Those of you who use the Orchard’s Analytics product may have noticed the recent appearance of a lovely orange “Add Event” Button. We’re pretty excited about this — it allows you to annotate the graph with events that may have impacted your sales.
By now, you’ve all played with Analytics enough to have noticed some spikes in your sales or streams. And you’ve probably asked yourself why. We certainly have. Events are here to help you understand that. Was your new single featured in a movie trailer? Did your new release get a good review on Pitchfork? By marking these events on your graph, and seeing what happens, we can start developing an understanding of what creates these spikes.
The goal here is to provide an open-ended tool for examining the impact of your marketing efforts. For this first release we kept it simple. Click the Add Event button. Select a date, enter a title for the event, pick an artist and relevant category. Hit save. That’s it. Events are indicated by a grey vertical line; hover on it to see the event, and click on it to ‘pin’ the event in place. Click again to un-pin it. Pinning an event means the event will stay put while you navigate, and also allows you to delete events. Events intelligently filter themselves based on what data you are looking at. The default, label-wide view shows all events; change your view to certain artists or releases, and you’ll only see events relevant to those artists.
There are about 9 million cool features we want to add to Events. For instance, event categorizations doesn’t do anything right now, but in the future this will allow you to hide and show events by their category, as well as tell you what kinds of events get used most often. Another feature already in the works is to automatically show you premium ad placements in online music stores. Combined with the existing ability to filter by country and store, this will provide powerful insights into the effectiveness of those placements.
We have a lot planned for Events. More important, though, is how YOU would use this. What would it do if it were magic? Head over to your analytics, give it a whirl, and let us know how it could be improved.
