Exploring Events with the Explore Tab

What Explore is for

Explore is the ad-hoc query surface in StretchAnalytics. When a saved report or the overview doesn't answer your exact question, Explore lets you slice the raw event stream yourself — no SQL required. You choose an event, pick how to measure it, group it by a property, bucket it over time, and set a date range.

The four inputs

Every Explore query is built from four choices:

1. Event (name) — the event to analyze, such as page_view, cta_click, or form_submission.
2. Metric — how to measure it. count is the live measure available today. sum:<field> and avg:<field> are part of the query language and become available when your workspace runs the high-volume analytics engine.
3. Group by — the property to break results out by. Supported options are brand, site, page_path, cta_name, and country.
4. Bucket — group results over time by hour or day. If you set a bucket, results are returned per time bucket instead of per group.

You can also set a from and to date range to bound the query.

What you get back

A query returns a set of rows — one per group or per time bucket — each with a group label, a value, and a count. It also reports events scanned, so you know how much data went into the answer. Results are capped so the query stays fast.

Step-by-step: which pages get the most views

1. Open the Explore tab.
2. Set Event to page_view.
3. Leave Metric as count.
4. Set Group by to page_path.
5. Set a date range (for example the last 30 days).
6. Run the query. Rows come back ordered by value, so your top pages are at the top.

Step-by-step: traffic by day

1. Set Event to page_view.
2. Set Bucket to day.
3. Leave Group by empty.
4. Set your date range.
5. Run. You now have a per-day time series you can eyeball for trends or seasonality.

Step-by-step: CTA clicks by country

1. Set Event to cta_click.
2. Set Group by to country.
3. Run. The country breakout reads from the event's metadata, so unknown locations are grouped as unknown.

Example

An analyst suspects a specific site is driving most conversions. She sets Event to form_submission, Group by to site, and a 14-day range. One site accounts for 71% of submissions. She switches Group by to page_path to find the exact page, then switches Bucket to day to confirm the trend is rising, not a one-day spike. Three quick queries, no spreadsheet.

Tips

• Start broad (group by site), then narrow (group by page_path) to drill from the big picture to the specific cause.
• Use Bucket = day for trends and Group by for composition — switching between them answers different questions.
• count is the reliable live metric today. Reach for sum: and avg: when your workspace has the analytics engine enabled.
• Found something useful? Save it as a report view so you never rebuild the query.

Troubleshooting

My query returns no rows. The event name may not exist for your organization in that window. Double-check the exact event name (for example page_view, not pageview) and widen the date range.

Group values are all unknown. The grouping property isn't populated on those events. For country, that means location metadata wasn't captured; try grouping by page_path or site instead.

sum: or avg: returns counts. Those metrics require the high-volume analytics engine. Until it's enabled for your workspace, Explore computes counts.