Ips News 4.x 4.3: Leverage your data with our statistic improvements

[ADMIN 347]

"The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data", the Economist wrote recently.

Invision Community software stores a lot of important data that can be leveraged to analyze and improve upon the traffic and interactions with your site.

While there are some various statistics tools in the AdminCP already, we spent some time with 4.3 enhancing and improving upon our existing reporting tools, as well as adding some new analytics tools you may find useful.

Chart Filters

Beginning with 4.3, any dynamically-generated charts in the AdminCP that support filtering will allow you to save those filter combinations for easier access in the future. When you open the Filters menu and toggle any individual filters, the chart will no longer immediately reload until you click out of the menu, and 'All' and 'None' quick links have been added to the filters menu to allow you to quickly toggle all filters on or off.

Here is the 'Sales' chart for Commerce, for example. You will see that the interface is now tabbed.

Commerce's Sales chart

After opening the 'Filters' menu, selecting all of my products named 'test', and saving this filter combination as a new chart, I can quickly come back to this chart in the future.

Specific filter configurations allow you to run reports easily

Note that each user can save their own chart filter configurations independent of other users.

Top income by customer

Speaking of Commerce, we have also added a new chart to the 'Income' page, allowing you to view reports of your top customers. As with other dynamic charts, you can save filter configurations here for easy future access, and you can view the results as a table to get a raw list of your top customers' purchases. Further, we have tidied up the table views for the other existing tabs on this page.

Looks like brandon is my top customer

Reaction statistics

We have introduced several statistic pages to expose information about the Reactions/Reputation system and how your users are interacting with it. For instance, you can now view information about usage of each of the reactions set up on your site.

Yes, I'm definitely confused a lot

You can also see which users give and receive the most reputation (which is the sum of their reaction points, keeping in mind that negative reactions can reduce a user's total reputation score), you can see which content on your community has the most reputation (which might prompt you to promote it to the 'Our Picks' page, promote it to social media, or otherwise continue to encourage interaction with the content), and you can see which applications reactions are given in the most. This could allow you, for instance, to focus more efforts in areas of your site to drive more activity, or to foster activity in areas you did not realize were as active as they are.

Some areas of the community aren't as active as they could be

Additionally, when viewing user profiles on the front end you can now see a breakdown of which reactions each user has given and received when you click the "See reputation activity" link in the left hand column.

Apparently I'm not so much confused, as I am confusing

Tag Usage

Another useful statistic introduced with 4.3 is the ability to review tag usage on your community. As with other dynamic charts, you can filter however you like and save those filter configurations for easy future access.

Not all tags are equal

Trend charts for topics and posts

When viewing the New Topics and New Posts charts, there are now tabs for "New Topics by Forum" and "New Posts by Forum", allowing you to see which of your forums are the most active. Additionally, you will see a trend line drawn on the chart to show you the trend (e.g. whether activity is increasing or decreasing). You can also filter which forums you wish to review, so you can compare your most active forums, the forums that are most important to your site, or the forums that need the most attention/may not be relevant, for instance.

Viewing new topics by forum

New posts by forum, but viewing only a subset of my most important forums

Other Improvements

Some other miscellaneous improvements have been introduced as well, which you may be interested in:

• When viewing Member Activity reports, you can now filter by group. We have also added the content count column to the table so you can quickly sort by top posters if this is relevant to the report you are running.
• Device usage is now also tracked (mobile, desktop, etc.) and can be viewed on a new Device Usage page.
• Developers: Dynamic charts now support database joins