2022Pitch

Turning presentation views into insight

This case study follows the end-to-end design of Presentation Analytics, a feature that helped teams understand what happened after they shared a presentation.

The feature launched to every Pitch Pro workspace, reached #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and became part of how fundraising, sales, and marketing teams shared their work.

OverviewThe story starts after you share

Pitch is a collaborative presentation platform. Creating the deck is only half the job. The other half starts when you share it.

Before this project, that part was invisible. You could send a presentation to anyone, but you had no idea whether they opened it, where they lost interest, or if they came back. Presentation Analytics closed that loop.

Watch the launch film on YouTube ↗

First winStarting small with Public Views

Rather than build a complete analytics platform, we launched Public Views in beta for a small group of users. It answered one question:

How many times has my presentation been viewed?

The goal was to learn whether analytics solved a real problem and what people expected from it. Every visit counted as a view. Unique visitors would come later, once the technical and privacy challenges were solved.

Public views panel over a Pitch deck showing 89 views since December 2020
Public Views wasn't the destination. It was a way to learn which analytics mattered most before building a larger platform.

ChallengesDesigning analytics people could trust

Once the beta proved the demand, the next challenge wasn't more charts. It was finding a reliable way to measure unique viewers. 100 views from one person and 100 views from 100 people mean very different things.

As a European company, Pitch had to design for privacy from day one. GDPR and ePrivacy limited how we could identify visitors, and interviews showed many creators were uncomfortable tracking recipients with cookies or personal identifiers.

How can we recognize a unique visitor without identifying who they are?

Anonymous analyticsNo cookie needed
GDPR-friendly
  • Last time opened
  • Geolocation
  • Device
  • Browser
Identified viewerRequires cookie tracking
  • Name
  • Email
  • Company
  • Viewing history
  • Cross session tracking

SolutionsRecognition without identification

The answer was a hybrid approach. Workspace members were already signed in, so they could be recognized without extra tracking. External visitors stayed anonymous, so we could measure engagement without personally identifiable information.

Know your audience empty state, explaining analytics across workspace members and public visitors
Activity view listing individual visits with named members and anonymous public visits by device and location
Workspace members could already be identified because they were authenticated, while external visitors remained anonymous.

IteratingSharing multiple links per presentation

Teams rarely shared a deck with one audience. Fundraising, sales and marketing each needed their own numbers. Custom Links gave every link its own analytics, with the same privacy model.

Custom links empty state: one presentation, multiple links, with optional passcode
Analytics for a single custom link showing 89 tracked visits by device, browser, and location
Each Custom Link collected its own engagement data, helping teams compare audiences without identifying individual public visitors.

Next upUnderstanding engagement

The MVP answered whether people wanted analytics. The next challenge was making them useful. Customer interviews kept pointing to three questions:

  • Who viewed my presentation?
  • Which slides kept their attention?
  • How did engagement differ across audiences?
Engagement panel with slide-by-slide bars, average duration, and a per-viewer breakdown
The next step was moving beyond visits to understand attention. Instead of only measuring whether someone opened a presentation, engagement analytics showed how viewers progressed through slides, how long they stayed, and where they dropped off.

EvolutionAudience & Workspace Analytics

The longer-term vision went beyond individual presentations: engagement across customers, campaigns and the whole workspace, as part of broader business reporting.

Audience and workspace analytics dashboards summarizing visits, active members, and popular presentations
The vision evolved from a single presentation to analytics across audiences, campaigns, and entire workspaces.

ResultsShipping the foundation

Presentation Analytics launched to every Pro workspace, became one of Pitch's most requested features, and reached #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. It also validated starting small: a focused MVP, real usage, then expansion.

Product Hunt launch card for Presentation Analytics by Pitch with 238 upvotes
Presentation Analytics launched to all Pro workspaces and reached #5 Product of the Day, validating both customer demand and the product direction.

ReflectionsLessons learned

When building analytics dashboard, the smallest useful release often teaches more than months of planning.

I'm proud we resisted building everything at once. Analytics looks obvious in hindsight, but every metric carries product decisions, technical tradeoffs and user trust. I left before every planned iteration shipped, but it's rewarding to see many of the concepts become part of the product.