Week 2: Internal Analytics

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This week was invested in expanding our internal analytics capabilities. In order to deliver on our core values, Masset needs to be able to help customers identify how content is being consumed both 1) within the company and 2) externally by customers and prospects. We’ve got lots of big plans for how we can accomplish the external analytics portion, but to get started, we’ve gotta tackle the core pieces first.

This week, we took our first major step forward! We delivered the initial version of Internal Company analytics. Okay, so technically we’ve been working on it for a few weeks, but it was released this week!

Company-Wide Analytics
Detailed Analytics Per Asset

Content administrators in Masset can now see how their content is consumed, shared, and used by employees at their own company! They can see trends over time, filter by tags, dates, and event counts. Combined with unlimited users, internal analytics help small tech businesses take the first step in understanding their content journey, isolating what’s working and what’s not.

Random Lessons Learned

  1. React Context has a number of performance pitfalls. I never realized how many re-renders it can cause. We managed to work around it with some clever coding, but it feels like switching to something like Zustand will happen in the future. There’s just too many easy ways to hurt yourself with pure React Context.
  2. Sometimes writing it yourself is the best option. Probably not most times, but sometimes. I originally implemented the spark lines using a 3rd-party library, but struggled with performance of the initial load and unload of so many graphs. Turns out the library was doing way more than we needed. A simple 150-line SVG component later, we had a replacement spark line without performance issues.
  3. There’s a fine line between allowing ultimate discoverability and delivering pre-canned insights to users. Some users want the ability to dig into all the nuances of the data, others want you to tell them what’s interesting. Not sure if we hit the right balance here. Some product feedback sessions should lead to a more concrete answer here.
Categories: