next Marketing Test Kitchen: Submit your idea via Buzz or email. We’ll evaluate the ideas and use the best ones for future initiatives. If we choose your initiative, we’ll give you a special prize.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps Marketplace

We are happy to announce that we have recently launched support for creating and managing revisions for arbitrary file types in the Documents List API. Prior to this, the Documents List API only allowed developers to create and query revisions of Google Docs files.

This opens up the API for a number of exciting use cases. For example, a developer could use Google Docs as the cloud-based back-end for a content-management system with versioning. Another possibility would be for developers to provide file history or file playback in their sync clients.

Please note, however, that while all users can use the API to query and manage revisions, currently only Google Apps Premier users can upload arbitrary file types via the API. All users are still able to upload arbitrary files types via the Google Docs web interface.

For more information on how to use this new feature, please see the updated release notes and updated documentation.

Posted by Russ Jorgensen, Google Docs Team

Want to weigh in on this topic? Discuss on Buzz

The Google Apps Marketplace team is always looking for ways to help its vendors add new users and improve installation metrics. In order to help achieve these goals, we have launched the Apps Ecosystem Marketing Kitchen. Through experimentation, we want to collectively identify, test, and share best marketing practices for business web app.

The first initiative we cooked up is designed to help you, as a vendor, minimize the abandonment rate of Marketplace prospects as they bounce around your Marketplace property and various product pages without clear a “call to action”.