What is the Data API?

The Data API provides a comprehensive set of events to track various actions and changes within your community.

Who is this for?

This API is invaluable for analysts, product/course managers, and business leaders looking to study their community data in more granular detail by importing all their community data into their own data warehouse. This provides the ability to develop custom metrics and insights beyond what’s possible through in-product reporting, as well as to combine community data with other sources to get a more holistic view of your customers.

Why did we build the Data API?

Without the Data API, you can access data and insights from your Circle community in two ways:

  1. In-product dashboards: these provide an excellent standard set of insights to help you understand community performance and stay on top of major trends. However, many of our highly advanced community owners need more depth and flexibility to track metrics that are specific to their business and objectives. For these customers, until now, the only other option has been to take CSV exports of their community data
  2. CSV Exports: this option gives you more control and allows you to study your data at an extremely granular level. However, CSV exports can’t be automated and require manual work to ingest this data for analysis over and over again, and they don’t cover all the use cases that the Data API is designed for.

Some of our advanced users with programming skills or access to developers on their team also use our Admin API to extract some data. However, the main purpose of this API is to administer your community and automate actions not perform data analysis. To repurpose the Admin API to produce data is cumbersome and requires a lot of clever scripting at the customer’s end to get around its limitations. Even those willing to go the extra mile soon realize that this approach is not scalable.

To address this need and supercharge your analytics, we are designing a high-throughput, purpose-driven data API that gives you complete, automated access to all of your most important community data.

Key Benefits

  1. Up-to-date Monitoring: Track user actions and community updates as they happen.
  2. Enhanced Analytics: Gain insights into user behavior and overall performance of your community.
  3. Improved User Experience: Identify and respond to user needs, trends, and issues more quickly.
  4. Custom Integrations: Integrate with other tools and services to enhance capabilities and improve community outcomes.
  5. User Engagement Analysis: Track user interactions to understand engagement levels.
  6. Personalization: Use user activity data to personalize content and improve user experience.

Requirements

Technical Requirements

We recommend using the Circle Data API to store data in a Data Warehouse where you can transform it into any desired data models and metrics for tracking and analysis. We have made the API compatible with ETL tools such as Airbyte (recommended) or Fivetran. A typical set up this API could work as follows: