In this article you'll learn:
- How to use the Interaction Explorer
- The differences in Channel Type
- How to apply filters to the data
- How to explore specific threads within the Interaction Explorer
One of the key tools made available to you through the Player XP platform is our Interaction Explorer. As previously mentioned, we see our Interaction Explorer as a powerful feed of all of your community interactions inside one easy-to-use location.
From within the Interaction Explorer, you can keep track of individual comments, threads and reviews towards your game, filter the results to identify exact feedback towards specific topics and view only the most extreme comments from your community.
One important note about the Interaction Explorer, you may see that the Interaction Explorer appears throughout the Dynamic Report dashboard and has a link on our main menu. The key difference you are seeing here is that when the Interaction Explorer is present within a page on the Dynamic Report (on a Topic for example) the context of the Interaction Explorer has been set. In practice, this means that a pre-set filter based on the page content you are viewing has been set i.e. a category, channel type or topic filter may already be set.
Interactions:
Firstly, we'll recap just what an "Interaction" is when we talk about it throughout Player XP. To us, an Interaction is any piece of content left on any of your monitored data sources. It could be a post on social media, a thread on Reddit or a User Review left on a digital storefront. To us, calling these "Interactions" avoids any headaches around confusing terminology of posts, comments, reviews, threads, responses etc... and makes a single metric that you can measure and keep track of throughout your time using Player XP.
Using the Interaction Explorer:
For this guide, we're going to focus on the behaviour of the Interaction Explorer when viewing it for the first time as a standalone feature - accessed by clicking the corresponding button below from within the Hub page.
By clicking this button you should see the following page load, this page will load with the date ranges pre-set to the last 7 days, so if you need to explore a different time frame then you can do so using the date picker.
At the moment, if your screen looks like the above with various Online Community threads displayed but ranked in order of volume of Interactions, this means your 'Sort By' filter is set to Most Discussed. If you would like to change the Interaction Explorer to view your most recent Interactions then set the 'Sort By' filter to 'Newest' (found at the bottom of the filters on the left of the Interaction Explorer).
Applying Filters and Seeing Aggregates:
Now that you've applied the 'Newest' sorting method, the next step is to start to filter the data in the feed to find the Interactions that fit your query. Whenever you apply any of the filters from the Filters menu, the results in the Explorer update. This means that you'll start to see aggregations change, Interactions that do not fit the filter become hidden and counts start to reduce as you filter out various Interactions.
A good example of this can be seen at the top of the Interaction Explorer where an aggregate sentiment score is presented alongside a count showing how many Interactions fit within your custom filters. For example, if we are to apply a filter to our sentiment to only show the most negative comments, then we see the overall sentiment score shown in the Interaction Explorer above change from -2 to -86 (makes sense right? Because we are filtering out all of the positive Interactions).
We also see the volume of Interactions reduces from 149,211 to 14,558. Once you have applied your filters, you should then start to focus down the feed to locate any specific feedback you are looking for.
Changing the Channel:
As you may have already seen when using Player XP or reading through these articles, we classify Interactions into three different pots - User Reviews, Online Communities & Social. This is because Interactions within these Channel types often have different contexts around them and the type of discussion that takes place can be very different.
The most apparent place of this is within the Interaction Explorer. The explorer defaults to your most discussed channel type, in the example above, this is Social, however, if you wish to change the Channel type then simply select a new Channel from the Channel dropdown filter. You'll see that when you change the filter, the sources available to include/exclude also update to reflect the selected Channel.
Once you do change the channel type you'll see the feed of the Interactions change to reflect the type of Interaction you are viewing. For User Reviews and certain Social sources, you'll see individual interactions, whereas, with Online Communities and the majority of Social Interactions, you'll see that they are grouped into the threads or posts they come from within their original sources.
Expanding a Thread:
Now that you've learnt how to change the Channel type to view all of your Interactions, the final area left to cover is how to view Interactions for specific threads within Online Communities or Social Interactions.
Unlike when viewing User Review Interactions, we collate all Interactions that have been left in specific threads & posts into a single element. This is because otherwise, you would see a lot of noise in the feed so our aim here is to make life easier for you when evaluating the response to a certain thread or area of your game.
It's important to flag that any filter applied on the left-hand side of the Interaction Explorer is taken into account within the threads so you may see certain Interactions become hidden and not included in aggregations on a per-thread basis.
To explore the individual Interactions that make up a thread, simply click the title of the thread or hit the 'Explore' button (as seen below).
Once clicked, you should then see a modal popup showing key tracking metrics for the thread and all of the Interactions within that thread. From within here, you can toggle to see the Filtered Interactions and All the Interactions we've collected. Oh, and a small tip, if you would like to view the thread within the original source (to respond directly to someone for example), click the export icon in the top right of the modal (highlighted in the image below) and you'll find the source open in a new tab.
Moving Forward:
Now you've started working with the Interaction Explorer, you can start to add a wide array of filters to your data to view custom feeds of your Interaction data and answer any specific queries you may have. If you would like to learn how to use the other key features within the Player XP dashboard then check out more of our helpdesk.