Having an analytics page has always felt like some small admission of defeat. I do not think many people think to themselves: "hmm, it's time to check the analytics and go to a page dedicated to that purpose." This is not a problem with nomenclature: I have similar issues with a page called metrics or insights. I think the best way of presenting a lot of this data is by situating it in the context of the job that you're trying to do.
Our general sense through interviewing users is that the two main ways people think about trying to understand their newsletter data better, it is in two contexts:
- To understand performance over a given time period for some time away or in a regularly scheduled fashion. We kind of handle this with our weekly and monthly reports, though those will likely get a bit of a facelift in the medium term future;
- Within the context of exploring an existing data set. If you see that you got a handful of new premium subscribers, your first thought isn't to go into analytics and see where they're coming from, but to check out the subscribers page itself and start poking around.
This is all prelude to say that today's changelog entry is about neither of these more important things, but a bit of a conceptual step forward in how we think about analytics. We've always thought of analytics as a page, but today we're thinking of analytics as a concept that can be embedded in other places — and right now, that place is your home page.
Head over to a given analytics page and hit the "star" button on any metric you care about:
And then, voila: