Identify your question and how it can be measured

While Data Feeds contain many tables you will often only be using a subset of them for a report. Which tables to include will depend on how you have decided to measure the answer to your question.  

• Identify what question you are trying to answer with analytics.
• Identify how you want to measure this answer.

Your question will often contain conceptual terms like activity, or health. In contrast, your measurement needs to be something more concrete. A measure of activity could be something like views, likes, or a combination of these actions. 

• Over what period should the report cover?
• What Igloo Objects does this question involve?

Example

Primary Question: How healthy are my forums?

A measure of a forum's health should depend on their intended use. In this example, the forums are for asking questions. As a result, an indicator of health could be whether these questions are being answered.

Over what period should the report cover?

This report will contain all forum topics ever created. Using this broad range will obscure trends, but will act as a simple indicator.

For an ongoing report, consider only including topics created within the last 7 days. It is unlikely that members will be happy waiting longer than 7 days for an answer.

What Igloo Objects does this question involve?

The question and measurement only identify Forums as the Igloo Object of interest. Look for forum related tables and explore their attributes using the Tables wiki. Most often you will be using d and f tables. 

Next Steps

After identifying the needed tables it will be time to begin constructing the report. The chosen analytics software will determine how you access Data Feeds and work with the data.

More Examples

Check out the example questions found in the Analytics Wiki section. These will contain a question and identify the Data Feeds tables used to provide an answer.