FunnelFlux: The SaaS is Coming (10)
Hi all,
It has been a while since I have posted an update on STM regarding where FunnelFlux is heading.
Well, we can now reset the timer :-)
We have been busy working on our SaaS for some time now (Project Flux) -- certainly has taken longer than expected but I am happy to announce that we plan to start rolling out availability in several weeks time, kicking things off at Affiliate World Europe.
Now, we are not yet fully launching the product with paid plans. Instead we will have a waitlist and will ask people to assist us with testing the product -- for free of course. So you get free tracking and get to play with a shiny new product, but one that's not yet polished or perfect.
During that testing phase we want to identify any critical issues, make our infrastructure more robust, and get feedback on usability -- all of these require getting real people in to run the system through its paces.
Our initial product aims to get the basics right, so will not be as complex as FunnelFlux is today but will of course be fine for typical campaigns. We also plan to be very transparent with our roadmap and what we are working on, our infrastructure upgrades, etc. We know many of you are tech-savvy and like to know the details of what's going on behind the scenes.
We're very proud of the marketing tech we're building and our plans for the future -- especially how we have designed the infrastructure (it is fast, is only going to get faster) and our UX goals.
If you'd like to be one of the first to get access to testing this new technology, you can get on the waitlist here -- https://forms.gle/BEg8n81JmdbVVRfV8
Note this is a questionnaire -- the quid pro quo reveals itself :-)
We will be selecting people over time from the waitlist and this survey information truly helps us make the product better. It's your chance to vote on what you do and don't want in a tracker, what pisses you off and to give some feedback on the ideas we have for the future roadmap.
More Info?
Here's some quick pics of the SaaS internals to give you a better idea of what's happening behind the scenes, and some notes from me on what you're seeing and other plans.
Campaigns & Reporting
Lookin' clean right?
We want to make the UI efficient and hide complex functionality so that it doesn't get in your way.
See that little lighting bolt button? That will slide out quick stats, which you'll see shortly. These will filter data to whatever you clicked on -- whether it is a traffic source, campaign or lander, and let you break down by things like country, ISP, etc. I wanted to make it super fast for you to analyse any object without having to spend time constructing reports. So, you could go to campaigns > show funnels > click on quick stats for a specific funnel and immediately break down by country. Done? Close the overlay, you're back at the table and can check the stats for something else. No navigating back and forth or changing reporting selections. Now imagine finding a lander that is getting a tonne of odd visits and being able to quickly check its stats and break down by ISP or user-agent. Easy!
See that edit mode toggle? That will reveal several extra columns like the quick stat icon, including edit, duplicate, archive, delete. This way you save table space and show these only when you need them. Why waste screen real estate on something you can easily show/hide at will.
See those tabs at the top? That's right, we plan for you to be able to (eventually) open and edit funnels at the same time. Navigation around the app will be fast and smooth, without redirection between pages (i.e. it's a single page app as you may expect).
Dashboard
This will be simple and efficient. One axis for visits, you can view the other data by hovering over the graph. We plan to add a more advanced visualisation section later, for people who want more advanced graphing, comparisons and so on.
The Funnel Builder
This is a tough area to nail but we have made significant improvements to the UX with the goal of making it very easy to visually build your flows (even more so than FunnelFlux).
Firstly, as a general UX style in Flux, we use sidebars a lot -- so for editing settings of items, table columns etc., a sidebar will fly out. You can see this in the rotator settings. I wanted to do this as A) I think its nicer especially when presenting large forms, and B) it will make the mobile UI a lot easier to work with + similar to desktop. Yes we will have a mobile UI/app eventually, but its not an early focus (and likely not very practical for the funnel builder).
In the second picture you can see our Node Palette on the left side. This is where you get to drag and drop to create nodes. The cool thing about this? You have access to all your lander, offer and other resources. So, you can type to filter then drag those items directly onto the canvas.
Those black tooltips? Yeah, we plan to keep your funnel pretty and neat by not showing huge lander names on top of your nodes. Instead you can see these by hovering on them or holding a hot key to show tooltips on all page nodes.
Also... yes we do plan to add lander/offer groups, so you can have one node and internally group/rotate landers. It's high on our feature list as we know it makes life easier.
Second also... we realise that the visual approach is not actually faster in some situations, e.g. when building very simple Traffic > Lander > Offer flows. We do plan to have a form-based builder that lets you quickly create funnels for these situations. You'll be able to stick to a form approach and choose to convert it to a full visual funnel situation later.
