We have recently released two updates related to our automated reports - Improved customization of report email and Advanced scheduling. Those features were highly requested by our clients and will elevate our automated reports even further. Let’s dive in.

Improved email customization

This update is beneficial for our clients who want to add their branding to the automated report communication. We have now enabled the ability to attach your logo and custom message to the automated email. You can follow the co-labeling flow to add your custom logo to display it on your exports and dashboards. 

Advanced scheduling

We have added this feature to make scheduling a truly flexible experience. We have started by adding quarterly and other more custom periods. We quickly realized that some of them are heavily dependent on the interpretation of the end-user. That is why we have introduced CRON-based scheduling. Thanks to CRON formulas, you have pretty much limitless abilities in deliverance for your report. To give you an idea, here is one of the example formulas: “0 9 2 */2 3“, which translates to “At 09:00 on day-of-month 2 and on Wednesday in every 2nd month”. Quite powerful, right? It is a feature for more advanced users, but we have also introduced instant inline translations to more human language. You will be able to see the results straight away.

Better automation 😎 

Our client base heavily requested both of those features, and both bring different customizations to the table and fulfill different needs. They fit in the general quintly narration, which is flexibility, something that we strive for with every product update. Stay tuned for more.

Instagram announced it is combining IGTV and feed videos into one format - Instagram Video. With this update, we want to explain how this affects data in quintly.

IGTV data sources not showing new videos

From October 5th onwards, Instagram's APIs classify all new videos as regular feed posts. So far, some of those were marked as IGTV. At quintly we have two separate data sources holding IGTV data, one owning public and another holding private data. Videos created on or after October 5th won't be returned by these data sources anymore. It is expected to see no more IGTV posts from that date onwards.

For historic access, we keep these data sources active for some more weeks. We publish a separate announcement once there is a definite deprecation date.

Videos are now included within regular post data sources

Instead, all videos created on or after October 5th are now included within our regular Instagram posts data sources. Also, here this change applies to both the public and the private data.

What steps do I need to take?

No immediate action is required. IGTV metrics based on the IGTV data sources will stop to show new IGTV videos. You might want to remove these metrics once your analysis completely moves beyond October 5th. On the other side, regular post metrics will show all videos created on or after October 5th. In general, this is an excellent simplification as IGTV videos are not considered a separate format anymore.

We are happy to announce the ability to push data to AWS S3 using our data push feature. This adds another option when building your own data warehouse/data lake.

What is the data push feature?

Part of our mission is to offer simple ways to take your social media data out of quintly to avoid data silos and enable analysis across several sources. Our data push feature handles scenarios where you want to build your data warehouse/data lake. Our system proactively pushes structured data to you on a defined schedule, eliminating extra work on your end.

How does it differentiate from the API or other connectors?

Our API provides a generic interface to take data out of quintly. The data push feature is an extra layer on top of our API. It takes away all of the development work required to connect to and maintain quintly's API. Once activated, it will proactively push the data you need to your data warehouse/data lake on a defined schedule. We make sure nothing goes wrong and provide transparency into each of the data push tasks performed. 

If you want to analyze data on the spot and are not interested in building your own data warehouse/data lake, recently we have expanded our integrations library by adding a native Google Data Studio connector.

Both approaches have pros and cons, but in the true nature of flexibility, we strive to cover each use case.

Where can data be pushed?

With this update, we can push data to an AWS S3 bucket and a Google BigQuery database, covering two popular services offered by AWS and Google Cloud. We look forward to add more destinations very soon.

How to get started?

If you are interested in pushing data to your data warehouse/data lake, please contact our customer service at support@quintly.com or via chat in-app.

Today we are excited to release our new Google Data Studio connector, enabling you to easily integrate quintly data in Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio is a popular tool used to analyze and report across various data sources.

What is this all about?

Measuring the impact of your marketing initiatives requires avoiding data silos and enabling analysis across various sources, Social Media data being one of them. A common use case is connecting your Social Media data with Web Tracking or Sales data.

We understand that analyses spanning several sources cannot be done in quintly alone, and this is why we strongly believe in offering multiple ways to integrate quintly data in third-party solutions. While our API provides a generic interface to take data out, it comes with extra integration effort which is unsuitable for all cases. This is why we have decided to develop native integrations for commonly used business intelligence tools to simplify the integration. Our Google Data Studio connector marks the beginning of a series of new connectors to be developed by our team.

