Analytics vs. API

  • 29 June 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 259 views

Hi,



I'm interested in how others use the Analytics provided ... we have multiple sources of data within our company and with other systems we can use apis or services to merge them into dashboards that cover more of our online journeys, not just community. However, with InSided we just have the option to export csv files, as far as I'm aware.



I'm a lazy person and this seems like a manual process that we have to invest time in every given time period. Is there any smart way of using the analytics available to update external sources?



Thanks!

3 replies

Hi Lorna, what data would you like to connect and analyze, specifically?



Regarding community content and user activity, yes there's the manual CSV exports available through the Control Environment, but all of these data -and more- are also available through the API. The only exception to this are post field annotations. Everything regarding, for example, new users, content created, posts liked, badges awarded and much much more can be read from our API endpoints. Such a process, then, can be automated through server-side scripts on your end, enabling you to process the data at any given interval and inject it into connected systems for further intelligence reporting.



I'm interested in knowing more about the use cases you're imagining, and your opinion on using the community API to power such integrations? 🤓
Hi Rens,



Yes, post-fields are definitely on the wishlist :)



I know the API has statistics, but what we'd like to do is use Power BI and the signature of your API authentication makes that complicated.



My use cases may just be relevant for me though 😊 I want to see our support related content all in one dashboard: forum, knowledgebase, product info pages, get started guides, manuals etc. The dashboard has mostly similar stats from Google Analytics - that part is nice and easy. I drill down on each to see more platform/behaviour-specific trends and stats. I have that for all except forum. So I'd be looking to drill down on the forum section to see answer rate, peer to peer % etc.



Does that make sense?!
Thanks for your input @Lorna.



For other readers, we are building a new version of our API which we hope to improve the experience for the development team. So any other input here is certainly welcome from inSided.



Best wishes,



Gino

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