Quick Stats
I love my quick stats, I think its a much better way to approach reporting and speed up data analysis.
Clicking the lightning bolt button in reporting rows will slide out an overlay (yes, an overlay, so your reporting table is still there in the background).
That overlay will pre-filter your data based on what you clicked, then let you change date range and high level filter using the buttons shown.
The quick stats will also be available generically alongside the reporting/analytics page, so you can go in and choose a campaign/funnel manually and break down data there -- so it's not only available directly from the table, but as a standalone reporting section.
Other Features on our Radar
I won't list too many as I want you to do our waitlist questionnaire and provide some feedback there, but here's a wishlist of mine that you can look forward to:
- Zapier nodes -- like PHP nodes in FunnelFlux these will let you do almost anything on the back-end as users route through your funnel. Have a form on your page? The submit can go to FunnelFlux and redirect to an offer while the data gets sent to Zapier... to do whatever you want. Think of the possibilities.
- Advanced JS functionality -- we plan for our JS to become extremely powerful, it basically hijacks your page to make tracking work without as much fiddling on your end. Think intelligent user fingerprinting on our back-end, prefetching and preloading, real-time resolution of where the user would go and replacing of links with direct ones (users magically redirect directly to the offer, reducing network-related click-loss), time on page and MVT tracking, a JS API to provide any tracker data directly to your page, cookieless tracking, and we even have plans for organic page tracking that will let us create
Shopify funnels/integrations and auto-discovery of funnel design. - In built landing page creation and hosting. We know this is something people have a love/hate relationship with... we will eventually provide an internal landing page builder as well as tools to directly host on our infrastructure so that you don't need landing page servers. Eventually this will move toward hosted product flows, checkouts, payment processing etc. so that your analytics and tracking tool is deeply integrated with your customer journey.
- Infrastructure in China -- I am leading the charge here and have an ambition for Flux to become the first tracking and analytics tool that bridges seamlessly into China. That means no VPNs for China-based users and fast tracking/redirects of people based inside of China. Yes this is possible, just not easy. This will pave the way for a new paradigm of tracking tools within the beast that is China.
- App localisation -- we plan to roll out localised UIs for many languages. Professionally translated UI text as well as help documentation so that tracking becomes something that doesn't require understanding of quite technical English.
- On the note of localisation... we plan for auto-translation of landers to be a feature of our JS -- e.g. user visits page, lander has a setting to translate on the fly using Google Translate based on the user's primary browser language. This would also be trackable in reporting so you would know the impact, positive or negative of doing this. And of course... you could then configure rules on when to do this to maximise ROI on a per-lander level :-)
- Dozens of more cool things, too many ideas to list here. We will certainly have some priorities above others and these may take years to develop, but we have a bold vision and you can help us achieve this by using our product in the future. Of course, hopefully you do so because you like it better than alternatives. If not, we want you to tell us why!
That's all for the wall of text from Zeno, throw any comments our way and feel free to drop by our booth at AWE in a week and a half!
Oh and if you have any things you really want from a tracker, or problems you want solved -- fill out our questionnaire :-)
Update 1
We now have a competition -- everyone who submits the questionnaire will go into the draw. One person will win a year of free tracking once we launch. This will be in the form of a free credit for our first plan is, so you'd get that free and if scaling above and beyond it, would have the plan's value credited on your account. Our lowest-level plan will likely be fine for most of you, and regardless you'd basically be getting free money for the year. Who doesn't like free money.
That UI is art.
It belongs in the Lourve.
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums
Nice @zeno! Been anticipating this for a while!
Can't wait to try it out!
Amy
Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app
It definitely looks crisper, but it's still uses too much white and spacing imo, which makes it hard on the eyes.
I'd really encourage testing a few table looks and color schemes and see which one brings the most clarity. That's where users are likely going to spend the majority of their time after all, pouring over data, so it needs to feel easy on the eyes to visually parse things, whether during the day or night. Other trackers generally make it easy with off-colors every other row, or even full green/red background coloration indicating ROI, compact rows (or at least the option to double-click the diver to shrink to fit), etc
However the main reason I just wasn't able to use FunnelFlux despite really wanting to, was how it handles the seperation or rather lack of seperation really between 'campaigns' as they appear on the traffic source and them sharing the same 'funnels/flow'.
Everything is peachy if you're just dealing with one ad campaign on one traffic source, but things get scrappy quick once you start running across multiple other sources, and wanting to duplicate campaigns across different targeting sets, all while continuing to have them use the same same funnel/flow for sake of easy mass changes to them all. The alternative of having to edit XX funnels every time you want to make a LP or offer change isn't something I want to go back to.
