Over the 4th of July, as the fireworks were dying off here on the east coast, we updated DigMyData with two features we’re really excited about launching: MailChimp integration and Story Points.

We will be detailing more about how to use Story Points to put important events in the chart to help explain why things are the way they are. Funny story about Story Points. We were talking to someone with early access (more invites coming soon!) and they asked how they could “write on the chart”. When asked what they had in mind he said, “You know – like on your website. How do I do that?” We knew we wanted to do some type of chart annotation, but because of that feedback and because Ryan Carson thought it was an effective design (at least for the homepage) we decided to just roll with that basic approach. We think it works very nicely.

Story Points are how you can capture data (ex: offline events like when you spoke at a conference or put in a placeholder for an unexpected dip). Mark and I have begun to label our own DigMyData chart at the places where lines jump up/down and with why it happened (or at least why we think it happened). Story Points we have included in our chart are: explanations for traffic jumps, new feature releases, and our sponsorship of LessConf. All together, these points begin to form a story where the real data from your business gets curated into a timeline of lessons learned.

Add a story point to a line (ex: website launch, offline marketing, policy change)

The email marketing darling MailChimp has been the follow up question for easily half of our early access users: “When will MailChimp be an option?” The standard answer it seemed was always “2 weeks out” (such is the life of a bootstrapped startup). Fortunately, we’re not getting those emails anymore as our most recent update included support for MailChimp.

MailChimp is great because so many of you out there use them to communicate with your customers to keep them informed and to drive sales. Setup is very easy; we link to a page in MailChimp, you create a key, and then paste that key in your DigMyData settings. All that is left is to select which campaign to import.

In our last week we included Google AdWords for the first time. There were a few issues that made the feature not quite as reliable as we prefer.