Summarizing People with Arc

When we launched Arc, we needed to validate that people wanted their analytics summarized with a simple Slack message. After 500,000+ summaries sent to 3500+ companies, it’s safe to say that we’ve confirmed our hypothesis.

Over the past months we’ve gathered a lot of feedback about what our users want next:

Hoping to change the stats from tracking sessions to unique visitors. Is this an option?

Arc’s summaries right now are awesome, but bite-sized. I want to see the bigger picture with more metrics like unique users.

It would be great if we could choose our data parameters. For example we may need to look at unique users for some campaigns.

Armed with confidence in our product and specific feature requests from our users, we started building new metrics into Arc.

It’s a big day for us, because we are now delivering people to both the Free and Paid Arc plans!

Um… what analytics metric is people? What does that even mean?

That’s a great question and similar to what I asked myself when Google Analytics made a big terminology change in 2014. Visitors and unique metrics updated to sessions and users. I found it confusing and I didn’t understand what a session was or what made it different from a user. After some reading I realized that sessions track visits to your site and users are the unique people who are visiting. Simple in theory but confusing until you learn a bit about analytics.

When I was explaining our new feature to my mom, I told her that we were going to start tracking sessions and users.

That’s nice, dear.

Clearly, that’s a sign that we weren’t making Arc accessible to everyone. So we applied Arc’s mission, Google Analytics summarized simply, and made our metrics as clear as possible. This is what we came up with:

Sessions = Visits

Users = People

With visits and people my mom understands exactly what we are doing without having any analytics experience. Hopefully it’s just as clear for our users.

So, that’s how Arc summarizes people! Another small change with a big impact 👊.

As always, reach out to us with questions or suggestions! We’d love to hear from you. Email hello@arc.ai or use the /arc-feedback command inside slack!

Note: We’ve also added some special messages if you happen to have 0 visits. Sometimes you’ll get awesome advice and sometimes you’ll just get something to think about.

Image by Anna Dziubinska

Originally published at blog.unioncode.com on August 26, 2016.