So it becomes a bit of a pivot table nightmare trying to get to the data I want to see for each in a timely fashion, having to create and save special reports etc, since the UI by default has rolled up that info.
It's like the equivalent of using a different tracker but only being able to use one campaign link for all your campaigns of the same type, and having to run drill-down reports for each 'sub-campaign' to try to make sense of things on each source and targeting. Lot more time spend loading data too.
I hope you guys can come up with a solution for that similar to how other trackers already do it with funnels/flows and displaying that information easily.
Other thoughts
1. Column totals and the ability to customize which ones you see on the summary page would be a step in right direction. More user customization options in general.
2. Should be able to double-click on a row to drill-down from the summary page if that's not already a thing.
3. Hope the new UI is mobile friendly at least for viewing stats and making simple adjustments.
4. Custom conversion/event types and option to show column for this on main summary page. I recall there being some weirdness too around needing to designate a lander as an offer in order to trigger such an event?
Other than I'm really looking forward to seeing it and would be happy to provide more feedback. I think you easily have the most sophisticated platform out there, and with some UI improvements to the make analysis and common daily tasks require less steps, it could rise to the top.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
I switched to Funnel Flux specifically for the seamless ClickBank integration, but now that I have no plans to touch ClickBank anytime soon, these small but daily issues are presenting themselves.
Without the use of a single flow/funnel to control over multiple campaigns, I've ended up not editing all of my relevant campaigns 100% of the time when trying to make simple landing page split-tests. Also having to go back in and edit multiple funnels each time I want to update the percentage of the test.
But on top of that, for setting an offer cap, I've had to set a Condition within each individual funnel to check if an offer is globally capped (in UTC time while my tracker runs in EST time) and then send it to specific offers based on the "Yes/No" variable... for every funnel... it's just a bit much. Where as the tracker I'm moving to will just be a simple checkbox for the daily conversion cap, in my specified timezone, and can just spillover the clicks past the offer cap into another offer. Just makes it a lot easier to run the campaigns and not worry about the cap since I'm getting a global spillover, without having to make sure I've set the conversion cap on every individual funnel.
But as Kelly said, the functionality is top-notch, it's just not presented in the most user friendly experience.
Luckily I haven't gotten deep into heavy drill-down reporting with it yet but I can completely understand what he also means in that respect.
Edit: Then again your unique approach to how everything is handled might be perfectly suited for others, just wanted to share my experience.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
I feel this reply is a bit late, though I did write a big response weeks ago then accidentally hit Ctrl+W... which closed my tab without a prompt and all was lost. I couldn't bring myself to rewrite it at the time since I was raging inside, as you can imagine (where's my "are you sure you want to close this tab" prompt Chrome? Where?).
Anyway, I'll be concise with responses to the above:
- Rather than try to make it "perfect" we'll add themes at some stage, basic CSS flavours for people to switch between. Some people like dark modes, some like it white, some will prefer a mix with stronger contrast.
- I'm not a fan of alternating rows (little evidence it actually increases readability), but do agree the tables are a critical UI point where people spend a lot of time. We will add colour coding of rows eventually, probably as a toggle since once again not everyone likes this. Likewise, we'll explore having a few table CSS options like font-size and row height -- these things are relatively easy to implement and often overlooked.
- I understand your pain with the campaigns coherency from the perspective of the traffic source. In FunnelFlux you can pass campaign ID as a tracking field and then break down by this, which is arguably more efficient than making something new in your tracker for every campaign at your traffic source -- just not something people are used to. In our SaaS we will have containers (funnel categories, basically just for organisation) and funnels. A funnel can receive traffic from any number of traffic sources and campaigns. Now, here's the key -- in the traffic source config we will now have a global field "campaign" that cannot be removed, which you use to pass campaign name/ID from the traffic source. In the reporting this is directly available, so its much easier to compare data vis-a-vis your traffic source campaigns. You will be able to see it in the tree on the funnels page as well, so can easily access this breakdown.
