Advanced Analytics Thread

Hi,

Lincoln is forecasting that the Advanced Analytics will be code complete by the end of this week and likely ready to be trickled out to customers by the end of next week.

The plugin is already available and can be turned on in order for customers to start collecting data. The new Advanced Analytics will not be able to show reports for any period before the plugin is turned on. Enabling the plugin will not enable the pages that contain the reports.

The Advanced Analytics are built on top of a service called Keen.io. Keen's software lets us capture and store data events. Vanilla has created reports and visualizations from this data as most of you saw at the last sprint demo.

The Keen service is expensive (building our own data store would have been equally expensive) and so we cannot deploy the new Advanced Analytics to all customers. Both Jive and Lithium sell advanced analytics as paid add-ons.

** I would not talk about Keen to customers. They are providing us with a backend service. We don't want to get sucked into data ownership, privacy and other issues unless we have to. **

The reason analytics are expensive is that we will need to database hundreds of events and event attributes over the lifetime of our product. Events are things like a page view, a new user creation, clicking on a reaction, etc. Storing and managing these events is expensive. Therefore, we will be limiting the number of monthly events that a customer can store in the database.

The most common event that will be tracked is the page view. In fact, it's likely that 90% of tracked events will be page views. For the purpose of pricing analytics, we'll be equating page views to events. A forum with 1M page views will likely generate around 1.1M events. For simplicity's sake, we'll round that down to 1M events.

Here is the pricing and eligibility for Advanced Analytics:

• Starter customer cannot get Advanced Analytics, they get the basic statistics currently on the Dashboard homepage.

• Corp customers can purchase Advanced Analytics for $250 per month, they will get 2.5M events (page views) included in that price.

• Enterprise plan customers get Advanced Stats bundled, 5M events included/

• VIP customers get Advanced Stats bundled, 10M events included

• Events packs:

5M, $250/month
10M, $500 /month

• For example,

  • If you are a VIP customer with 20M page views/month, you must purchase a $500 / 10M page pack to have Advanced Analytics.
  • We are talking about the actual page views, not the maximum page views in your subscription agreement.
  • For customers with spiky traffic, we should try to sell either a pack to meet the high watermark or an average/month figure, not the low water mark.

• One forum per customer w/ exceptions for some VIPs - those would be VIPs with lots of smaller sites. EA would NOT qualify to have multiple sites on Advanced Analytics w/o additional charges.

• In the near future, we will be offering a basic set of Advanced Analytics and a Premium set with a lot more reports. We are also hoping to offer custom analytics as a service. Bundling and pricing for this is TBD.

Some FAQs

Q: If I don't have Advanced Analytics how can I get stats?
A: You get basic stats on your Dashboard home page and you can also get stats using Google Analytics (free) on any plan level.

Q: Does Advanced Analytics slow down page load times?
A: The amount of code added to pages to enable tracking does not noticeably increase page load time. The event tracking action takes place client side (i.e. in the end user's browser) and so has no impact on Vanilla's software or database performance.

• Please submit your FAQs and feedback on the staff forum