Getting reports on a regular basis

We wanted to get this dashboard to our team every day at 9 AM in our #analytics channel in Slack, so everyone would get a quick report on the release’s progress first thing in the morning.

For that, we used the Scheduled Reports feature in Statsbot, which can deliver any metric or dashboard you need in Slack, on a recurring basis–either hourly, daily or weekly. Like the users responsible for the other 1.8 million scheduled reports generated on Statsbot this year, we were grateful to save the time it would have taken to generate these reports manually.

Setting up a goal to get actionable reports

Just tracking the progress wasn’t enough. We needed to know if we were hitting the targets we had set for the launch. So we used Statsbot’s Goals feature, which produces a prediction about how likely you are to reach your goal by the end of the month. Its advanced machine learning-powered algorithm tells users whether you’re ahead of or behind schedule to hit your mark.

We set the goal “5% growth in unique dashboards openings month over month” to see if users were engaging with the Dashboards product. Goals helped us to track progress, stay motivated and adjust our strategy quickly.

Unique Dashboard openings` is the metric we set in our Mixpanel account, which appeared in our Goals report.

Shortly after the launch, we’ve noticed that engagement was not growing as expected and we started communicating with our users to get their feedback and understand what we were doing wrong. It turned out that only a few people users per team were using Dashboards–often just the ones who had created them. The rest of members found it difficult to sign in to their account every time they need to look at reports–or they just didn’t know how to do it and didn’t care. For them, it was simpler to just ask for a screenshot.

As a result, we added a shared Dashboards feature with auto-generated links that could be used by anyone with no need to stay signed in at Statsbot. Using insights from Mixpanel presented in Statsbot, we identified a problem and solved it in real time. Our clients met this feature with enthusiasm; some even started to stream their dashboard to a TV in their offices!

But the evidence for this change’s success isn’t just anecdotal. Users are finding value in shared Dashboards.

Instant analytics insights

Lastly, we wanted to be able to track potential errors and act quickly if something had gone wrong. For that purpose, Statsbot has a Streams feature which is only available for Mixpanel users. Because Mixpanel allows users to catch events in a real-time, Statsbot can send a report with a specific metric in Slack immediately.

How we track errors with Mixpanel and the Streams feature at Statsbot

Thanks to streams, we could be proactive in dealing with any errors, rather than only knowing something had gone wrong when tickets started coming in to support. In one instance, Streams caught an error notifying us that charts on shared Dashboards has been broken for several clients, and allowed us to resolve the problem quickly.

Results

Although dashboards are a common feature in many business intelligence tools, their value was not immediately obvious to us. But getting customer feedback changed our own perception of what an analytics tool needed to deliver for its customers. And the feedback we’re getting now has been overwhelming.