Compare does two things. It can split one metric into a series per segment, account, campaign, tactic, or dimension, or set it against the previous period. It can also collapse the gap between two of them into a single uplift line.

Uplift is for when the gap is the thing you're tracking, like whether Pro plan users adopt a feature more often than Starter plan users, or whether this month is running ahead of last.

Compare is available on Metrics cards only.

Dashboards are part of the Appcues App, which is in beta and rolling out gradually. If you don't see the Appcues App for your account yet, it hasn't been enabled. See Introducing the Appcues App for more.

Prerequisites

• A Metrics card. See Add cards to a dashboard.
• For a segment, account, campaign, or tactic comparison, the items you want to compare already exist.

Turn on Compare

1. Open a Metrics card in the card builder and choose a Metric. See Add cards to a dashboard to learn about Metrics.
2. Turn on the Compare toggle. The comparison settings appear below it.
3. Choose what to compare by:

• Segments — one series per segment.
• Accounts — one series per account.
• Campaigns — one series per campaign.
• Tactics — one series per tactic.
• Dimensions — adds a Select dimension… dropdown offering Page, Platform, Locale, OS, Browser, or Domain.
• Previous Period — the same metric over the window before this one.

4. Add the items you want, using the button that matches your choice: + Add segment, + Add account, + Add campaign, or + Add tactic. Click the X beside an item to remove it. Dimensions and Previous Period have nothing to add.
5. Click Save card. Each item is drawn as its own series.

• Leave Compare off for a single series.
• Big value cards accept only Previous Period. The other comparison options aren't available on them.
• Platform, OS, and Browser are only recorded on events generated through the Appcues SDKs, so a breakdown by any of the three leaves out events sent another way.
• Domain groups a card by domain without offering a list of specific values to filter to.
• The Locale, Platform, OS, and Browser options here are card-level breakdowns, separate from the dashboard filters of the same names that scope every card at once. See Analytics dashboards overview for those.

Compare to the previous period

Previous period answers pre and post questions: how this month's Key Moment conversion rate is doing against last month's, or whether feature usage moved after a release.

1. Add a Metrics card and choose a Metric and an Event.
2. Turn on the Compare toggle.
3. Choose Previous Period from the comparison dropdown. There is nothing to add, since the comparison is the same metric over an earlier window.
4. Click Save card.

The comparison window matches the length of your current date range and ends the day before it starts. A dashboard set to Last 30 days compares against the 30 days before that. Change the dashboard's date range and the comparison window moves with it.

How it draws depends on the visualization:

• Timeseries and Bar chart — the previous period appears as a second series alongside the current one.
• Big value — the card shows uplift against the previous period instead of two separate numbers.

Show the difference as uplift

Uplift turns two series into one line: the gap between them.

1. Add a Metrics card and choose a Metric. Uplift works with any metric. Conversion rate is the usual choice, since uplift means more as a rate than as a raw count.
2. Under Events, set the events the metric applies to. For Conversion rate, event 1 is the numerator, the thing you're counting, and event 2 is the denominator, the group you're counting it out of, with a ÷ shown between them in the builder. Leave event 2 empty to use the default denominator, shown as All users.
3. Turn on the Compare toggle.
4. Choose Segments, Accounts, Campaigns, Tactics, or Previous Period. Uplift works with all five, but not with Dimensions.
5. Set Show as uplift, directly under the Compare toggle, to % for the relative difference or # for the absolute difference. The chart switches from one line per item to a single uplift line, and the item rows are replaced by two labeled fields.
6. Pick the group you're measuring in Selected. Leave Compared to on Everyone to measure that group against everyone, or pick a second group to compare it against. Previous Period has nothing to choose.
7. Click Save card.

Confirm it worked

• The chart draws a single line instead of one per item.
• The y-axis switches to percentages when you pick %.
• Hovering a point shows Uplift (%) or Uplift (#) with the value for that date.

What the uplift line is comparing

Say the metric is Conversion rate with a Report exported event over All users, and with Pro plan users in Selected and Starter plan users in Compared to.

