Observable docs

Appearance

Analytics ​

Data apps

Analytics, found under the first tab of app settings, shows you a heatmap of the number of unique viewers on every page of your data app over the last 60 days. See which dashboards are evergreen, or when reports were popular, or which pages have grown stale and been forgotten.

Screenshot of the analytics page for a single data app. The columns of the table are: “Page” (with URL paths), “Viewers by day” (where each row has a one-dimensional heatmap in shades of blue-green), “Total” (with just a number), and “Regulars” (with a stack of users’ avatars).

The page is designed to emphasize consistent and broad viewership. We show unique viewers, not total views, so that viral spikes don’t drown out steadier drumbeats. The color scale is logarithmic, so that the presence of some views (even by just a couple people) isn’t overwhelmed by one person refreshing a broken page a hundred times. Weekdays with zero views get a faint gray outline, whereas weekends are just blank, to help you see weekly periodicities. Hover over a cell to see the viewer count for that day.

The “Total” column is the sum of the number of unique visitors on each of the last 60 days. (I.e., it is not the total number of pageloads.) A total of “2” might mean two people on one day or one person on two days. If Alice and Bob view your app on Tuesday, and then Alice, Bob, and Charlie view it on Wednesday, then the total for those two days is 5. We call this “viewer-days”, and it represents the sustained popularity of a page.

For data apps with many pages, we show the pages with the highest totals at the top.

Diagonally hatched areas represent times when a page did not exist. When a page has been deleted, we relegate it to the bottom; when 60 days have passed it will disappear. Because Observable Cloud understands the structure of Observable Framework, we know statically which pages exist in your app. This lets our analytics distinguish zero views from null views: we know about extant pages with no viewers, and about non-existant pages that had viewers in the past.

Screenshot of the analytics page showing pages that were deleted

All dates are UTC, and data may be delayed by up to a day.

Regulars ​

When you’re building apps for a broad constituency, it helps to know which people or groups are getting value out of different pages. The “Regulars” column shows who has been viewing the dashboard at least twice a week.

Screenshot of the analytics page for a single project.

Note that you can only see regulars for members of your workspace. Public data apps don’t track the identity of viewers.