Transcript

In this video you’ll learn about usage data in Totango! Major topics include: Account attributes, user-level usage, and aggregated account usage.

Usage data in Totango generally refers to the measurement of an account’s or user’s utilization of a product or component outside of Totango–that you want to then represent within Totango. Is some activity happening, and if so how often?

To be clear, we are NOT referring to usage of Totango by your team–such as tasks and touchpoints they’re creating. If your permissions allow, you can enable that option in User Management and interact with the data via the Totango Users segment.

Your customer usage data can be tracked by account attributes, user level usage, and aggregated account usage. Each option has different requirements for ingesting this data into Totango.

You can learn more about account attributes in another video, but let’s say you have a customer’s Average Order Value in a billing system. Just like any other account attribute, you can bring that data into Totango on a daily basis (or other custom schedule) via Data file or other data source. As a reminder, attributes are not summed over time. So, the Average Order Value might be $73 today and $90 tomorrow. However, account level attributes do retain a historical record of each value, so you can visualize those changes on the account profile. And, you can build a custom metric to perform calculations and use in filters, such as “Show me all accounts where the Order Value increased by 15% or more in the last 2 weeks.”

User-level usage, on the other hand, collects data about user activity performed in some other system. With this type of data in Totango, you can view a stream of events per user and per module and activity. Modules are groupings of similar actions–if your application has 4 modules in it, these are the activities that a user could be doing in each one. Note that there is no time-stamp with each activity because it’s for the purpose of aggregation over time. This approach allows us to look at activity over different time periods, so we can get insights into expected utilization of our product on a monthly or weekly basis.

Additionally, user usage is always tied to a specific user (or person). I see User 1 used our product’s Dashboard 3 times an hour ago and 2 more times after that. At the end of the day, assuming no more activity, the count for User 1’s activity for this module would be 5. This user-level activity means we can also see usage on the user profile. Totango additionally rolls up user-level usage at each account profile to get insights into top users, top modules, and utilization at each level in your hierarchy structure.

On a tactical level, you can leverage user-level usage as filtering criteria for segments, SuccessPlays, and Campaigns–simply by searching for the activity and specifying the count over the time period you want. For example, if User Joe hasn’t logged in for over a month, send him an email to nudge him back into the product. This use case for triggering some action in Totango based on usage for a set number of days is a perfect example of why usage data MUST be sent to Totango at least daily and have an automated process in place.

How do you set this up? Totango accepts usage data in a number of ways. For near real time collection, you can leverage the Totango JavaScript Collector or a tracking pixel (such as Segment), or via HTTP API for capturing data server-side. As an example, using the Developer console found under Product Instrumentation, I customized this script and then added it to the global header of my application. It should only take a few seconds to show up in the Developer Console, and I’ll also be able to see it immediately throughout Totango, in the areas we saw earlier.

User-level usage data can alternatively be collected via data file on a scheduled basis–perhaps a CSV that Totango looks for every night at 11 o’clock. Wherever the data comes from, it must specify Account ID, User Id, module, activity, and count. You can think of usage data as a bucket per user, filling up with activities during the day. Then at midnight of your instance time, Totango empties the bucket and sums the activity that happened the day before. In the case of using a data file, if you send multiple files throughout the day, all the activity per user will be summed at the end of the day.

Aggregated account usage, on the other hand, is an alternate way to represent usage data that is not tied to individual users. Instead, you can pre-aggregate usage outside of Totango and then load that data into Totango. Rather than all individual activity inside your product, it’s summative data for ALL activity inside your product. This type of data can be collected via data file on a scheduled basis. Aggregate account usage must always specify Account ID and a column for each item you want to track–either a Module/Activity represented with two pound signs, or an attribute. Aggregate account usage is often used for Totango attributes such as License Utilization, Active Users, or Time Spent.