As we’ve increased the options to configure StatsMix dashboards, we realized we needed a much better way of easily adding widgets. As a result, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released a completely re-designed dashboard widget builder.

Previously, we offered about a dozen pre-built widget types for our customers to choose from when managing their dashboards. Our new widget builder turns that around and offers a fully customized experience.

We now have a single widget builder that allows you to select every option based on the metrics (what kind and how many) you want to display. From this, you can pick the content type (chart, tabbed content, custom HTML, RSS feed, or mentions) and then the various options specific to each.

Here’s a short video (1 minute) that show the new dashboard widget builder in action:

In our early testing with some customers, we’ve found this new widget builder system to be a much better and more efficient way of managing StatsMix dashboards.

Let us know what you think!

We launched a major update to our dashboard and charting tools. StatsMix customers now have complete control over the appearance of their dashboards and much more fine-grained control for individual charts.

Dashboard widgets are now completely re-sizable with free-form placement. After adding a dashboard widget, it can be re-sized to almost any shape and placed in any configuration on a dashboard. These changes then also appear on any shared dashboards as well. You can also extend the height of a dashboard just by dragging it down.

Here’s a quick demo video that illustrates the new functionality:

Overall, the big improvements are:

Dashboards

• Completely re-sizable dashboard widgets
• Free-form placement of dashboard widgets
• Change the size of the dashboard height to accommodate any widget configuration
• New pie chart dashboard widget

Individual Charts

• New, easy-to-use controls for chart type options
• Additional chart types – spline, area, pie, and area-spline
• New, easy-to-use controls for data grouping options
• Additional data grouping options – real-time and hourly
• An improved date range picker

StatsMix automatically converted your dashboards, but please double check their appearance (especially your shared ones).

Let us know if you have any questions or help with any of these new features.

Once you setup metrics and dashboards in StatsMix, you often want to control the look and feel of those reports for your team, customers, or the public.

While we’ve had some existing options to change the branding, they were limited to this point. But that’s all changed! We’ve just launched a completely updated way to change the appearance of any dashboard or metric as well as making it possible to white label them. This is especially useful you’re sharing dashboards with customers.

Here’s what we’ve added and enhanced:

• ability to remove all StatsMix branding
• add your own custom CSS
• upload your own logo
• add a custom domain
• password protection for shared dashboards and charts

Here’s more detail on each new feature:

Remove StatsMix Branding

By default, any shared dashboard or metric is wrapped in a nicely formatted StatsMix branding. On Standard plans and higher, you can now easily remove any and all references to StatsMix and customize the look and feel using the next few options.

Add Your Own CSS

Add your own CSS to fully customize the look and feel of any shared report. The only limit is your design skill! Contact us if you need any assistance in this area.

Upload a Logo

You can now upload a logo that can be displayed on shared dashboards or metrics.

Use a Custom Domain

The default sharing URL follows this format: www.statsmix.com/x/random_token. We now offer the abilty to use any domain in place of www.statsmix.com. For example, your shared dashboards and charts can now have a URL that looks like this: metrics.mycompany.com/x/random_token. Once again, we now allow you to fully remove all mention of StatsMix as needed.

Password Protection

For any shared dashboard or metric, you can now also assign a password when setting up sharing. Passwords are unique to each shared dashboard or metric, giving you full control over access.

Most of these features apply to our Pro plans and higher. You can see the full list on our pricing page.

We now offer the ability to create PDFs on the fly for any of your StatsMix dashboards.

With just a single click, you can now download a nicely formatted PDF of your dashboard.

To create a dashboard PDF, just click on the sharing icon from the dashboard view (be sure to turn on sharing for that dashboard) and select “generate dashboard”. That’s it!

Often there are business activities that would be useful to view with your metrics. You’d like to see them marked or displayed on a chart to identify if there are any effects from the event or possible correlations.

You can now add a note to any metric in StatsMix, just by clicking on the chart. This will open a window that gives you the ability to add a title, description, and the date of the event. The note can also apply to just the currently viewed metric or apply across all metrics.

Notes can be calendar events or actions that happen in your business. Some examples include:

• the CEO speaks at a conference
• deployed a new software release
• product launched in an app store
• launched an advertising campaign
• released a new feature
• wrote a new blog post
• a company milestone or goal

The possibilities are endless as our new notes feature is truly extensible for many different uses in your business.

Here’s a brief video to demonstrate:

We have more improvements to notes in the works, so let us know how you’re using it and what you’d like to see moving forward.

We released an exciting upgrade to our charting functionality in StatsMix. Our goal was to provide more ways for our customers to dive into their data and visualize metrics in the ways that suit their business best.

