Recently we have updated a metric component, custom notes, that allows users to leave metric-specific messages visible on the dashboard level. Thanks to this improvement, we have made the storytelling aspect of a single metric more accessible. Let’s dive in.

Describe what you see

To add a note to the single metric, click on the “+Notes” button in the footer of the metric. An additional popup with a simple WYSIWYG editor will show up. Once you have created your metric, click “Save”, and the newly created custom note will appear in the footer. You can always modify or delete them if you wish

Publish and deliver your personalized findings

The most beneficial aspect of improved custom notes is in metric and dashboard sharing. Custom metric messages are widely supported by all our sharing (interactive reports) and export options (image formats, pdf, excel, CVS, and Powerpoint). Thanks to this inclusion, data analysts can attach their insights or descriptions on the metric level to anyone who is the end user. I hope that you will find this update helpful.

A sought-after update to our API will allow you to create share links via new endpoints. A very useful feature for our clients/partners integrating with quintly via API

Shared interactive report links

One of our core shared features allows users to share dashboards in an interactive format. We always believed that when it comes to data, it is crucial to give the end viewer ability to zoom in on the information they are looking at. App users were able to take advantage of managing the links for quite a while, so we are happy that our API users can do it programmatically now too.

New API endpoints

To manage the dashboard share links, we made four new endpoints available: listing all shared links, creating, updating, and deleting share links. Creating and updating come with parameters, including timeframes, password protection, and expiration options. You can find the whole list of features in our API documentation. We have more exciting news coming, so stay tuned 🙇 .

We are happy to bring you a new powerful UI component - Inline grouping and tagging. This universal UI module will allow you to tag and group profiles on the fly, massively increasing your productivity within the tool.

Get organized

The inline component completely replaces the old mechanism of adding, removing, and modifying groups and tags. To access this component, click on the pencil icon next to profiles or posts. This will open a dialog window where you can quickly search for existing groups or tags and modify or remove them. We have unified the UI of this component for a more streamlined experience. You can still access and manage tags and groups in their respective sections within our platform.

Components

We have spent quite a bit of time reviewing the most used components and challenging how they are used. The goal of this exercise was always an improvement in how you will use our platform. Stay tuned for more updates.

📅  Dynamic date ranges.

We bring you a date selector on the dashboard level. We have made it available to choose from two types of date settings - fixed and rolling date. For a set timeframe - fixed is perfect. A rolling date range would be better if you want a more dynamic date range. Once set, the dashboard will remember this setting. Dynamic date ranges are available for interactive and scheduled reports.

😎  Improved onboarding flow.

We have simplified and improved our onboarding flow, allowing you to add profiles and authenticate them in quick steps. You are also able to invite new users directly from this flow. More streamlined, more self-serve, and will get you up and running in minutes :)

😀  Linkedin new reaction.

As you probably know, Linkedin has rolled out the “Funny” reaction. We have it implemented immediately, so this new reaction type is available in LinkedIn's Posts Table default metric.

📌  Data source section.

Minor update to our data source section: The column types (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) now link to a knowledge base article describing the data types in more detail.

💲 Ad break metrics for facebook.

We have added new ad break metrics for individual Facebook posts and videos from Insights. Ad break metrics cover impressions, earnings (in USD), and CPM (earnings per 1000 impressions) for advertisement in a Page's videos. These are the metrics.

For posts (Definition):

• post_video_ad_break_earnings
• post_video_ad_break_ad_impressions
• post_video_ad_break_ad_cpm

For videos (Definition at the bottom of the page):

• total_video_ad_break_earnings
• total_video_ad_break_ad_impressions
• Total_video_ad_break_ad_cpm

Those metrics have been added to our facebookInsightsOwnPosts and facebookInsightsOwnVideos, respectively. They are ready to use in custom metric builder and via API.

📥  Data Push tasks improvements.

We have made improvements to our data push engine. You can now access your Data Push tasks configuration using our API with a new endpoint. 

🔩  CSV importer for Migration assistant

We have finished an improved migration assistant script. It allows us to migrate public fan, follower, and subscriber counts from an old tool into quintly in various CSV formats.

Over the last couple of months, our team has been working on a massive data structure and process overhaul. The main task what to replace the last remaining real-time data sources. Why is it a big deal? Let's dive in.

Real-time VS persisted data sources.

