Flourish analytics

Flourish visualizations are built for users to directly engage with, through interactive features like controls, filters, and popups. 

But what if you want to understand how users that come to your site are interacting with your Flourish visualizations? That's where our analytics come in.

Analytics is a premium feature available as a bolt-on to our Enterprise plans. It allows you to track end-user interactions with your embedded visualizations, such as when people hover and click on visualizations, or how far through a particular Flourish story a user clicks.

In this article

Why might you want analytics?

Flourish visualizations and stories encourage engagement, but it can be very useful to know just how much engagement they are receiving. By using analytics you could answer questions like:

  • Which types of visualizations do people engage with the most?
  • Do people engage more with our stories than with our stand-alone visualizations?
  • How much engagement do our Flourish stories get? 
  • How far do people click through our stories?
  • Are longer or shorter stories more effective?

How do analytics work?

A lot of our customers have their own analytics systems in place already through which they track other data. For this reason, we've built our own analytics to be customizable and to feed into your existing systems.

We do not store interaction data ourselves, but this feature simply acts as a connection between Flourish visualizations and your own systems: we fire events information to you that your developers can capture and feed into your analytics system.

What information do we provide?

The information you can retrieve varies between visualizations and stories. 

For visualizations, we track four different actions:

  • mouse_enter: when someone starts hovering over a visualization
  • mouse_leave: when someone stops hovering over a visualization
  • click: when someone clicks anywhere on a visualization
  • key_down: when someone types something on their keyboard

For every visualization event, you will be provided with some extra data about the visualization it related to, including:

  • template_ID: to identify the type of template, e.g. Line, bar, and pie chart or Projection map
  • visualization_ID: a unique ID relating to a specific visualization you've made

For stories, we track the following actions:

  • mouse_enter: when someone starts hovering over a story
  • mouse_leave: when someone stops hovering over a story
  • click: when someone clicks anywhere on a story
  • key_down: when someone types something on their keyboard
  • play: when someone clicks the play button
  • pause: when someone clicks the pause button
  • change_slide: when someone changes the slide in the story

For every story event, you will be provided with the same information as a visualization ( template_ID and visualization_ID), in addition to:

  • story_ID: a unique ID identifying the specific story you've made
  • slide_index: the index of the current slide
  • slide_count: the total number of slides in the story

For full documentation of these events, see our developer docs page here.

How can you implement analytics?

To add analytics for a particular page on your site, your team will need to add some extra code snippets to the page:

  • to initialize the firing of analytics events, and
  • to capture the information and feed it into your own analytics system

Full documentation on how to implement analytics on your site can be found in our developer docs here.

We don't store the analytics data ourselves, so we can only provide data once you have analytics set up on a page and begin capturing events—we cannot provide data retroactively for before analytics were implemented.

Frequently asked questions

Analytics are an Enterprise-level bolt-on.

If you are an existing Flourish customer, get in touch with your Customer success manager at customersuccess@flourish.studio.

If you don't yet have a Flourish account, get in touch with our Sales team at sales@flourish.studio for more information.

We don't store interaction data ourselves, our analytics feature simply acts as a way to connect your Flourish visualizations to your existing analytics systems.

For this reason, we cannot retroactively provide data from the past since we do not store it and only provide analytics to you if, and when, you implement analytics on your pages.

When you follow the developer documentation, adding the event listener function once on a page will make analytics available for all Flourish embeds on that page.

For visualizations you've already made in Flourish, you can add analytics to the page in which they are embedded to retrieve analytics for them.

For existing visualizations, you'll also need to hit republish in Flourish to make analytics for them available.

Currently, our analytics feature is only available for our Script embed codes. That's the one's that look like this: 

<div class="flourish-embed flourish-chart" data-src="visualisation/visualization-ID"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div>