We were busy shipping improvements to Squeaky right up until the last few days of November, so it's taken a little bit of time to let the dust settle and gather the highlights together. Below you'll find a rundown of all the amazing updates to the Squeaky product during November 2022.
New site creation flow
When new users join Squeaky, we've purposely kept the site set up incredibly straightforward. We've only made minor changes over the past year, and around 75% of users who add their site to Squeaky will go on to verify their site and begin benefitting from the insights we provide.
That's pretty good, but 75% still leaves plenty of room for improvement. We believe in the value our product can offer our customers and we owe it to all new users to help them get started as effortlessly as possible.
So, to help more people get the most out of our product, we've completely rebuilt our site setup flow, offering more guidance and making it easier to get support when installing our tracking code.
Old flow
The old flow was short, with users completing one basic form and then being unceremoniously dumped into an overwhelming-looking tracking-code installation page with some links to help centre articles.
New flow
Our new flow includes steps to define what type of site you're adding (website vs. web application), add your site details (name and URL), invite your team members, and choose between three installation methods: manual, with a guide, or by inviting a colleague to install the code for you.
Added bar charts visualisation
Until now Squeaky has only offered line charts throughout the app, but that's not always the right chart for any given use case. We've now added a separate option to switch to a bar chart view and it's already making a huge difference to how easy it is to read and interpret your data.
Just click the cog icon in the top-right of your chart and you can change the chart type. We save your preferences on a per-chart basis, so there's no need to reconfigure their appearance each time you return to Squeaky. We'll be adding additional chart views in the months ahead, but if you have any requests please let us know!
Introduced linked data access rights
Many of our customers make use of our data-linking functionality that allows you to pass information from your database to Squeaky - this is particularly helpful for customer support teams that want to look up a particular visitor's session when helping to diagnose and troubleshoot their issues. However, depending on your company policies, not all of your team members will have permission to view customer data. With that in mind, we've added controls that allow you to determine linked data access and visibility on a per-user basis.
Improved privacy controls
We've continued our efforts to improve our privacy controls by making them clearer to understand and easier to use.
A new default for data anonymisation
Last week we introduced a new data suppression model for text on your site. We've now made this the default setting for all new sites to ensure the highest level of data protection for your visitors out of the box.
We've also added a new visualisation to the Data Capture privacy page that helps to illustrate how this feature works.
Consent management
Most companies using Squeaky don't need to ask for user consent as Squeaky is already compliant and privacy-first by default. However, for companies that do need to request consent we've updated the copy and interface to make it easier to understand which settings are right for your business.
Clickhouse all the things
A few months back we shared that we were experimenting with ClickHouse, to see if it could improve the performance for our event tracking feature, as it allows you to perform complex queries across large datasets. So far, we've been incredibly impressed with the results and how easy it's been for us to adopt.
To introduce the same 2-5x performance benefits throughout our application, we've now backfilled all of our analytics data into ClickHouse. It's already powering the dashboard and analytics pages, and more features will be receiving the upgrade in the months ahead.
Final touches to event tracking
Thanks to all the amazing feedback you've been sending in we're now confident there are no more major issues remaining with the feature and our event tracking feature is now officially out of beta. The final fixes last month included:
- Fixing issues with the event selector dropdown layout.
- Ensuring the event trigger counts refresh accurately.
- Fixing a bug with the graph colour labelling when changing or adding events to your comparison view.
- Stopping charts from overflowing their container.
Naturally there may still be small things to iron out, so please do let us know if you encounter any small issues.
User journeys update
When you hover over a page in the user journey we'll now hide any following pages, making it even clearer where your users went from any given page.
Those were all the major updates from November 2022, thanks so much for reading. We'll be doing our best to get a few more great improvements to you before the end of the year!