Pivot tables

A pivot table answers questions that have two things in them at once — "how many signups, by campaign and by plan?" It puts one of them down the side, the other across the top, and the number for each combination where they meet.

A bar chart can only really show you one of the two. A pivot table shows both, so you can read a single row, compare a whole column, and spot the one combination that stands out.

Use cases

Pivot tables are useful whenever you want to compare two things at the same time. Typically, the questions you can answer with one look like this:

Acquisition and marketing

• Which campaigns bring in customers on our most expensive plans — not just the most signups?
• Does a channel that works well in one country work anywhere else?

Product

• Which features does each type of customer actually use?
• Is a new feature being adopted evenly across platforms, or carried by just one?

Experimentation

• Did the winning variant win everywhere, or only in a couple of markets?

When you can use a pivot table

The Pivot table chart type is available on every segmentation insight:

• on an Overall segmentation your segment needs at least one breakdown — the whole date range is summed up into one number per cell;
• on a trend (daily, weekly, monthly, ...) breakdowns are optional — the time periods give the table its second dimension.

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Pivot tables are not available for funnel, retention, or journey insights. Switching between Overall segmentation and a trend keeps the pivot table; only the axes on offer change.

If your segment contains more than one event, all of them need the same breakdowns. See When Mitzu can't build the pivot table below.

Creating a pivot table

1. Build a segmentation insight as usual and add one or more breakdowns.
2. Pick the measurement type: Overall segmentation for one number per cell, or a trend for one row per period.
3. Click the Pivot table icon in the chart type row.
4. Choose which breakdown you want across the top, using the dropdown that appears to the right of the chart type icons.

Choosing what goes across the top

The dropdown to the right of the chart type icons decides how your breakdowns are arranged. It shows your current choice, for example Columns: Plan.

• Breakdowns in rows — nothing goes across the top. Each breakdown becomes its own column on the left, and you get a flat list with one row per combination.
• Columns: <breakdown> — that breakdown goes across the top. Any other breakdowns stay on the left as labels.

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Only one breakdown can go across the top. If you have three breakdowns and put one across the top, the other two appear as two label columns on the left.

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Choose the breakdown with fewer values for the top. A breakdown with 4 values gives you 4 readable columns; one with 200 values gives you a table you have to scroll sideways forever.

You can also use a breakdown set for the whole insight in the Break downs panel, not just one set on a single event. Both kinds appear in the same dropdown.

Trends: the time periods are one more axis

On a trend the periods join your breakdowns as an axis of their own, named after the granularity — Day, Week, Month and so on.

• By default the periods run down the rows, oldest first. A daily trend over 90 days is a 90-row table you can page through, not a 90-column one you have to scroll sideways.
• If the insight has exactly one breakdown, Mitzu puts that breakdown across the top for you the moment you switch to the pivot table: one row per period, one column per plan, country or whatever you broke down by. This is the layout most people paste into a spreadsheet.
• With two or more breakdowns everything starts in the rows, and you pick what goes across the top.
• Columns: Week (or Day, Month, ...) puts the periods across the top instead, with every breakdown in the rows. It reads well for short ranges at a coarse granularity — twelve months, eight quarters — and gets wide quickly on daily data.

Previous-period comparison, rolling averages and cumulative sums are switched off while the pivot table is showing; the table holds the plain numbers of the current range only. Your settings are remembered rather than discarded — switch back to a line or bar chart and they apply again.

Reading the table

The header has two rows. The top one tells you which event the numbers belong to and what is being counted — Unique users, Event count, and so on. The row underneath lists the values of the breakdown you put across the top.

Bars behind the numbers show you how big each value is, so you can scan the table without reading every digit. Each event gets its own scale, so bar lengths are worth comparing within an event but not across two of them.

A grey dot (·) in a cell means that combination simply didn't happen — nobody on the enterprise plan came in through that campaign, for example. It is not the same as a zero.

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Don't confuse the dot with <n/a>, <empty> and <not set>, which you will see as row labels or column headings rather than inside cells. Those are real groups, holding the users whose property had no value. The dot means a missing combination; those labels mean a missing property value.

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Rows start out sorted by the first column of numbers, largest first. On a trend with the periods in the rows they are in date order instead, and with the periods across the top each row is sorted by its row total.

