Understanding Trends: Visualize key metrics over time

Usermaven’s ‘Trends’ feature helps you visualize how key user metrics and event occurrences change over time. Track sign-ups, feature adoption, or website engagement to understand user behavior, spot patterns, and make data-informed decisions.

Why use Trends? Value for marketing & product teams

Trends offer a dynamic view of your data, enabling you to:

1. Monitor core performance & impact:

   • What it is: Track the daily, weekly, or monthly trajectory of crucial metrics like sign-ups, feature usage, content views, or purchases.
   • For Marketing: See campaign impact on traffic and conversions; monitor content engagement; track channel performance.
   • For Product: Observe DAU/WAU for product health; track new feature adoption rates; monitor key activation events.

2. Uncover deeper user behavior patterns:

   • What it is: Compare multiple events or segment a single event by properties (e.g., Country, Device Type, Plan Name) to understand the “why” behind the numbers.
   • For Marketing: Compare landing page performance; segment by utm_campaign to see which initiatives drive engagement; understand regional differences in offer interaction.
   • For Product: Analyze if “Trial” users engage differently than “Paid” users (Plan Name); compare old vs. new feature usage; identify varying engagement on mobile (Device Type).

3. Focus on what matters with powerful segmentation:

   • What it is: Isolate specific insights by filtering trend data based on event properties (e.g., Page URL, Feature Name) or session properties (e.g., Browser, Referring Domain).
   • For Marketing: Filter by Page URL for specific landing page trends; analyze sign-ups from Organic Search (Session Channel); track activity for a Promotion Code.
   • For Product: Filter feature usage by User Role; analyze trends for a specific Subscription Tier; isolate error trends by App Version.

By leveraging Trends, both marketing and product teams can transform raw data into actionable insights, continuously optimizing strategies and improving the user experience.

What can Trends do?

Using Trends, you can:

• Plot a Trend: See how often an event happens over a selected time period.

• Compare multiple events: View two or more events (for example, sign-ups vs. upgrades) side by side to see underlying patterns.

• Break down by properties: Split a trend by event properties (like Country or Page Title) or user properties (like Customer Type) so you see separate trend lines for each value.

• Apply advanced filters: Focus your analysis on specific groups of users by applying filters (for example, users from a certain city or using a particular browser).

• Use custom formulas: Create your own formulas using basic math (like sums or averages) and built-in functions (like TOTALS, UNIQUES) to track metrics unique to your business.

Building a Trends report in Usermaven

• Pre-Built templates

  Take advantage of ready-made trend templates (e.g., “Top Channels,” “Top UTM Campaigns”) for instant insights. Simply select a template and add it to your dashboard with one click.

• Modify Existing Trends

  Reuse or tweak trends you’ve already created to save time and effort. Perfect for quick updates to filters, date ranges, or metrics without starting over.

• Ask AI:

  Enter a natural language query (e.g., “Show me daily active users over the last month”). The AI instantly analyzes your data and generates a trend automatically.

• Build from Scratch

  Manually configure every aspect, from choosing events and metrics to applying filters and breakdowns. Ideal for highly customized or complex analyses that aren’t covered by templates or AI.

Building a Trend from scratch

1. Navigate to Trends from left menu. Click on the “Create Trend” button.

2. Enter a simple, descriptive name (e.g., Sign-ups Over Time).

3. You can select a data source from options like Google Search Console, Ad Insights, Events, or Sessions to analyze different types of insights for your reporting.

4. Choose an Event: In the “Metric 1” section, pick an event from the “Select Event” dropdown menu. You can choose from:

   Event Type	Description
   Events	These are the default events in Usermaven, such as Page Views.
   Custom Events	These are the events you track using the usermaven("track", "EVENT_NAME") function. Any custom events you’ve added will show up in the dropdown menu.
   Pinned Events	These are your pinned auto-captured events or the events you create in your pinned events dashboard.

5. Pick a Metric: Choose what you want to measure, such as:

   • Event count: Total number of times the event occurred.
   • Unique visitors: Number of different people who triggered the event.
   • Event property: Totals or averages based on a specific property (e.g., total purchase amount).

6. Add Additional Metrics (Optional): Compare multiple metrics side by side (for example, Sign-ups vs. Upgrades).

7. Set the date range & granularity: Choose a time period (like the last 30 days) and decide if you want the data shown daily, weekly, or monthly.

8. Breakdown options based on data source:

   You can apply breakdowns based on the selected data source, as each model has its own set of breakdown properties. For example, Google Search Console (GSC) will have different breakdown options compared to Events, Sessions, or Ad Insights.

   Property Type	Description
   Events Properties	Breakdown based on attributes like country, city, or event type etc.
   User Properties	Compare trends for different user segments, such as subscribers vs. free users
   Session Properties	gain insights into user sessions, including session duration or traffic source
   Company Properties	track company-specific details like account creation date or project association
   Custom Properties	Use your own defined attributes to segment data based on your needs

9. Apply Filters (Optional):

   Add filters to limit your data (e.g., only show data for users in the US or sessions from a specific channel).

10. Click on “Create” button, and your trend will be created and you will be taken to the Trends dashboard.

Visualizing your data: Available chart options

Usermaven gives you different chart options to see your data in a way that makes the most sense:

• # Counter → Shows one big number.

  Example: How many people signed up this month?

  

• Gauge → Shows a single metric against a predefined range or goal.

  Example: How many people signed up this month compared to your goal?

  

• Line (Time Series) → Tracks changes over time with a line.

  Example: How your website traffic grew in the last 6 months.

  

• Area (Time Series) → Like a line chart but shaded to show volume.

  Example: How your revenue has increased over the year.

  

• Bar (Time Series) → Compares numbers over time with bars.

  Example: Sales in January vs. February vs. March.

  

• Table (Time Series) → Lists numbers for each time period.

  Example: Daily breakdown of visitors and sales.

  

• Bar (Aggregated) → Compares categories, not time.

  Example: Which channel brings in the most traffic?

  

• Table (Aggregated) → Shows details in a neat table.

  Example: How many leads came from each marketing campaign?

  

• Donut (Aggregated) → Breaks things into parts of a whole.

  Example: Paid customer by device from paid search

  

Events Properties Reference

Sessions Properties Reference