One of our most significant features just got better. We have improved report error handling in the spirit of better communication with the end-user. If the scheduled report fails for any reason, we will notify you via email and our inbuilt notifications, allowing you to fix the issue quickly.

Meaningful knowledge

If a scheduled task fails to send or generate a report, we will send you a notification and email. We have spent some time making each of those notifications to be as informative and actionable as possible. You can easily access the dashboard that has been used as a base for the report and fix the issue quickly. If the report is based on a private dashboard, the notification will be sent to the dashboard owner. If it’s a shared dashboard, in addition to the dashboard owner, we will notify the account administrators.

Next steps

This improvement is the first step in our report overview initiative. We have added a new layer of transparency to the reports with this improvement. Stay tuned.

Being one of the most sought-after topics, data availability is crucial for our customers. The most vital part is to know how much historical data is available when adding new profiles. As a part of our data transparency initiative, we are happy to deliver another update helping you understand the availability of historical data within quintly.

Why is it important?

In a nutshell, social networks won't return audience data via API at any specific time. It means that we cannot get the number of followers that the account had, for example, exactly one year ago. Some platforms have even the in-app analytics limited to the last ninety days only (Instagram, for example). To tackle those limits, here at quintly, we take daily snapshots of account vitals and store them as soon as the profile is added.

The challenge

Since the audience data is publicly available to anyone, we also make it available to any other user who starts to track a specific profile. If the account was added before yours, you could benefit from already existing audience data. The challenge is to transparently show our users how much historical data is available.

Transparency at the center

We have decided to create visualization bars to indicate how much information we contain on a specific profile within one full calendar year. This graphical cue will let you quickly identify how much, time-wise, information is available. It’s straightforward, three bars, two colors, four possibilities: 

• All gray bars - there is no data available. Tracking starts now
• One green bar (low) - less than six months of data
• Two green bars (medium) - more than six months of continuous data
• Three green bars (high) - more than a year of continuous data

Thanks to those hints, you can quickly determine how much information you will have available from the start, even though you just added the profile. It is worth mentioning that we have also introduced a Migration Assistant, an import tool that will help you move your existing audience data into quintly for historical reasons. 

We have just released a minor update to the handling of profile names. Due to the discrepancy of each social network on how to pass profile names, we have decided to organize them

Per network changes

1. Twitter, TikTok and Instagram
   We have standardized the naming convention by displaying the @username instead of the name. Very helpful, especially for networks that profile names are very different from usernames.
2. Facebook Global Pages
   We have added an automated appendix of usernames of the Facebook market pages. 
3. All the other networks 
   The profiles are listed using their name instead of their username.

Those changes apply consistently across the platform, within metrics, reports, profile searches, and profile listings.

This update was the last interaction to our improved profile adding flow. It will make it much easier to interact with accounts already added to quintly, mainly if you handle many of them. 

We have just released another way to add profiles that you would like to analyze quickly. We have now made adding profiles via social networks buttons available. Let's have a look 👇 .

How does it work?

We have incorporated the 3rd party native social widgets. Thanks to those, you can quickly authenticate and access all managed accounts. Choose the business accounts/pages you would like to track and add to your sidebar. Currently, we support Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and… Snapchat Shows 👀 . 

Snapchat Shows a.k.a. Originals 

Snapchat Shows have been in our roaster for quite some time, but not highly utilized due to the complicated nature of authenticating and adding profiles. So far, what has been a pretty cumbersome process has become very easy and intuitive, making analytics for Snapchat Shows accessible for everyone. Considering that this specific product of the Snapchat ecosystem handles premium streaming services within social media, it is crucial for brands, media companies, and agencies to analyze its performance and include it in the broader analytics pool.

Faster than ever!

We have started the UX improvements around profile searches and general onboarding in the second half of 2021, intending to give you the analytics as quickly and transparently as possible. The above improvement adds yet another way to speed up the profile adding process. It supplements multiple profile additions, whether via search or pasting a list of social media URLs. Stay tuned as they are a couple of more updates related to profiles handling up for release soon. Until the next one 👋 .

Over the last couple of months, we have introduced new API endpoints based on common use cases. Those changes include improvements around spaces, users, and available data sources. Let’s dive in.

/list-spaces - this endpoint is related to businesses that are managing isolated instances for their quintly accounts. It returns all of the managed spaces within the organization. 

/list-users - returns all of the users, including the spaces that they belong to, whether they are an admin, and the user's timezone.

/list-data-sources - will list all of the available metadata for our data sources across all social networks. This includes all columns, type, and whether it is public or private 

Further, we have introduced new and updated existing endpoints to help you manage private statistics connections more effectively via the API, giving you full control over the private stats use cases activated for individual profiles.

/list-private-stats-use-cases - lists all of the available private stats use cases. It is especially useful in order to understand which use cases you require. Also needed for the next endpoint.

/activate-private-stats-use-cases - by passing the userId, spaceId, profileId and useCaseId, you can quickly activate private statistics use cases for specific profiles.

/generate-private-statistics-authentication-link - the final step after activation is to generate the authentication link for someone to authenticate the required use cases. You can do via this endpoint for yourself or your customer.

/deactivate-private-stats-use-cases - in order to deactivate specific use cases you can use this endpoint. It takes similar parameters as /activate-private-stats-use-cases.

Those changes add an extra layer of management to our API, allowing our API users to handle many more scenarios within their connected applications. You can find the complete documentation for all endpoints on https://api.quintly.com.

We are happy to announce that we have rolled out multiple improvements to profile additions and authentications in the past couple of weeks. The whole process got a big overhaul allowing you to bulk add and authenticate the profiles, saving you a huge amount of time.

Adding multiple profiles

Adding a profile is one of the first steps of accessing the data and also one that usually takes a significant amount of time. That is why we have implemented multiple ways of searching and adding profiles to improve this process. You can search by just the handle name, although not all of the networks support it, in that case, a powerful URL search becomes handy. Also if you have a list of profiles that you want to quickly add, just copy and paste it in the search box, click “Search” and they will automatically be added to your selection. This brings us to the main point, selection. You can now search and to the selection multiple profiles without the need of repeating the process. Once you have added all of the profiles, simply click “Add profiles” to finish this process and move to the next step…  

Improved authentication

Once you have added your profiles you can quickly authenticate them yourself or ask for the owner to do so via an external link (no sharing of credentials). Once you finish the process your accounts are ready to use for more advanced and in-depth metrics like demographics audience and reach analytics. 

What’s next?

The main message of this update is that the initial time needed to access the data went down significantly. This update is a part of a bigger batch of updates tackling our onboarding process, so please expect further improvements in that matter. The next iteration will be the ability to add profiles directly via your social media account. Stay tuned for more and we are looking forward to hearing what you think about this release

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.