The values across the top are sorted sensibly for what they are: numbers in numerical order, dates in chronological order, everything else alphabetically. The <n/a>, <empty> and <not set> groups always come last, so your real values stay together at the front.

Sorting, filtering and paging

Click any column header to sort by it: once for ascending, again for descending, a third time to return to the original order. Numbers sort as numbers, not as text.

Below the header is a row of Filter boxes, one per column. Type in one to keep only the rows containing that text. If you fill in more than one box, a row has to match all of them to stay. The counter underneath the table tells you how many rows are left.

The insights page shows 20 rows at a time. Dashboard cards and the agent's chat show fewer, depending on how much room they have.

Totals and averages

When a breakdown is across the top, a second dropdown lets you add a summary column.

• No totals — the default.
• Totals column — adds a Total column that adds up the row.
• Average column — adds an Average column with the average of the row, ignoring empty cells.

The summary column sits on the far right, with grey bars rather than coloured ones. It is almost always the biggest number in the row, so giving it the same colouring would flatten every other bar in the table.

caution

A row total is not always the number you want. Hover the summary column header and Mitzu tells you which of these apply to your insight:

• If your table contains more than one event, the total adds those different events together.
• If you are counting unique users, someone who appears in two columns is counted in both. A row total of 100 does not mean 100 different people — it is the sum of each column's own count.
• On a trend with the periods across the top, the same applies to someone active in two periods.

On a trend the useful summary depends on the orientation. With a breakdown across the top, Total is the period's total across the breakdown values. With the periods across the top, Total adds up the whole range and Average gives the average per period — the same number the standard table shows in its AVG column.

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Changing what goes across the top, or switching totals on, does not send a new query to your data warehouse. The table dims and a Run button appears; clicking it rearranges the data Mitzu already has, so it costs you nothing.

Formulas

Formulas work with pivot tables. The formula gets its own set of columns next to the events it is built from, and your breakdowns are kept.

When Mitzu can't build the pivot table

Every event in your segment has to be broken down by the same properties. The order you added them in doesn't matter, but the properties themselves do. If one event is broken down by Plan and another by Plan interval, there is no sensible grid to build.

When that happens, Mitzu shows a Pivot unavailable badge, hides the pivot dropdowns, and falls back to the standard table so you still get your numbers.

To fix it, give every event the same breakdowns — or set the breakdown once for the whole insight in the Break downs panel, which applies it to all of them at once.

Exporting

CSV

The Export button below the table downloads it as mitzu-export.csv.

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The CSV contains every row of the result, not just the page you happen to be looking at.

Image and clipboard

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Image exports, dashboard thumbnails and emailed reports show at most 12 columns of numbers. When a pivot is wider than that, each metric keeps its latest periods — or its first values, for a text breakdown — and a note under the table says how many columns were left out.

Download chart and Copy chart to clipboard in the More menu give you the pivot table as an image. This is also what gets embedded into dashboard PDFs and email reports.

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Images can only show the first 25 rows, with a + N more rows note at the bottom telling you how many were left out. Use the CSV export when you need the whole table.

Pivot tables elsewhere in Mitzu

Dashboards. A saved pivot table appears as a table on your dashboard card. Since there is no chart version of a pivot table, that card has no chart/table switch. Scheduled dashboard reports and alert emails include it as a table too.

Shared insights. Insights you share publicly show the full table, including the two-row header and the totals column.

The Mitzu agent. You can just ask for one: "show me subscriptions by plan and sign-up source as a pivot table". The agent will also choose a pivot table on its own when you ask an overall segmentation question with two or more breakdowns, because a grid is easier to read than a bar chart with dozens of groups stacked into it. See the Analytics Agent page for more.

Limits

Limit	Value
Breakdowns you can put across the top	1
Rows shown per page on the insights page	20
Rows in an image or PDF export	25, then a + N more rows note
Rows returned from your warehouse	20,000, then a Trimmed results badge appears
Length of a single breakdown value	400 characters, then it is shortened

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Bar and line charts only draw the top 10 breakdown values, to stay readable. That limit does not apply to pivot tables — a breakdown with 15 values gives you all 15 rows.