Chart types
Line chart
The bread and butter of analytics, behold!, the venerable line chart.
This is a great place to get started with Spindl charting, as the left-hand event navigation is (roughly) consistent across chart types, and is pretty simple in this case.
Cohort Retention
One of the classic (and harder to interpret) data visualizations of growth marketers is the cohort retention graph. Such a plot shows you the retention of a given cohort through time (reading left to right on the below chart), or of the same time period (e.g. two time periods in) across different starting cohorts (reading from top to bottom).
As befits a complex plot, the configuration is also slightly complex. The Activating Event is the event that definitionally marks the beginning of the user journey for the purposes of the plot (here, having done a swap). The Retaining Event is what class of event the user must have done to be considered an active user in that cohort (here, the relatively light-touch event of a page view). The period is simply the size of the time step used to define the cohort: daily, weekly, or monthly.
If the retention plot looks too small (only 3x3 say), either reduce the period to something shorter, or lengthen the date range in the upper right-hand side date picker.
Sankey diagram
Arguably an even more complex chart type is the Sankey diagram, named after an Irish rail engineer plotting flows in a steam engine (though preceded by the much more famous Minard map, which demonstrated the horrifying casualties suffered by Napoleon's army as it marched to and from Moscow). This one is a bit of a brain teaser, and the Spindl version is a pretty basic rendering of the full power of a Sankey, but it can be helpful to visualize certain flows.
Here's a Sankey showing the Page View entry points for a dex, filtered to traffic from Twitter (pretty high wallet connect rate!):
If you want to see what swaps get traded before users drop off, here's one view:
The configuration pane can be a bit confusing, and the output almost random-seeming (a lot of it depends on layout parameters, like depth of journey, that we don't expose yet).
Some definitions:
Event - The primary event to plot and focus on, though if users hit other events, those will appear too. If you filter, the entire chart will only be limited to events of that filtered type.
Direction - 'Entering event' means that generally you're looking at a plot of many origin points going to one final endpoint. 'Leaving event' means you're looking at the focus event as the source of the flow, and seeing where users go after that. If you reverse it in your head a lot, join the club; so do we.
Expanded Events - Here you can force events to expand into different sources (or sinks) based on whatever filter dimension you choose (e.g. session channel, AKA, where they came from).
It's hard to get a hang of it at first; play around the params until it sort of makes sense.
Big Numbers
This 'chart type' is really just a headline big number for the top of dashboards. Pick your event, pick your aggregate measure, filter if you want....and then save to the dashboard as your big new KPI.
Pie/Donut
PSA: The makers of Spindl fairly despise pie charts, but sometimes they're the most efficient data visualization and we can't call ourselves an analytics platform without something like it.
The event configuration on the right is like most charts in Spindl (we keep it consistent for a reason).
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