- We have revamped the way quick stats work, and I think you will like it. From any table, whether its the funnels page, landers, offers, traffic sources, etc., there are icons you can click which slide out a stats overlay with high-level breakdowns. The goal is for most of your reports to be accessible with a few clicks and not much typing. So for comparing data to your traffic source, you would log into the app > go to funnels page. You see your funnels and want to see the data for all your PropellerAds campaigns. You click a little thunderbolt icon on that funnel > a stats overlay slides out, campaigns is the default selection. It auto-loads the last 24 hours and shows a tree of traffic sources > campaigns for just that funnel that you selected (so the quick stats data is filtered to whatever row item you clicked, isolating the data). I really like this approach as its fast and lets you click your way to specific breakdowns extremely quickly. Plus, I think the forced campaign ID tracking field in URLs makes this systematic, less prone to error, and maximises the efficiency of a single funnel.
- I totally forgot about footer totals -- we'll definitely have them, just a UI oversight in the mockups.
- Summary page -- you mean the dashboard? No plans just yet to allow custom metrics there, but its something we can do. On the table for sure, just not sure custom metrics in the graph and tiles at the top. For those we'd need to flesh things out a bit more I think, e.g. an editor that allows you to pick a metric and set its colour, or create a custom metric from basic maths, etc.
- Double click > drilldown: this will be replaced by a single button click on a quickstats icon. This opens as an overlay, basically a big sidebar. When closed you are still at the previous view, so you don't navigate somewhere else and have to go back to the table.
- The front-end is much cleaner than FunnelFlux original that's for sure. We'll work on mobile responsiveness a bit later, have to get the basics sorted on desktop/laptop viewports first. After that it will be straightforward but I doubt funnel editing will ever be a fun thing on mobile. We will use sidebars a lot and this will provide a nice mobile UX, since these can slide out and take over the entire mobile device screen > hit X to close.
- This is something we have considered as well, but won't do at a super early stage. This needs a lot of thought as with Flux you could have events happening in many different places. Likely, we could add user events that are funnel-wide, i.e .the user triggers them but they are independent of the pages themselves, letting us map these events to the visitor themselves not a page visit. These could either be global so that they can bare aliases in column names, or if we wanted the events to have the possibility of being different per funnel, we'd need the events to push an event number and alias, then show those aliases in rows in the tables (e.g. column for event name, columns for event 1, event 2, etc. so you could have a proper mapping of what happened) -- get's complex as you can imagine.
- For conversions, these will remain offer-specific, i.e. landers can't convert directly. This is important to separate the page types anyway, else landers and offers just become the same thing. We won't have custom conversion types initially but we have plans to add some global conversion type events that can be passed in JS/postbacks, such as lead, sale, cart, checkout, upsell, etc. Likely we would add generic conversion types and let you as a user give them names to be used in columns, so they would be global.
Also, we'll actually be focusing on our JS tracking as the forefront tracking mechanism for Flux, with lots of cool things in the pipeline and a goal of making it really fool-proof. I.e. you put JS on the page and it "figures it out".
Anyway, thanks for the feedback again!
Originally Posted by sprice
It sounds like you also could pass campaign name/ID as a tracking field and break down by that in reporting to solve some issues, but admittedly its not obvious to do so (hence changes in the SaaS).
In the SaaS we will also have lander/offer groups, which will come in handy -- with these you'll be able to add a single node that includes multiple landers + rotation weights so you can simplify the funnel visually and configuration-wise. These will also be global, so you could manage a single lander group that's reused across many funnels, e.g. a group like "Top iPhone X Sweeps Offers".
As for the offer cap, thanks for the insight -- we don't have a great function for this at the moment and indeed its a bit hard to do with the current funnel approach, since you can't swap out an offer to some other offer if it isn't present as a node. That then requires adding the other offer to every funnel, having a condition repeated and so on. We'll think on how to best appraoch this in the SaaS as I know offer caps are a pain in the butt and ideal if your tracker can deal with them so you don't get blindsided.
Update 1
We have had quite a few submissions to our questionnaire and as thanks we want to give one person free tracking for a year.
So, everyone who submits the questionnaire will go into the draw. One person will win a year of free tracking once we launch, to be announced whenever that comes to pass.
This will be in the form of a free credit for whatever our first plan is, so you'd get that free and if scaling above and beyond it, would have the plan's value credited on your account.
So for example if our lowest plan was $99, you'd get that for free monthly. If you needed a plan that was for example $299, your monthly charge would only be $200. So, effectively $1200 in free tracking.
Our lowest-level plan will likely be fine for most of you, and regardless you'd basically be getting free money for the year. Who doesn't like free money?
P.S. we haven't revealed our plans or pricing yet, so I am not saying our lowest plan will be $99.
The saas version looks elegant, but I prefer the self-hosted version, I hope that the self-hosted version will also add the new features.
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