Data Point
What exactly is considered a data point in Countly? Each of the below metrics affect data points in a Countly deployment.
- Sessions: Each launch of the application or a visitor landing on a web page.
- Events: Optionally triggered custom metrics from the Countly SDKs.
- Views: Page views in web or views in mobile/desktop applications. Most Countly SDKs have a mechanism to enable automatic tracking of views.
- Ratings received: Via Countly Ratings plugin.
- NPS® and surveys response received: Via Countly Survey and NPS plugins.
- Push notifications sent: Each push notification sent from Countly to APNS and/or FCM.
- Push notification actions: A user interaction with a push notification, such as tapping the message, or clicking a button inside a rich push notification.
- Clicks within views: For web applications, to visualize click heat maps of views. This has to be enabled in Countly Web SDK.
- Crashes and errors: Each occurrence of a crash in a mobile application or a JavaScript error in a web site.
- Attribution link clicks: Each click to an attribution link generated from Attribution plugin.
- Performance monitoring: Each trace sample in performance monitoring corresponds to a data point. If enabled in the web SDK, page load traces and network traces are automatically captured by the SDK. The mobile SDK automatically captures these duration traces - app_start, app_in_background, app_in_foreground.
This list is updated as new Countly plugins are released.
View
A view is a page view (for web) or screen view (for mobile) that measures how many times tracked pages are viewed by visitors or users (respectively). It is mostly automatically tracked with Countly SDKs. It is one of the fundamental metrics in digital analytics. It is used to calculate many other metrics related to page view, like total and new visitors (or users), bounces, and average time on page.
Event
An event is like a counter. It is used to measure how many times a user triggered an action on any tracking element or page. Unlike a page view, which is automatically generated, an event must be manually implemented. You usually trigger an event when the user takes some kind of action. The action may be clicking on a button, playing a video, swiping a screen, etc. The key is that the user is interacting with your app. Events can be determined by you to track the interactions that are important to your app and goals.
Session
A session is simply a collection of hits, from the same user, grouped together. By default, Countly groups hits together based on activity. In other words, if a user opens an application or visits a website, it counts as a session until they close it. Countly uses 20 minutes of inactivity to separate sessions. When Countly detects that the user/visitor has been inactive for more than 20 minutes, it will terminate the session and start a new one when the user/visitor opens the app or visits the website again.
Previous Period
When viewing any chart, you may see a comparison with 'Previous Period'. This period is calculated on the basis of the time period you have selected, and refers to the period just before the start of your selected time period. If you have selected one month (or week), the previous period will indicate the month (or week) ending the day before the start of your selected period. For example: if you choose to view data for the period of June 16 to June 22 (7 days), the previous period will be June 9 to June 15.