For each day in the range, Appcues works out the conversion rate separately for each segment. The denominator is the segment's users who had any event that day, not everyone in the segment. It then plots the gap between the two as a single line.

On a day when 180 of the 600 Pro plan users with any event exported a report, and 120 of the 1,200 Starter plan users with any event did, the two rates are 30% and 10%. The line plots a gap of 20 percentage points, and Starter plan is the baseline because it's in Compared to.

A comparison like this describes a difference between two groups. It doesn't tell you what caused the difference, because the two groups differ in more than the thing you're measuring. Pro plan users pay more and use the product more, so they were already likelier to export a report. The same limit applies to comparing users who saw a campaign against users who didn't, since the ones who saw it had qualified for its targeting and reached the page that triggered it. See How to measure campaign success.

What All users counts

An empty event slot reads All users, and that means every user with at least one event in the dashboard's date range. It isn't everyone in your product. Anyone with no events in the window is left out. To measure against users who were active in your app, set event 2 to session_started.

Which item is the baseline

The group in Compared to is the baseline, the one you measure from. The group in Selected is the one measured against it. The builder says so in the helper copy under the two fields.

Leaving Compared to on Everyone measures your selected group against every user with any event in the window, the same population as the All users denominator.

Swapping the two flips the sign. Putting the weaker group in Selected gives a negative uplift, because it's underperforming the baseline.

Example: put account Northwind in Selected and account Contoso in Compared to, on a teammate invited conversion rate. On a day when 9 of the 120 Northwind users with any event invited someone and 22 of Contoso's 200 did, the rates are 7.5% and 11%, so the gap is -3.5 percentage points and the line sits below zero.

A negative sign means the selected group converted less often than the baseline. It doesn't mean anything dropped over time.

Previous Period is the exception, because there are no groups to choose. The baseline is always the earlier window. A positive uplift means the current period is outperforming the one before it, and a negative uplift means it's behind.

Reading percentage and absolute uplift

With #, the line is the plain difference between the two values, written as a decimal. On the Pro and Starter card above, 30% against a 10% baseline puts the line at 0.2, meaning 20 percentage points. For a count metric it's the difference in the count.

With %, the same gap is divided by the baseline. Switch that card to % and it reads 200%, because the 20-point gap is twice the baseline's own 10% rate, so Pro plan users exported three times as often.

A negative value means the selected group converted less often than the baseline. The Northwind card reads -0.035 as # and about -32% as %.

To see each item plotted separately instead, leave Show as uplift unselected. The card then draws one line per item.

If an uplift percentage looks implausible

Check both groups' own conversion rates for that day before reading anything into the number.

Because % divides by the baseline, it spikes whenever the baseline is near zero. Dividing by a very small number produces a very large percentage, so a baseline segment that converted one user out of four hundred on a given day can push the uplift into the thousands without anything meaningful having happened. Against that 0.25% baseline, a selected group converting at 2.7% reads as 981%.

A small selected group does the same thing. If it has only a few hundred users, two or three of them converting on a quiet day moves its own rate enough to push the percentage into the hundreds, even when the baseline is steady. Compare a small segment against a large one and expect the line to be spiky.

Two ways to tell the difference:

• Switch Show as uplift to # to see the absolute gap. A large % next to a tiny # means you're looking at small numbers on one side or the other, not a large real difference.
• Leave Show as uplift unselected to plot both segments separately and look at the baseline directly.

In the other direction, a negative percentage bottoms out at -100%, the point where the selected group's rate is zero.

Day-to-day movement in an uplift line on small segments is mostly noise. The card doesn't show a confidence interval, so no single day's value is evidence on its own. Widen the dashboard's date range, or read the trend across the whole window rather than any one point.

If you don't see Show as uplift

Confirm the Compare toggle is on, and that you're comparing Segments, Accounts, Campaigns, Tactics, or Previous Period. Show as uplift isn't available for Dimensions.

If a card shows no data at all, see Analytics dashboards overview.