By Jason Thompson, co-founder, 33 Sticks
If this is your first time hearing about Keen IO, here is a quick overview.
Keen IO is an amazingly powerful and flexible analytics platform. No, not the traditional analytics platform you are used to, like Adobe Marketing Cloud or Google Analytics, but a robust framework for building your own analytics product.
Three Steps to Utilizing Keen IO Within Your Product or Application
Data Capture
The Keen IO API offers a broad range of languages you can utilize to capture event data from your application. From signups to errors to a user pushing the ‘on’ button, Keen IO captures event data and stores it in JSON format, automatically capturing any new events and properties as you define them. You might find yourself wondering, what kind of applications can I embed Keen IO in? Great question, Keen IO can be implemented into anything from a SaaS application to a smart watch.
As a simple demonstration, I’ve implemented Keen IO into the 33 Sticks website to track the effectiveness of our navigational elements.
When a visitor clicks on a navigational element, a small block of code is executed to capture the event:
//Create a JavaScript object of N number of properties I can define
var menuProperties = {
menu: "About",
action: "Click"
};
// Add the event to the "linkClick" collection
Keen.addEvent("linkClick", menuProperties);
Data Analysis
The Keen IO Workbench is the analysts best friend. Using the Workbench, you can quickly design queries that will best tell the story of the data you are collecting.
Data Visualization
Once the data has been analyzed, you can inject the data visualization directly into the product.
Keen.onChartsReady(function() {
var series = new Keen.Series("linkClick", {
analysisType: "count",
timeframe: "this_7_days",
interval: "daily",
targetProperty: "action"
});
series.draw(document.getElementById("my_chart"), { lineWidth: 2 });
});
If analytics is a core feature of your product or you are using analytics to capture and visualize performance data about your product. If your product is a SaaS solution, a robot, a mobile app, a smart watch, a home automation device, or anything in between, exposing key analytics to your customers is no longer a nice to have, it is a must have and a platform like Keen IO makes it much more doable than it has ever been.