Based on some data retrieved from social networks, a real-time API call was needed. A solution that worked quite well, but unfortunately, due to the volume of data, it was slow, we couldn't pass the data through our Data Layer in real-time, and building custom metrics was quite complicated due to the response format (JSON). It was especially problematic if there was an issue with the information delivery. Due to the real-time nature, it was tough to debug the origin of the case. We have decided to move the remaining real-time data sources within our Data Layer infrastructure, with the help of our import workers, effectively changing them to persisted data. Persisted what?

To keep it short, this type of information has been imported via our workers, treated by our Data Layer engine, and stored in our database, becoming easily accessible and queryable.

Data Layer

One of the pillars of quintly, Data Layer, is more than just a database storing information. It's a sophisticated and constantly evolving data curation engine to ensure that the information served to our clients is the most accurate and qualitative. Thanks to moving all of the remaining data sources within our Data Layer, we have achieved:

• Robustness: thanks to structuring the information the same way, you are free to combine the data sources the way you want with ease 
• Performance improvement, no more ad hoc parsers, we query already sanitized data from one source.
• Transparency: since we control the data on our end, we can track the whole journey and report on it better
• Data quality and consistency: as mentioned above, each data source will undergo treatment from Data Layer, performing various data quality checks and improvements

This iteration is also a huge deal for us internally. It will significantly reduce the time needed for the maintenance, bug tracking, and, most importantly, implementation of the new data sources.

Writing about the data quality and maintenance work involved is very hard. Still, this improvement is significant as it helps us continue providing the most sanitized data for all your analytical needs. Isn't that what we are all here for anyway?

One of our clients' most requested features, Instagram Reels, is now available at quintly. Meta has announced that they are rolling out the Reels API endpoints starting from the 28th of June 2022. In a true quintly fashion, we are ready. Let's dive in.

Reels at quintly

Straight to the point, all your Instagram metrics will also start including Reels from today. No action is required from you, and you can very easily filter them by using the type column in your metrics. There is one additional column on the private level available with the Reels object whether Instagram shows the Reel on both the Feed and Reels tab or just Reels. 

You can access the Reels via two existing data sources - instagramOwnPosts and instagramInsightsOwnPosts. Reels will show as type “Reel”. It is also available in custom metrics, via API and Data Push tasks. 

Instagram data ready

We are thrilled to bring this update to you in less than 24h after the announcement - product team, you rock 🤘. This addition will allow you to include Reels into your social media marketing reporting easily.

Not a client yet? Book a personalized demo with us 👈 . 

We are delighted to announce that we have partnered with Auth0 to deliver the most secure and private user management. Thanks to this enhancement, your login, organization, and user invitation flows are more protected now than ever. Let’s jump in. 

Why Auth0

When we started this process, we had two ways to approach it: Either we build it ourselves or find the most reliable partner on the market. After careful consideration, we opted for the second option. We wanted to deliver the best solution on the market to our users, and we quickly turned to Auth0.

Auth0, in a nutshell, is a company built around privacy and login and registration flows. Auth0 provides a very robust, fully adaptable solution for any business. Since it matched our internal mantra, it was an instant match. 

Drifting away from the homebrew solution and teaming up with them gave us time to focus on doing what is the most important for all of us - social media analytics.

What does it mean to you?

For the last few months, we have been working in the background to utilize what Auth0 offers. We have reviewed our customer login, and registration flows and improved them. You will immediately notice that we have added Universal Login - the ability to log in or register with Google and Microsoft platforms, thanks to the new way how we will handle your security entity.

It also includes SSO (Single Sign-On) for extra security. Since our integration with Auth0, every time you or your team members log in, they will validate whether the information is correct.

We have also made changes to your Admin settings in our tool. The user management got more straightforward and transparent. You can now invite users directly from the app without the need to provide them with additional login information. Your invitee will receive an email and can choose from various login options to create his/her account. You can also check the status of all of your invitations and resend them if necessary.

Lastly, you can also add an extra layer of validation in the form of MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication). You can opt-in or out of this by visiting your Personal security settings.

The future is … secure.

We are pleased with this iteration as handling users has become more secure than ever. The robust functionalities that Auth0 offers are the first step to many more enterprise functionalities that we will implement in the future.

The first quarter of 2022 brought a lot of bigger product updates mentioned here before. We have also worked on the more minor updates related to either iteration of feature release, customer feedback, or our discovery. We have put all of them below. 

Updates to our Data Push and API

👉 We have made it possible to fetch all of the metadata of all your data push tasks via /list-data-push-tasks API endpoint. It's the same information as the one from within our app in the Integrations > Data Push section. You can find more information in our API documentation.