How to get started?

Log into Google Data Studio and find our Google Data Studio connector here. Click "quintly" and you will start right with creating your first data source in Google Data Studio using quintly data.

More connectors coming soon

You can expect us to offer additional connectors for popular business intelligence solutions soon. Next in line is a Tableau connector that we expect to finish in the coming weeks.

YouTube has become increasingly popular among the social networks we track here at quintly. Several of our customers rely on the data we provide to monitor their YouTube channels. Earlier this year, we have made significant improvements when it comes to the depth of data we provide for individual YouTube videos.

Today we are excited to lift YouTube Analytics to the next level, covering most channel metrics available in YouTube Studio. We are proud to say we now cover both the channel and individual video-level in-depth.

What data becomes available?

We have completed the set of metrics and break-down dimensions offered by YouTube on channel-level, including:

• Historic subscriber counts (no 30 day-limitation for your own channels)
• Card metrics (learn more about cards on YouTube videos)
• YouTube Premium metrics (e.g., views coming from YouTube Premium members)
• Lifetime metrics (metrics aggregated since the creation of the YouTube channel)
• Break-down by age, gender, country, live or on-demand, channel subscribed status, YouTube product (e.g., YouTube Kids), playback location, traffic source, device type and operating system

Not to forget, for all these metrics, you can look into their development over time. In total, we have increased the number of available channel metrics from 12 to 114 with this release.

Why is this important for you?

By having access to many more metrics for your own YouTube channels, you can finally enhance your channel reports and tell a more complete story about how your brand or organization performs on YouTube. Breaking down metrics covering several dimensions adds a new level of depth and insights.

Playlist metrics coming soon

While this marks a major step towards a complete metric set for YouTube channels, we constantly improve existing data sets. Looking into the future, we can already share that YouTube playlist metrics are coming soon as well. We'll share this as a separate product update once available.

The profile and date selectors are the most used controls in quintly. For the experts of you using them over and over, you can now control both selectors by simply using your keyboard and thus save time.

Simply press "p" to open the profile selector and "d" for the date selector. Once opened, you can directly start typing to search for profiles or to select a time range, followed by pressing ENTER. No need to use the mouse at all.

Give it a try yourself with these examples when having a metric in front of you:

• Press "p", type a profile name in your account, press ENTER
• Press "d", type "last week", press ENTER

Learn more about what terms the quick search of our date selector understands in our knowledge base. 

Posts shown in the Tags section will now show the type of the post below the social network icon to easily identify the right post before tagging. This helps especially in situations where there are several post types for the same social network, e.g. for Instagram there are Feed posts, IGTV videos and Stories. Beside the additional information the layout of each card has been updated to improve readability.

We are excited to add password protection as an option when exporting your dashboards as a link. This extends the security of link exports by another factor beside just knowing the link itself.

To set a password simply check the Password protected option and set a password after having exported your dashboard as a link via Export > Link.

Setting the right time zone is important, so we can show all dates in quintly accordingly (e.g. when a post was published). So far setting the time zone was possible within the personal settings. Users told us it was sometimes unclear what time zone is being used when dates are shown. To improve this experience we have applied the following changes.

Asking for the time zone during onboarding and when adding new users

New customers will now be asked for the time zone to be used during onboarding. When adding new users to existing accounts, the admin will need to set the time zone when inviting a new user to their account. In all cases this ensures the time zone is set proactively in the very beginning.

Setting the time zone within the date selector

All date selectors now transparently share the time zone being used and easily allow to change it in the specific context. On dashboards you can even set different time zones for different metrics. This for example can help with setting a time zone based on the profiles selected.

Transparently sharing the time zone in several contexts

In several contexts where a date is shown in quintly, you will now see what time zone has been used. We always want to make sure you know exactly how to interpret the data in front of you. For metrics, you will find this contextual information right below the chart or table, including the date and its time zone.

Using our API is a common way to take the data you see in quintly into your own or third party applications. There are several parameters available to specify what data you would like to fetch.

Today we are introducing an easy way of building API requests. The Metric Builder now shows an API section within the Query results tab holding the complete API request for this metric and the current selection (profile, date and additional filters). In case you want to use the Metric Builder purely for building API requests, we recommend using the Api visualization in the top right.