By: Stormly in Tutorial

How to work with Stormly's Insights

There is a lot of value in taking insights and turning them into actionable steps. If you are building, or want to build, an analytics dashboard for your product managers there are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the process of getting the most out of Stormly Dashboards and show you how you can look at the same Insights from different angles. Read on to get started!

Stormly makes it easy to get answers for any product or marketing question. It does this by providing specific insights in just a few clicks!

Data has the power to change how we approach business decisions. But, it can happen that you’re feeling lost at sea with numbers flying all over your screen, and not knowing what’s important or relevant.

Don’t worry because now it will be easier than ever before! All insights that are most relevant for getting an understanding on where your product stands in terms of traction, performance and stickiness now comes together in one central dashboard. This means there will be no guesswork involved when trying to optimize towards product goals.

In this example, I’ll show you how our Insights can help make the most of your dashboards and what it takes to have them all in one place. So that if some important pattern gets detected - like a big drop in conversion, or a new highly converting user segment is detected- then we’re right there with ya!

The data in this demo project is based on the music streaming app- StormBeats. You can even follow along this step-by-step tutorial and sign up for a free account if you like!

Let’s start by thinking about what insight we want to get a closer look into. In this case, it will be the conversion funnel for our app and how users interact with it from beginning until they successfully finish their first purchase!

The conversion funnel is a series of steps that users take when they install your app. These can include signing up, installing the software and then playing their first song! It’s important to know how many people go through this process, so you’ll know if there are any issues with user experience or flow on our end, as well as which areas might need improvement going forward.

With Stormly, getting to that knowledge is super easy!

Open the “Insights” menu from top and click “Basic Reporting.” This is where most of your analytics reports will be generated. Here, you can find insights such as funnels and retention rates for each stage of a customer’s journey with your company or product.

We know that you’re interested in a conversion funnel, so we’ll start there.

The last step in this funnel is to answer any questions that the Insight has. We just pick a few based on what event data we’re sending it and after running, our results are ready!

Because this funnel is one of the key things we want to keep an eye on, we’ll save our Insight. The great thing about this is that once an Insight has been saved, it’ll run automatically in the background for you and ensure that your latest results are always there when needed.

On top of that, you can filter and segment any Insight how you like. So for example we could set up another funnel Insight for mobile vs desktop users, and save that separately

Saving your Insight not only works for simple Insights like our funnel here, but even the fancier ones like aha-moment, or the ones that find what behavior and user attributes lead to conversion. Those Insights even notify you when new interesting behavior appears that leads to higher conversion, for example. But let’s focus, we’ll get back to those in another article.

Now that our insight is saved, we can add it to any dashboard. When you click “Add to dashboard” and choose which elements of the full Insight interest you most - like a funnel chart or conversion rate to song playback- only those will show up on your screen!

Next, we want to get a little fancier and forecast how many songs will be played. Let’s open the Insights menu again - there’s always something new there!

This time, let’s pick “forecast” so that it’ll give us an idea of what might happen in the future based on historic data like previous play counts or listens per day (amongst other metrics).

Just like with our funnel, we have to answer some questions. In this case we pick our “Play song” event to forecast, and leave the number of days to forecast at 7.

We can even forecast conversion rates if needed. With a forecast we can also anticipate future demand, so we can assign resources more efficiently.

Once the forecast is ready, we’ll save it so we can add it to our dashboard. For our dashboard, we’re only interested in how many songs are going to be played today and tomorrow, and a trend line for the number of songs played.

Now that we’ve added some Insights to our dashboard, it’s time to have a look at it. Click the “Dashboards” menu item to open your default dashboard.

Our dashboard looks great already, but we can drag and drop items around to fully customize it. To get ever more relevant and customized, we can open the menu on a dashboard item, and use the “Formatting” action to reformat numbers, labels, and much more. See [this article] for more about formatting and customizing your dashboard items.

One more thing! Wouldn’t it be great to get an email every day at 9am, showing the latest dashboard with its Insights? Just hover over your favorite widgets and click on “gear icon.” Select ‘E-mail schedule’ then choose when you want this particular snapshot of data delivered.

Using Stormly is the number one way to stay on top of all your metrics, insights and more. Sign up today and you’ll never have to worry about missing a beat again!