👉 We also support pushing JSON format to AWS S3, supplementing the already existing CSV format. You can find information about the data format on the data push task detail page.

👉 One more minor update to those using our API and data push tasks. We will now return the primary key per data source. This is especially useful for data warehouses, where you would like to understand what set of data source columns identifies a row within.

Data sources and general improvements

👉 Small but powerful update to the profiles data source. It now includes a column containing the complete set of groups to which the profile belongs. It enables metrics that want to aggregate results per group and thus allows groups to be used as a kind of "label" for profiles.

👉 The expiry date is no longer mandatory when generating a new interactive link. You can share and access the interactive links indefinitely. 

👉 Finally, if you create a link for someone to authenticate the profile, you will be notified via email once the task has been completed.

Q2 and beyond

We hope that you liked this format and we will continue bringing more of those smaller updates to light in a quarterly fashion. We have quite a few big updates coming up too so watch this space.

We have just added a dedicated reports section to our platform. Thanks to this update, you will be able to manage all of your reports from one place. Handling your interactive and scheduled reports has never been more straightforward. Let’s dive in.

New reports section

You can find the new reports in the Analysis section. Once you visit Reports, you will be presented with the list of all of your reports (both active and expired). You can view the date it was created, who created it, and when it expires. You can also perform all of the previously available actions on the report level, i.e., manage the report settings, visit and copy the report link, go to the dashboard on which the report is based, and delete the report. 

Export or interactive report?

As you probably noticed, the link option is missing from the export menu. We realized that our interactive link is much more than another static export option. It is an interactive report itself. The interactive link was always a part of the scheduled report. In terms of sharing the results with the team, the ability to zoom in and allow your teammates to perform a quick analysis within carefully crafted reports were the unique values. We have decided to combine both report types under one menu, “Share”. As an addition, we have also made the expiry of the interactive reports optional.

Reports will only get better

We are continuing to bring more transparency to our tool. The report overview section is a handy addition to it and it became the first step in our reports initiative that we are working on right now. We hope you find it helpful.

We are happy to bring a significant data overhaul that we have done to time-series data sources. We give you fully accessible, per post, and filterable time-series data. Why is this huge? Let's find out.

Humble beginnings

The sheer amount of data queried in our platform at each given moment creates challenges when it comes to the loading times and performance. The time-series data was most affected, so we have decided to propose a solution - aggregation tables. In a nutshell, instead of getting information on the posts, we stored the critical metrics with timestamps in those aggregation tables. This was a perfect solution for many years, but when there is progress, there are welcomed changes and challenges - we have introduced powerful post tags and filters.   

The aggregation tables were a great solution at the time. Still, with the introduction of tags and filters, it was impossible to add this functionality to those tables as the aggregation concept works on the number of posts and key metrics and not on the individual posts themselves. That meant that metrics based on aggregation tables could not take advantage of the advanced post filtering when needed. 

Over the last few months, we have improved our data infrastructure, which allowed us to revisit the topic of how to support filters for time-series data. Today we can happily say that we finalized it.  

What does it mean to you?

Simply put, any metric based on post data can now be further filtered down by our advanced filters in real-time. Would you like to see how tagged posts, hashtags or mentions did over time? You have a social media campaign running, and you want to do competitive benchmarking on top-level KPIs? Now you can. In terms of functionality, nothing changes. You can still use and build the same metrics, with the difference that popular metrics like "Key Metrics Table" and "Number of Posts", if there are filters applied, the total aggregated results will show only the filtered posts where requested. This change will allow you to build even more robust dashboards that can start with the most generic KPIs, drilling down to post level to tell the full zoomed-in story. It is worth mentioning that this also applies to our auto-tagging filter.

There are a few small prints that we need to list below.

• This change only applies to post related metrics as it operates on the post titles and descriptions, so followers and user metrics won't be affected.
• Filtering by tag won't be available for User Generated Content (members posts on your timeline), but the post text filter will. Our system will recognize this for you and present it accordingly.
• Due to the sheer amount of data that has to be parsed ad hoc, in a very rare scenario (we are talking hundreds of profiles with thousands of posts) that the generation of the result might take more than 20 seconds

What the future holds

This update was an important missing piece to provide you with genuinely consistent data. It also standardizes all the processes within quintly and removes unnecessary maintenance. Our advanced filters will only get more powerful over time (we have a few things planned), so this alignment is really welcomed. Most importantly, this improvement allows you, our users, to zoom in and filter out the noise where it matters the most. We cannot wait to see what you come up with and how you will use it. That's our biggest win.