Targets are typically used for Budgets and Forecasts, and tied to specific metrics. You may add more than one target to each metric in your workspace.
View targets
Set up targets
Set up targets
Prepare your targets data
You set up targets by registering a target table from your database. Steep will read targets from this table and match them to the corresponding metric. The target table needs to follow the below format.
Target table format
| Column | Example value | Type | Description | Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| series | Budget 2022 | String | Target series name | required |
| metric | registrations | String | Metric name | required |
| time | 2022-04-01 | Date or Timestamp | Target date | required |
| value | 20000 | Numeric | Target value | required |
| dimension | Country | String | Dimension name | optional |
| dimension_value | UK | String | Dimension value | optional |
The series name can be used to set up multiple target per metric, e.g. ”Budget”, ”Budget v2”, ”Stretch budget”, that users can switch between.
The metric name is used to specify the name of the metric. Note that, if you change the name of a metric in Steep, the name needs to be updated in your target table as well.
The time column is used to specify dates that represents the start date of each period depending on the time grain. For example 2022-04-01 for April on a monthly time grain or 2022-04-04 for Week of Apr 4 on a weekly time grain.
Targets can optionally be defined for one or more dimension values. Include dimension and dimension_value in your table to define targets for a specific dimension value. It is possible to define targets for metric total in parallel with multiple dimensions and dimension values for the same target series and metric.
Target table format
| series | metric | time | value | dimension | dimension_value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-01-01 | 10000 | ||
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-04-01 | 12000 | ||
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-07-01 | 15000 | ||
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-10-01 | 20000 | ||
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-01-01 | 1500 | country | US |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-04-01 | 1500 | country | US |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-07-01 | 1500 | country | US |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-10-01 | 1400 | country | US |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-01-01 | 2000 | country | DE |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-04-01 | 2000 | country | DE |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-07-01 | 2500 | country | DE |
| Budget 2024 | registrations | 2024-10-01 | 2500 | country | DE |
Steep will automatically interpret the time grain of your target series. This is done by looking at the difference between the first two dates in each series. You can always double check that the correct time grain was interpreted by looking at the target settings page.
Note: Steep does its best to aggregate/average the defined target data between time grains dynamically so that the user always gets a target line on their chart regardless of time grain. However, this is currently not possible for Custom value and Unique count metrics. For those metric types, we recommend defining the target data in the time grain in which the metrics will be most commonly viewed.
Registering the table
To register your targets table in Steep, go to Settings → Targets → select the targets table from your database.
Target data fetched from your targets table will be cached by Steep for 1 hour. In the rare case that you want to clear the cache after a major change to the source data, you can do that manually by changing your targets table setting eg. by removing it and adding it back.
Add targets to widgets
Once you have your targets table registered you can choose to add your target to a widget on your home screen. Learn how to add a Target to a widget.
Add targets to metrics
Targets automatically show up for all metrics with a matching name
View targets
Once set up everyone can see how your metrics perform against a target while exploring a metric...
...and for widgets when the target is toggled on.
