We are in the midst of significant improvements to the admin dashboard that will make it easier to access and interpret data about your community’s health and value. In this topic, we’ll share what we’re working on so you can see where we are headed!
For now, this is considered a highly experimental change! We are very much in the midst of development, so please expect to see some rough edges — particularly around performance — and lots of evolution in the coming weeks. We are doing dedicated testing with a limited group of customers which is informing most of the work at this time.
What’s changing
We are updating the dashboard to serve as a hub for admins who want at-a-glance insights about the health and value of their community. At the moment, the dashboard is composed of four sections:
Highlights, where admins can view important key performance indicators like signups, stickiness, and accepted solutions.
Site Traffic, which lets you know who is coming to your community and where they’re coming from. (Note that referrer information will not be backfilled.)
We expect to add more sections soon to explore Support and Search data.
Previewing the redesigned dashboard in your community
If you’d like to check in our progress so far, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the dashboard improvements item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
This is really nice, I appreciate the modular nature of it with how I can swap out reports and whatnot.
It would be great if these “key stats” could be made modular too, my site is mostly for documenting stuff internally with a company and other testing so lots of these don’t apply to us.
Thanks for asking I retrieve some of the following information through custom Data Explorer queries. I consider these metrics relevant for our use case.
Users
number of registered users in group X
share of contributing users (created a topic, replied to a topic), reading users, and ghost users (just clicking around without further engagement)
language setting (from the language switch)
distribution of email domains (public providers, universities, others)
Topics, Posts
number of topics / posts in self-defined groups of categories
post-per-topic ratio in these groups
Traffic
page views from web crawlers
page views from users = anonymous users + logged-in users
Hey, the dashboard is actually already available for testing / viewing.
If you’re asking about when it would actually be swapped out with the current dashboard without fiddling with settings, I believe it could still take some weeks.
I’ve given this a try and I LOVE what I see and can do. I have a few questions.
Is there documentation on the response format required for the custom Data Explorer queries to show up correctly? Using the AI bot on the forum here it looks like it needs a date field and a number field. I was able to get a report “Time to Solution” working but it’s a bar chart vs a line chart like the others. I think initially it did show up as a line when the dates returned where in the format of MM-DD-YYYY. We wanted consistency so I changed the Data Explorer query to match a 3 character month and the two digit day.
The other question I had was around the Site traffic area, I am wondering how the top countries are calculated. Is this by IP address? Also, when I click the graph to filter out logged in/anonymous/crawlers, I suspected those numbers to change based upon what was still visible in the graph but they didn’t
My final thought for now is that it would be nice to add your own highlights to the highlight section and organize which tiles show up in which order!
Thank you for this new feature and I am quite excited to see this as it continues to iterate
Thanks for the feedback, glad to hear you like it so far.
I can answer a few of the questions:
Oh that’s interesting – I had designed these as “separate” sections, the grey border essentially indicating a different compartment, but I can absolutely see how it would be interesting to tie those to the filters of the main chart.
I would think so, yes. Of course VPNs might distort the data a bit, but not sure I see a great alternative. Using profile location would exclude all anonymous visitors + not always correct or set either. Did you have anything else in mind?
Happy to say that’s definitely on our roadmap, just not for a first version
Yes, we have a large percentage of traffic from countries that our internal metrics don’t match up with. I was trying to see where the crawler and bot traffic was correlating to but the numbers didn’t change
I don’t have anything else in mind, I think that’s the best way to do it, I just wanted to confirm that’s how it worked!
For now, this is considered a highly experimental change! We are very much in the midst of development, so please expect to see some rough edges — particularly around performance — and lots of evolution in the coming weeks. We are doing dedicated testing with a limited group of customers which is informing most of the work at this time.
What’s changing
Previewing the redesigned dashboard in your community
I retrieve some of the following information through custom 
