- Ron Huber
- Jun 3, 2024
- 12 min read
Introduction
83% of business leaders find API integration critical to business strategy, but it starts with building an active user base. For companies to remain competitive in the API economy, they must be proactive in winning and retaining API consumers. That’s why accelerating API adoption is a top priority for companies of all sizes and across all industries. In this article, you will learn about the importance of promoting API adoption, the key obstacles that organizations need to consider, and how to increase their active user base.
“In the early days, businesses were hesitant to use APIs, but today APIs account for 80% of all Web traffic.”
Why Is Increasing API Adoption Important?
API adoption is an umbrella term that gauges how users engage with your API assets, from the number of active API consumers to how often they interact with your API ecosystem.
In the early days, businesses were hesitant to use APIs, but today APIs account for 80% of all Web traffic.
APIs play a pivotal role in creating new products and services by enabling collaboration between companies.
Ensuring high API adoption rates is important because APIs have no intrinsic business value if no one is using them, pushing companies to focus on improving their API adoption rates to win and retain an active user base.
Taking advantage of the booming API economy requires developing a solid API adoption strategy, which brings us to defining the benchmarks to measure your performance against empirically.
What Are the Key Metrics to Measure API Adoption?
It’s essential to measure API adoption to identify patterns in usage and areas of improvement. We’re going to zero in on the most critical metrics you can use to measure API adoption to help you always stay focused on the things that truly move the needle.
1. Active Users
How many API consumers use your API over a certain period?
Keeping track of that number helps you gauge the size of your user base and get a better idea of the business value your API assets generate for your organization.
You can measure active users by tracking how many users make requests to the API daily, weekly, and monthly to identify a general trend.
2. New User Registrations
This metric tracks how many people sign up to use your API over a given period. Measuring the number of new user registrations provides insight into how rapidly your user base is growing and how effective your marketing campaigns truly are.
You can track this metric by looking at the number of people who sign up to
use your API ecosystem daily, weekly, and monthly.
3. The Number of API Calls
The number of API calls is a crucial metric that can measure API adoption, providing insight into the engagement levels and helping you plan and predict the growing needs of your user base. You can track the number of API calls by monitoring the number of requests that are made to the API over a certain period.
4. Time to First Hello World (TTFHW)
Time to first hello world is a metric that measures the time it took for a new API consumer to sign up, go through the onboarding process, read the instructions needed to understand how your API works, and execute their first API call. This metric measures how quickly developers start using the API and can help you identify where the onboarding process or API documentation needs
improvement.
Track this metric to understand how easy it is to use the API and gauge the
success of your API adoption.
You can measure this metric by calculating the time from the moment the user enters your API ecosystem to when they make their first API call.
How to Use API Portals Boost Adoption Rates
“API portals ensure that developers can discover and use your APIs, but often fail to drive API adoption due to poor developer experience. Application leaders should deliver separate targeted internal and external API portals to enable optimal developer experience and adaptive governance.” -- Gartner®
An API portal is a linchpin that ensures high API adoption rates, providing a single point of access to all APIs and an ecosystem for users to interact with your APIs.
API portals can help you drastically boost your adoption rates in many ways. Below, we cover all of them.
Read More: The Ultimate Guide to API Portals in 2022
1. Improve API Discovery
API discovery is the ability to see all available APIs and easily locate the needed assets based on your goals.
The API portal plays a vital role in this process by providing a central access point to all APIs via an intuitive interface.
Improving API discovery helps developers quickly find the APIs they need, positively affecting your API adoption rates.
As a bonus, you reduce the likelihood of creating improper assets management vulnerabilities. This cyber threat made it to the OWASP API Security Top 10 list and occurred mainly due to poor API inventorization.
2. Organize Your API Documentation
API documentation describes the structure and functionalities of an API, helping developers understand how to use it.
Technical documentation lives at the core of an API portal, and producing good docs is a strength of many IT organizations. For example, Divio, an open-source company that maintains the Django web application framework, has compiled a best practices guide that’s seen wide adoption across the industry.
Deeper Learning
A partial WSDL for the above structure might look like this:
<message name=”Book”>
<part name=”title” type=”xsd:string” />
<part name=”author type=”xsd:string” />
</message>
<portType name=”Books”>
<operation name=”createBook”>
<input name=”newBook” message=”Book” />
</operation>
</portType>Read More: Comparison of WSDL & OpenAPI API Documentation Formats
Divio’s “grand unified theory of documentation” holds that your docs should cover
four different use cases:
Tutorials (learning-oriented)
How-to guides (problem-oriented)
Explanatory resources (understanding-oriented)
Reference materials (information-oriented)
API documentation should be clear and concise, providing all the information developers need to operate with your API successfully. It should also be up-to-date and reflect any changes that have been made to the API after rolling out new patches.
API documentation can be created in various formats, including HTML and PDF.
If you have to manage an extensive list of APIs, it’s easy to lose sight of some of them.
With API portals, you can create a repository of your API documentation across your API assets to improve the onboarding process and boost your TTFHW numbers.
