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 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.

We are happy to announce that you are now able to analyze Twitter polls. This is a welcome addition to the already extensive Twitter data sources. Let’s dive in.

Opinions as data metric

In Twitter’s own words: “Twitter Polls allow you to weigh in on questions posed by other people on Twitter. You can also easily create your own poll and see the results instantly”. Polls have been heavily used by brands and media companies alike and are the best source of instant question validation. We have decided to include polls as a part of our private-level twitterAnalyticsOwnTweets data source. We have added a few columns, including:

In a true quintly fashion, we have accompanied this new addition with new default metrics (chart and table) to get you started.

What’s next for Twitter?

We will continue to work on adding those extra data points to our data sources. Our private-level data sources are already running on Twitter V2 API, but we are working on moving all public data requests to the new version as well. Not only is it the newest, most supported version, but also comes with brand new metadata. This change will enable new metrics currently not available, exciting 😎 .

With the expansion of the scope of the text filters by adding the ability to exclude any or all text, you can now show the results that matter for you without the extra noise. When you create the exclusion on the text filtering, we will filter through the post content, returning only the results that do not contain specified words or phrases. This feature works on every dimension where text filters are applicable.

More complex filtering

To add the exclusion, click on the "+ Add filter". In the sidebar, in addition to already available options like including ALL or ANY tags and text combinations, there is new exclude section, where you can use the same logic to rule out ALL or ANY text appearance. You can also create tags based on those rules and even automate them. 

Use cases

We have covered the extensive use cases that post tagging and advanced filtering enables in this article, so you can see exclusion as a further refinement of your results and a new layer of flexibility in filtering them. This request came directly from you, our users, so thank you for your continuous support, and we hope you will find it helpful. I know we will.

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 👋 .

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.