As of August 15, 2018 we are upgrading our new analytics platform out of beta and launching our Spredfast analytics platform. Spredfast analytics are faster, more reliable, more intuitive, and more powerful than ever before. The purpose of the Beta phase was to learn what customers need and how to create a best-in-class, intuitive, yet highly configurable analytics system and that s exactly what we ve done. This blog post will give you an overview of the major enhancements and improvements to the platform.
Legacy analytics (GoodData) will still be available to customers to allow runway time to transition over to new analytics, and Spredfast will provide resources to help in those efforts.
If you have existing dashboards from Beta Analytics: Customers with existing dashboards saved in new analytics still have those same dashboards saved. Dashboards were upgraded out of beta and all widgets, filters, etc. were migrated to the new system. On top of your existing dashboards and settings, you ll have access to a number of new features, widgets, and filtering capabilities within Spredfast analytics (outlined below).
What are the differences between beta and the new analytics platform launching 8/15?
We ve made leaps and bounds improvements to the reliability and speed of the platform.
- Data refresh frequency: We refresh data in the dashboards more often.
- Speed: Dashboards load 30X faster for 95% of customers, and 2-5X faster for the 5% with extraordinarily high message volumes.
We ve built in the deeper the functionality we know you need.
Widget updates: We re providing you with the visualizations and data you need to tell the stories you need to tell.
- Configurable tables: Configurable table widgets allow you to tailor the metrics you want to display within a table in a dashboard (change the column order, value display settings, sort order, and more). Available configurable table widgets include:
- Post Explorer
- Account Explorer
- Channel Explorer
- Content Type Explorer
- Label Explorer
- Post level metrics: View post level metrics via drill downs and the side panel.
- Widget exports: Export widget data from directly within a dashboard.
New filtering capabilities: We re making it easier than ever for you to only show the data that s important to you within widgets.
- Lifetime vs. delta values vs. current: Toggle between lifetime, delta, and current values (define those time periods for yourself).
- Share dashboards: Share dashboards with other Spredfast users in your Company from directly within the platform.
- Widget level filters for (side-by-side comparisons) vs. just a dashboard filter: see a side-by-side comparison (for example, engagement by region). Every filter available at the dashboard level is also available at a widget level.
Easier Layout and UI: We ve made dashboards easier to learn and more intuitive to navigate.
- New layout: We upgraded the platform to an easier, free-form layout and added the ability to set print layouts and guidelines. Widgets are much easier to resize and arrange within a dashboard.
- Widget selection previews and color guides: You now get a preview of a widget while editing and live data as soon as you drop it into a dashboard. Widgets are also color coded by like metric types (i.e. all follower-related widgets are orange). Showing you which social networks are available by widget.
- Filtering interactions (i.e. filtering error surfacing😞 Spredfast analytics will warn you if the filters you are using in your dashboards and widgets are keeping you from seeing your data. For example, if you have created an error between your filtering and the data actually available within a widget.
- Widget overlays within a dashboard: You can now overlay widgets, which is the foundation for being able to annotate dashboards with custom text and images in the future. With overlays we ve also added basic layering commands such as bring to front, etc.
- Timestamps for when dashboards were last updated: Quickly see when data within a dashboard has last been refreshed.
All customers will now be able to create configurable care dashboards in addition to the pre-configured reports available within care analytics.
- Configurable care dashboards: Care-specific metrics and dashboards are available to configure, save, and share care dashboards within your business.
What s changed?
- If you have a New Follower widget in an existing Beta dashboard, that will migrate to a Followers widget toggled for delta values. The data in that widget has been rolled into the Followers widget using display options to get you the same data.
- The "Followers" metric has been removed from the Scorecard widget. Users who wish to see this number will need to add the "Followers" widget to their dashboard.
We have a number of resources available to help you get started with Spredfast analytics, or continue to get more value out of your dashboards if you were a user of beta analytics. These will be provided in our official launch details, tomorrow!
Sincerely,
Your Spredfast Analytics Team