The charting release includes these new features:

• Compare and analyze different metrics on the same chart (outside of dashboards)
• Chart settings are now easier to find with simplified navigation
• When sending metadata to a metric, their display is much easier and clearer
• Data tooltips are improved
• Speed improvements – the charts load much faster, especially when comparing multiple series
• Zooming in/out of data is real-time – no more having to configure and reload settings
• Comparisons are remembered between sessions
• More intuitive to find the API code and chart sharing

But enough text! Here’s a short demo video on our new charting:

To try this out, just sign in to StatsMix and select any of your metrics. The new charting will immediately appear.

Let us know what you think!

We launched a really useful new feature this week — alerts on metrics. StatsMix now allows you to set alerts on any of your metrics.

When your metric reaches the trigger you set, we’ll send you an email with the details and actionable links.

Here’s a brief video demonstrating how easy it is to set up an alert:

Our current alert options include:

• Metric hits an all-time high
• Metric hits an all-time low
• Metric increased by percent or amount
• Metric decreased by percent or amount
• Metric went higher than a value
• Metric went lower than a value

If there are important metrics you need notifications on (we all have some), you can now monitor it with our alerts.

Try setting up some alerts today and let us know what you think!

With the new daily summary email design, we’ve also updated how users manage email notifications within StatsMix. The old way was a little complicated and involved too many steps to configure the email for each profile.

We now have a separate notifications area in StatsMix where users can customize each of their emails with exactly the metrics they want. Any changes will show up in the next morning’s daily email summary.

Daily Email Summary of Metrics

We released a new version of our daily email summary to replace the format we’d been using for some time. There were three main requirements for the new email design:

1. All the metric values for each customer need to fit in the email clearly
2. Varying lengths of metric names need to fit horizontally and still be legible
3. Overall readability – need to be able to quickly skim the email to view metrics

Since each of our customers has a different set of metrics, with varying values and lengths, we wanted a new design to properly take into account all the usage we’ve seen. We’re very happy with the new design and feel it serves the needs of our customers much better.

All of the existing features for the daily email summary remain including the 7 day history, important system notices, and the daily change.

Let us know what you think of the new design!

One of the core concepts of StatsMix has always been the idea of sharing your metrics with anyone that needs to see them. From management to advisors to investors, we’ve found it’s hard to keep all your stakeholders abreast of different parts of the business.

So far, we’ve had four ways to share dashboards: email summaries, multi-user accounts, private links, and embedding.

Today we’re announcing our most exciting sharing feature — the ability share dashboards under guest accounts.

You can now invite anyone via email to share any of your dashboards within their own StatsMix account. If they’re new to StatsMix, we’ll automatically create a free guest account that allows them to view all the dashboards that have been shared with them.

If they already have an account, they’ll now see a new tab in the navigation that says: “Shared Dashboards.”

All users have an unlimited number of shared dashboards they can view. Guest accounts will also have the option to sign up for a free trial and try out StatsMix fully for themselves. They’re not obligated to do this though and can keep a read-only view of all the dashboards shared with them for free.

We’ve had great feedback while we built this feature from beta testers. Now that it’s publicly available, there’s no reason to not share your dashboards with anyone who may have interest in viewing your metrics.

Just to illustrate this, here are a few common use cases for our guest account sharing feature:

Companies with investors
Companies that have investors regularly provide reports on key metrics. Unfortunately, there are issues for both parties. For the companies, they have to figure out what to send the investors, how to do it, what format to send it in and the frequency of sending the reports. Investors, on the other hand, are receiving reports from most of their portfolio companies in different formats, at different times, making it hard to stay on top of the metrics without spending too much time.

StatsMix solves both these problems by simplifying the entire process. Companies can quickly create a new dashboard tailored for their investors, displaying the data at the interval they choose (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly), and share it instantly.

Investors now have all the metrics for each of their companies in one place. Reports are not cluttering their email inbox, but instead can be viewed all at once when the investor is in review mode.

This scenario also applies to advisors, mentors and key employees of the company.

Agencies and their customers
We’ve found that there are typically two approaches to using StatsMix with agencies or consulting firms. The first option is to manage each of their clients as a separate profile within StatsMix and then share that data with them. Alternatively, they can have their clients manage their own StatsMix accounts and share the metrics back to the firm.

Our new guest dashboard sharing now allows for these customers to choose the method that best works for them. Their clients can easily create a dashboard of key business metrics they wish to share and the firm can now go in and review all their clients’ reports in one place.

Other examples include:

• An organization with many users.
• A website with many independent authors.
• Newsletters with numerous contributors.
• Companies with multiple business partners and clients.

We’re very excited about the possibilities for our new guest sharing and can’t wait to get your feedback!