Tasty Data Goodies

What's cooking in the Swivel kitchen?

Hey everyone,

We've been making a lot of changes around Swivel lately.  And we want to share what we're cooking up in the Swivel kitchen with all of you.

For the next release of Swivel Business, we're working on enhancing performance, improving Swivel's look and feel, and giving you more interactivity when it comes to your data.

We are also dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 in the next release. We want to take advantage of the latest technologies, so we can build a better, more interactive product for you. As the possibilities expand for web applications, IE6 stands in the way of giving you the ultimate experience.

Since Microsoft released IE7 in 2006, the number of people using IE6 has fallen to a small minority of Swivelers.  Only 22% of visitors to swivel.com use the browser.  On Swivel Business, that number is even lower (10%).  And we're not the only ones moving on from the old technology; actually we're kind of jumping on the bandwagon here. Companies such as Apple, 37 signals, and Salesforce dropped support for IE6 earlier this year.

In order to keep using Swivel, people with the IE6 browser should take the chance to upgrade. All of these browsers are free to download and use:
  Download Internet Explorer 7
  Download Mozilla Firefox
  Download Safari

One other note about the upcoming release: we've also de-prioritized a few small features in favor of building newer, better ones (stay tuned).  You will no longer be able to rearrange reports with a simple drag and drop, but we're working on a more powerful interaction. Also, if your data is hooked up to our API, it will need to be reconfigured to work with our new API.  No worries though. Based on your feedback, this one should be easier to use.

Check back soon. We can't wait to share the new features we've been working on with all of you.

Thank you for your continued support. We always appreciate your thoughts and .

Tracking Swivel Metrics (Part 3)

In the spirit of self-education, we're sharing the numbers we track at Swivel.  In this post, let's look at project planning. The first two posts in the series are available here and here.

We use agile methodology to keep our projects on time and on budget.  As part of this methodology, we maintain a backlog of features for the release and estimate days of work remaining for each feature.

Tracking the following metrics gives us an instant understanding of our status.

• Working days until release - how many workdays are left before the next release.
•  Days of work until release - how much work there is estimated left to do before the next release.
• Days ahead of schedule - how many days we are ahead of or behind schedule (subtract the prior two metrics). 

Tracking Swivel Metrics (Part 2)

In the spirit of self-education, we're sharing the numbers we track at Swivel.  In this second post on the topic, let's take a look at users. The first post is available here.

To understand user behavior, the best practices include watching three key metrics:

• Recency - how long ago was the last time that the user interacted with your site?
• Frequency - how many times has the user come back to your site?
• Monetary value - how much money has the user spent on you? 

Recency is the most informative of the three metrics: people who have interacted with your site recently are the most likely to interact again.

We aggregate user recency and sign-up data to track some important metrics, including:

• 7-day growth - the number of users gained in the last seven days, divided by the total number of users.  As a start-up, we're focused on building growth, so we watch this carefully.
• 30-day retention - the percentage of users who have come back to the site in the last 30 days.  It's easier to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one, so a healthy business has high retention.

Tracking Swivel Metrics (Part 1)

I've recently seen a handful of discussions like this one calling for better business intelligence education.  At Swivel, we feel that the community can be a great resource for learning.  So, in the spirit of self-education, we'd like to share the metrics that matter most to us.

Over the next few days, we'll talk about the numbers we track.  Today, we'll start with visitors.

Visitors
We track visits to understand Swivel's potential: visitors can become users and users can become customers. We use the free tool Google Analytics to capture statistics about visitors. The key indicators we focus on include:

• Daily unique visitors - The number of daily visitors to the site. If you use Google Analytics, beware that its handling of unique visitors is a bit misleading.  Limit your unique visitors report to a single day in order to get data that is comparable day-over-day.
  
• Bounce rate - The percentage of people that leave the site after visiting just one page.  A high bounce rate means that we aren't drawing many people deeper into the site.
• Time on site - The amount of time people spend on the site.  Some of Swivel's pages are very interactive, so time on site is often a better indicator of engagement than bounce rate.

Charts rule!

Everyone loves charts.  Whether you're a manager putting together a presentation, a student researching stats on world health or an advanced data analyst, you can't deny the simple beauty of a chart to help you visualize and understand data.

PBS presents Sid the Science Kid, who playfully reminds us just how "sweet" charts are as "handy, dandy scientific tools."