3. Build and Promote Your API Ecosystem
An API portal is a key part of your organizational infrastructure, but it shouldn’t be your final goal. Instead, focus on building and promoting your API ecosystem. In today’s digital world, no organization can build every aspect of their platform or service independently — they rely on third-party APIs to help fill the gaps. An API ecosystem encourages collaboration, providing value for both internal and external resources. This helps foster community growth, which leads to further
creativity and innovation. An API portal should provide documentation and tools that make promotion easier, attracting organizations to the ecosystem rather than relying solely on marketing campaigns. Organizations should use an outside-in approach to build an ecosystem by looking for ways to solve business needs, understanding what the market wants, and building APIs to fulfill that demand.
4. Make Your APIs More Accessible to Business
Units With digital transformation on the agenda of every forward-thinking brand, the role of the API portal has changed. Gone are the days of API portals housing code and documentation for developer eyes only.
With the growth in usage of APIs and the API-first methodology taking root, particularly at the enterprise level, developer portals have morphed into API portals.
These modern platforms act as a way for businesses to drive innovation, revenue, and collaboration among developers as well as other stakeholders.
We’re seeing that APIs turn into products that serve developers, marketers, and C-suite players alike. This is in line with Gartner’s guidance to software engineer leaders on productizing APIs.
In their report, ‘Top 10 Aspects Software Engineering Leaders Need to Know About APIs’, Gartner Analysts Shameen Pillai and Mark O’Neill advise software engineering leaders to “treat APIs as products by creating the role of an API product manager to promote a consumer-centric product mindset for APIs.” [Also,] software engineering leaders should “improve the visibility, roadmap, and interoperability of APIs by managing the life cycle of APIs.”
API portals offer the features that entice developers and their non-technical colleagues alike, providing a user-friendly way to work with your APIs.
5. Build a Strong Community
While great technical docs are fundamental to retaining devs interested in your product offerings, building a solid community around your API ecosystem requires exploring more engaging ways to interact with your user base. API portals provide organizations with the tools they need to build a close-knit community around their API offerings, including forums and Q&A platforms. Modern API portals can also be complemented with content marketing, a highly effective strategy to reach developers where they stand. Developers work in a rapidly changing professional environment that can be exhausting. Help them with content that includes what people are doing with your APIs or technology. Write case studies, mention success stories, and interview developers using your technology.
Developers spend a lot of time reading, and they respond well to video series and podcasts that allow them to take a break when the content is relative to trending topics, news, and interesting questions. API portals help you connect with your audience on a much deeper level, positively affecting your API adoption rates.
6. Enforce Granular Access Control
API portals allow you to centralize your access control by allowing you to implement fine-grained user privileges and permissions.
You can segment your API consumers into groups and teams, providing them access to data and features based on their role or user tier.
This promotes collaboration across departments and organizations, boosting your API adoption rates and making your API ecosystem safer and more flexible for your users.
It’s common for organizations to build two identical portals for a single project due to the lack of advanced access control. API portals such as Apiboost eliminate this issue.
7. Promote API Compliance
API portals make it easier for you to comply with various laws and regulations related to your industry.
Meeting API compliance starts with having a complete list of your API assets.
If an API slips through the cracks due to poor API inventory management, that creates a potential compliance issue as you won’t be able to align your compliance status with industry standards.
API portals provide you with a complete picture of your API assets, helping you streamline the process of complying with regulatory requirements.
8. Utilize Reporting & Analytics Tools
API portals provide a range of reporting and analytics capabilities that can help you measure - and improve - the performance of your API program.
These features include detailed usage statistics, performance metrics, and error tracking.
They can help you track the usage of APIs how your target audience interacts with your API assets. This information can be applied to improve the usability of your APIs and better meet the needs of your user base.
9. Productize Your API Assets
API productization is the process of taking your API assets and turning them into a product.
3 Effective Ways to Promote Your API Ecosystem
Creating a robust API ecosystem is an effective method to improve API adoption rates. However, you still have to actively promote your API assets to gain the initial momentum and unlock exponential growth.
Here are the best ways to market your API ecosystem to get you started.
1. Use Directories, Forums, and Q&A Sites to Engage with Developers
Developers consume massive volumes of information in their day-to-day work routine.
Typically, these developers don’t know what they need to know before they encounter it and rely heavily on websites that are good at surfacing new techniques, products, and workflows while helping them separate the wheat from the chaff. If done right, these niche channels can pay huge dividends: Reddit: Dev-focused Reddit subs are bustling with developers exploring new technologies and APIs. The /r/webdev subreddit alone has 1,1 million subscribers. Reddit’s algorithm promotes posts based on the number of responses and upvotes. Promotional posts are often downvoted out of view, so focus on engaging in conversations, adding insights, and telling stories along with dev-focused articles as your top-level posts.
Quora: Quora can be an effective place to get the word out. Answer relevant questions thoughtfully and in-depth with a link to your portal to stand out from the torrent of low-value promotional answers on the platform.
