Sample Usage Scenarios

There are many ways to incorporate RESTful Metrics into your applications. The metrics you define and collect will really determine the success of your analytics campaign. So to help you, we've compiled some examples of where RESTful Metrics could be used in order to get you thinking about metrics and how you may want to integrate them into your applications.

Traditional Impressions

While RESTful Metrics can certainly be used in conjunction with an impression tracking tool, such as Google Analytics, sometimes it's useful to compare and contrast your metric data points against your impressions. For example, if you a had a metric tracking how many searches were performed on your site you could then compare that to the impressions metric for the same date range. So if you had just kicked off a marketing campaign, you could correlate the two metrics to determine if the new users using your application were actually taking advantage of your search feature.

User Growth

You can always login to your site and view how many users are in the database. But how does this compare to how it was doing yesterday, or last month or even last year? By storing your daily totals, such as your user total, you'll get an accurate view of how your application has grown over time.

Support Requests

If you stored a data point for each support request that came in for your application, you would be able to correlate your support requests to other aspects of your application like never before. For example, how do impressions relate to your support request count? How does it relate to your user count? What's your user-to-support-request ratio, and has it grown or shrunk over time?

Popularity

With compound metrics, you can submit non-numeric values. This means that you could keep track of the most popular keywords typed into your search simply by emitting a data point containing each word in a search query. RESTful Metrics could then show you popular search terms for any given time period. You could even compare time periods to see how popular terms have changed over time.

Average Purchases Per User

If you're in the business of selling things, you could compute the average number of purchases per user and send that data point along to RESTful Metrics. You could then see, on a daily basis, how your average purchases per user has changed over time.

If you have multiple classes of users, you could submit a separate average calculation for each class of user so that way you could compare how one class of users purchase more or less goods than another class.

Performance of Your Search Results

How well are users finding the items they are looking for in your application? If you tracked the result position listing that the user clicked on after performing a search, you would automatically have an average calculated for you by RESTful Metrics. If the average is greater than the number of items on your first page, you'll know that users are having to click onto the second page of results too often.

Map Popularity in Games

You've created a brilliant game for the iPhone that contains many playable maps that users can choose to play or skip. If you stored the number of plays and the skips in RESTful Metrics, you would be able to determine which levels to exclude in your game's next version. You would also be able to build more levels similar to the ones that are popular.