March 2023 brought another great month of improvements to the Squeaky product, tackling three of our most requested features/additions. The post below outlines the latest updates, and there's a short note at the end regarding changes to the way we'll be sharing product updates in the future.
Added UTM-parameters to event tracking
As the next step in our continued extension of Squeaky's event-tracking functionality, we now allow you to define UTM-Parameters as autocapture events.
UTM parameters allow you to append various attributes to URLs for your site, these are then captured by Squeaky on page load and surfaced in our event tracking interface. There is a broad range of applications for UTM parameters, but here are some example use cases:
- Track and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by seeing which channels are generating the most traffic.
- Use UTM parameters to monitor user flows between your own domains (a great alternative to cookie-based data transfers).
- Surface insights on your paid-advertising performance by passing details to Squeaky on things like Campaign IDs, Search Terms, etc.
Timezone localisation
Until last month the date properties in Squeaky were always based on UTC time, with the exception of a couple of the data and time properties in the recordings table. We've now introduced the option to offset all times in Squeaky to reflect your preferred timezone, you'll find the controls in your account settings, and they only affect your personal user account:
This may seem like a small change, but it impacted almost every aspect of our application, involving rewriting thousands of lines of code across 135 different files!
Export visitor and recording data to .csv
One of the most commonly requested features in Squeaky has now arrived: you can now export your visitor and recording data as a .csv file from inside your site settings pages:
If you're on a paid plan you are now able to export any visitor or recording data from within your sites data retention period, and any exports you generate will remain available in your site settings Data Exports tab.
Bug squashing
Alongside last month's major feature updates, we've been continuing to refine the product and squash bugs. We tend not to highlight these too often during product updates, but there were a few notable improvements this month:
- There were several fixes to the Click Counts heatmap, maybe them more reliable and performant.
- We've removed inactivity from the session duration metric, as this artificially bloated the less of your average sessions.
- Last month we introduced a major update to the Journeys feature, but this also introduced a bug where End-based journeys were inverted, this has now been fixed.
A note on product updates blog posts
Around a year ago we switched to offering monthly product updates from quarterly. This was because the quarterly product updates were often too long and some users wouldn't learn about new features (that had been released weeks earlier) until they'd received the quarterly update.
However, the same issue still persists, as we often release a really valuable update in the first week of a month, but people won't necessarily hear about it until a month later, likewise, not all of our active users check their emails for product updates. As a fast-growing startup, it's vital that user feedback on our new features and improvements reaches us quickly, so we can iterate and improve faster, and likewise, we don't want you to be waiting for weeks before you can realise new value from Squeaky.
With that in mind, over the following months introduce in-app notifications to share each feature update as it has been released. This will be in a non-intrusive manner, but the cadence will vary, sometimes you'll see an update once a week, and other times just a few notifications per month, depending on the size/scope of the projects we're tackling. We'll also share these same updates on social media, and we'll publish a quarterly digest that includes all major updates, for those that still prefer the blog format.
Thanks for reading about the latest product updates from March 2023. If you have any questions or comments please reach out to us via hello@squeaky.ai.