Product Hunt: When your API portal is ready to launch, adding your site to Product Hunt can help gain mindshare and visibility. You only get one chance, so do your research first.
API Directories: API directories are lists of publicly available APIs with search features to help developers discover resources. It’s worth taking the time to list your offerings on directories like ProgrammableWeb and RapidAPI.
Catalogs: Catalog sites like Rakuten RapidAPI are similar to API directories and provide additional tooling for devs to work with service offerings like testing and monitoring.
2. Leverage Social Media
Social media can be a powerful marketing channel, so don’t overlook its potential.
X (Formerly Twitter)
Developers love Twitter because its short-form content makes it easy to scan a large amount of information and engage with others working on similar problems. The platform also has an incredibly vibrant developer advocate community. A high follower count isn’t necessary to use the platform effectively. Just be a part of relevant discussions, quickly surfaced through following relevant hashtags. Research the hashtags relevant to your API portal, set up alerts, and use them to start conversations.
LinkedIn is an important channel to ensure that your portal is discoverable (via its profile), but building a following or using sponsored postings is important to get your message out on this platform to developers and business units alike. Your LinkedIn channel is an excellent place to share new feature announcements, beta programs, and links to high-quality, dev-focused content.
YouTube Reusing your video content on YouTube or making it your primary distribution channel for video content is a great way to reach developers.
While most general channels fare better on the platform with fewer channels and more attention, dev-focused video content should be organized by topic in separate channels, preferably in sequence, to encourage developers to keep watching and engaging.
You can also make it easy for them to share your best content on other platforms.
3. Host, Attend, or Sponsor an Event
Developers typically love webinars and tech conferences because they offer the opportunity to interact and connect with others in the industry. The pandemic has made hosting virtual meetups truly normal.
Writing code can be an isolating experience at times, and the opportunity to engage professionally with others in a social atmosphere is appealing. Tech conferences range from small to huge and often offer speaking and sponsorship opportunities. Virtual meetups and can be used for recurring get-togethers centered around a relevant technology or industry. Webinars offer another effective tool to educate potential users about how your product works and your unique value proposition in a friendly and laid-back setting. Read More: How an API Portal Can Boost ROI (In More Ways Than One)
What Are the Most Common API Adoption Challenges
By understanding the most common challenges related to API adoption, you can take proactive steps to overcome these obstacles that hinder the growth of your API program.
1. Regulatory Compliance & Industry Standards
API compliance means ensuring that an API meets the requirements specified by the relevant governing institution or other regulatory entity. These requirements may include industry-specific laws, such as HIPPA for the healthcare industry, or general regulations such as GDPR and CCPA to protect data privacy.
Regulatory non-compliance can significantly hurt the organization, leading to a vast range of negative consequences - from fines to reputational losses. API compliance issues reduce your API adoption rates by deterring organizations from partnering with you because the failure to comply with regulations creates an additional layer of business risks for all stakeholders.
2. Security
With Gartner projecting APIs to become the primary attack vector in 2022, implementing security measures and policies across all of your APIs is vital.
API security measures protect your data from being accessed and modified by cyber attackers that can use the loopholes in your security policies to reach a malicious goal. API users have become increasingly aware of the security risks associated with API use as massive data breaches make headlines every year.
If your API isn’t secure enough, users may be reluctant to use it, which, in turn, limits API adoption rates.
3. Access Control
Granular access control is also critical for security and scalability - you want to authorize access to specific data or functionalities based on the permissions granted to a given user. This is especially important as your API ecosystem grows and starts interacting with many different teams.
Without advanced access controls in place, your API adoption rates are likely to suffer as your APIs won’t be able to meet the needs of a large segment of your user base, especially enterprise clients with complex organizational structures and cross-departmental relationships.
Business Agility
APIs need to maintain a balance between enforcing compliance standards and security measures and being user-friendly for API technical and non-technical consumers alike. With the rise of citizen development, the rapidly growing trend of getting business units involved in API product development, it’s essential to provide non-IT users with the ecosystem they need to create API products and use APIs as part of their workflows with little to coding skills. According to Gartner, the number of active citizen developers in large enterprises will be four times greater than the number of IT professionals by 2023. Those who fail to adapt to this significant shift in the API economy may have lower API adoption rates and miss out on substantial market opportunities in the near future.
Apiboost: An Enterprise API Portal Platform Primed for API Monetization
API portals are essential to ensuring high API adoption rates, but even large organizations may find it challenging to build them from scratch.
This is where Apiboost comes into play.
Apiboost is a cloud-based API portal platform with rich functionality and high extensibility. In addition to providing functionality for building out flexible catalogs for your APIs, Apiboost lets you productize APIs through Product Optimizer and enable people to collaborate in teams with Team Builder.
With Product Optimizer, your APIs can become shoppable products controlled at a Product Owner level, enabling authorized administrators to add new content, descriptions, blog posts, video, events, and even discussion forums to help educate third parties about your APIs.
Apiboost is so much more than your regular developer portal. Schedule a demo with us to learn more about our API portal and how Apiboost can help you engage with developers better.
