Introducing Sherlock — User Engagement Analytics Done Right

“Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
- Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

Last week we released the latest addition to the Knowtify family — we call it Sherlock.

Sherlock is an app that is dedicated to helping product teams actually understand the engagement level of their users in a way they’ve never been able to do before. The primary goal of Sherlock, as an MVP, is to help product teams quickly and easily answer the question:

Who are my most engaged users?

For too long, this question has gone unanswered or been left to anecdotal feedback of our customer success teams.

For too long, we have been forced to try to hack an engagement score using painful tools like Google Analytics that don’t really understand how to assess activity at the user level.

Or piece together something internally that is never updated or maintained — making it virtually useless.

For too long, transparency into user engagement has been a major blind spot for all product builders.

But all that changes with Sherlock.

How does Sherlock work?

Sherlock works by tracking user activity (events) in your product (right now we are built on top of Segment.com — so if you are sending events through Segment, you can use Sherlock immediately).

Then, in Sherlock, you can easily give each event a ‘score’ or rating based on how important each event is to your product’s overall engagement.

And this is where the magic of Sherlock begins. Sherlock takes these scores and immediately calculates a ranking of your entire user base — based on their engagement with your product.

That’s right…

…in a matter of seconds, you can see a fully ranked list of your users based on engagement. A view of your users you can’t get anywhere else.

But that’s not all…

You can also dig into detailed profiles for any of your users and see exactly how they have engaged with your product over the last 7, 30, 90 days.

Another view of each user that you can’t get anywhere. With Sherlock you can have it in minutes.

It’s not magic, but it sure seems like it :)

“Great…but what can I do with this list once I have it?”

Great question, right now, you have the ability to export your ranked list as a CSV — allowing you to do whatever you want with it.

Import it into your own dashboard, your email provider or more. We might also suggest you have a look at Knowtify for your engagement messaging needs :)

In the future, we will have multiple integrations that will allow you to take action on this data.

Why Sherlock?

Here at Knowtify, we have always been dedicated to helping companies both understand and impact the engagement levels of their users.

This is because, we believe that User Engagement is the foundation for success for any modern software business. We believe User Engagement is the ultimate metric. Success is no longer determined by a raw number of users — it’s the engagement of those users that matters. Doesn’t matter if you run a social media product, an e-commerce solution, or a SaaS product — User Engagement is the metric that drives value for your business.

And this is why we think it’s essential that every product team — strike that…everyone involved with building a valuable software business — have a complete handle on and understand User Engagement.

And that’s why we built Sherlock. There is a lot of opportunity here and we’re excited for this first step.

As always, please let us know if you have any comments on Sherlock, Knowtify, or User Engagement in general. We’d love to hear from you!

Originally published at blog.knowtify.io on April 8, 2016.