Use Case
When analyzing event data, you often need to understand the cumulative impact of your metrics over time. For example:
“How many times has this feature ever been used?
“How many distinct people have ever used this feature?”
“What is the total revenue generated up to this point?”
Why It’s Important
Viewing metrics as a cumulative sum provides valuable insights into long-term trends and overall growth. It helps you track feature adoption, user engagement, and total impact over time, enabling more informed decision-making.
The Feature: What It Does
In Metric Drilldown, after selecting an event and choosing an aggregation method—such as Event Count, Uniques, Average of Property Value, etc.—you can now apply the Cumulative Sum option to your results. This feature accumulates your selected metric over time, providing a running total in your charts.
When the metric aggregation is set to Uniques, you have two options for calculating the cumulative sum:
Distinct Uniques
What it does: Counts each unique user or unit only once in the cumulative total, regardless of how many times they appear in subsequent time periods.
Use Case: Answers “How many distinct people have ever used this feature?” by providing a deduplicated cumulative count.
Total Uniques
What it does: Counts each occurrence of a user or unit every time they appear, allowing them to be counted multiple times in the cumulative total.
Use Case: Helps you understand “What is the total number of unique user engagements over time, including repeat users?” This provides insight into recurring user activity across different periods.
For other aggregation types:
Event Count: The cumulative sum shows the total number of events over time, helping you track overall engagement.
Average of Property Value: Accumulates average values over time, useful for metrics like cumulative revenue or total session duration.
Sum of Property Value: Accumulates the sum of a chosen property value from your events, useful for questions like "What is the total revenue generated up to this point?" or “What is the cumulative sum of this property over time?” by providing the total accumulated value.
By enabling the Cumulative Sum option, you can transform your metric analyses to capture total impact over time, providing a comprehensive view that supports deeper insights into your product’s performance.