Story time.

Back when I was at Morning Brew, we spent over a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the dashboards we needed to derive meaningful insights about our audience.

These insights unlocked tremendous opportunities for growth, retention, and more.

We were using Sailthru at the time. Their analytics and dashboards were geared primarily towards e-commerce businesses, with an emphasis on metrics like conversions, sales, order value, etc. Not content-focused newsletters.

This is true for most enterprise-level email platforms.

So we hired a company that would routinely extract all of our data out of Sailthru and dump it into Snowflake. We paid them a lot of money. We also paid Snowflake a lot of money too.

But the data we extracted from Sailthru was just one piece of the puzzle—email engagement. It didn't have any context about where our subscribers came from, how they engaged with content on our site, their network of referrals, or any other metadata we collected with polls and surveys.

Not to mention—the data that was dumped into Snowflake wasn't even structured properly to allow us to build the dashboards we desired.

So we hired a data engineer who could clean, refactor, and optimize our data. This took months and cost us a ton.

We then spent a huge sum of money for Looker, a BI tool that we fed all of our newly optimized data into.

Which kicked off another search, this time for a data analyst who would be able to slice and dice our data to finally build the dashboards we had wanted from the start.

And none of that even takes into consideration the dozens of hours our team spent determining what dashboards we wanted, white-boarding our schemas, managing the team of freelance data engineers and analysts, and onboarding onto several new enterprise software platforms.

Fast forward a few years to when we began building beehiiv...

This entire process was top of mind from day one.

And today we're putting it into action with the launch of 3D Analytics. Newsletters on beehiiv will have access to the same dashboard and insights without any of the hassle.

3D Analytics

3D Analytics will be a "living organism" within beehiiv—meaning we will continuously and routinely add new dashboards, metrics, and views to further unlock what's possible with your data. At launch however, there will be two primary dashboards:

1. Posts Report

2. Subscribers Report

Posts Report

As shown in the image above, this report will breakdown all of your posts within a given timeframe, both in aggregate and individually.

This makes visualizing and understanding ongoing engagement trends simple.

We also built a proprietary ranking algorithm to systematically rank your top performing posts and links, taking into account dozens of metrics.

This report also includes a simple URL table to track your top performing links across all posts within that timeframe (broken down by both web and email).

This makes it simpler than ever to track the performance of on-going ad campaigns, amongst other use cases.

Coming soon: you'll be able to input any given subscriber cohort (i.e. those who signed up from facebook ads) and specifically view their performance across these posts.

Subscribers Report

Simply input any given time period:

• past 14 days

• past month

• between April 1 stand April 30th

• etc.

and we'll provide a thorough breakdown of where subscriptions came from during that time period and the performance of those subscribers since.

The report will breakdown opens and clicks by acquisition channel, alongside a geographic breakdown as well.

Where this gets fun...

Say you experimented with some acquisition on Facebook in the month of March and want to evaluate the ROI of that initiative.

Simply drop in facebook as the source parameter at the top, alongside March 1, 2022 - March 31, 2022 in the date parameter and you'll see the performance of all subscribers who came from Facebook, thanks to beehiiv's attribution data.

You can even double click further and evaluate the performance of just those subscribers who converted from paid Facebook ads.

Looking Ahead

We plan to launch an additional few reports in the very near future to provide more granular cohort analysis as well.

This will be an evolving initiative—so feel free to provide feedback as to which insights you are looking to derive and we'll see what we can do.

And be sure to follow us here on Twitter for real-time product updates and announcements.