# About reports

Learn about Airship's built-in reports for projects and messages, Performance Analytics for custom reporting, and how engagement data is collected and structured.

Airship provides engagement data in out-of-the-box reports and Performance Analytics. You can also export your project data using our streaming service. Use these resources to extrapolate information about your audience and how they interact with your messages. This helps you understand how to engage with your customers and users in more meaningful ways.

## Aggregate and message-level reports

Projects have default aggregate engagement reports and individual message reports:

* [Engagement Reports](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/engagement/)
* [Message Reports](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/message/) — Includes [Message A/B Test](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/experimentation/a-b-tests/messages/) variants and messages in [Sequences](https://www.airship.com/docs/reference/glossary/#sequence)
* [Scene Reports](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/messaging/in-app-experiences/scenes/create/scene-reports/)

Sequences also have a [Performance report](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/messaging/messages/sequences/performance/).

## Goals and experiment reports

*Goals* are selected events that generate a set of performance reports. Goal event attribution appears in message reports. You can also use Goals for measurement in Holdout Experiments and Feature Flag A/B tests. See [Goals](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/goals/).

Each of your experiments generates reports so you can evaluate their performance. See the reports information for each type in [Experimentation](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/experimentation/).

## Performance Analytics

*Performance Analytics* is a customizable marketing intelligence tool that provides access to reports and graphs based on engagement data. You can build your own reports, customize existing ones, and export the data.

While the [Engagement Reports](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/engagement/) convey long-term trends within your app, Performance Analytics provides more immediate data (in windows of up to 13 months) with finer granularity and options to customize the data you want to see. Unlike standard message reports, you can determine what data is relevant to your needs, by audience, event, and other dimensions. You can save your reporting criteria and dashboards, so you always see the data relevant to you and can easily share your insights with others.

You can export Performance Analytics reports as downloadable CSV files. For example, you might download a report of users who executed a specific Custom Event, and then [upload the CSV as a static list](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/audience/segmentation/audience-lists/uploaded/) and send notifications to those specific users.

See [Getting Started with Performance Analytics](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/analytics/navigating/).

## Real-Time Data Streaming (RTDS)

*Real-Time Data Streaming* is a service that delivers user-level events in real time to your backend or third-party systems using the Data Streaming API. While RTDS is not a report format, it can be used as a data source for reports using third-party tools. See [Real-Time Data Streaming](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/real-time-data-streaming/) and our [integrations](https://www.airship.com/docs/integrations/).

> **Note:** Performance Analytics can provide data across a group of projects belonging to the same
> organization. Real-Time Data Streaming provides access to event streams per individual app. You cannot get events across multiple apps in the same data stream.


## Data collection

Airship retrieves engagement data from user interaction with the [SDK](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/getting-started/developers/sdk-api/), which is required for mobile and web channels. This data falls into three main categories of event types:

* **User-initiated action**, such as opening/closing your app, tapping a push notification
* **Device responding to an environment change**, such as encountering a beacon
* **Experience-changing actions initiated by app publisher**, such as a push send

We also gather information from SMS, email, and open channels. However, because these channels do not use the SDK, they cannot return some of the advanced usage information that you can get from your apps and websites.

See the following resources:

* [Data collection references](https://www.airship.com/docs/reference/data-collection/)
* [Data Collection for the Web SDK](https://www.airship.com/docs/developer/sdk-integration/web/data-collection/)
* [Data Collection for Email](https://www.airship.com/docs/developer/api-integrations/email/data-collection/)

## Named Users and advanced data

While [Performance Analytics](#performance-analytics) and [Real-Time Data Streaming](#real-time-data-streaming-rtds) do show channel data and return events for individual channels, much of Airship's advanced data, including orchestration and predictive features, requires [Named Users](https://www.airship.com/docs/reference/glossary/#named_user). We recommend implementing Named Users to get the most from your data analysis.

Named Users improve your data analysis in these ways:

* Airship uses Named Users to triangulate behaviors for groups of channels representing individuals in your audience, since each [Channel ID](https://www.airship.com/docs/reference/glossary/#channel_id) represents one of many ways that the same user might access your app or service.

* Determining behavior by Named User rather than by Channel ID produces higher-resolution data, down to the individual user rather than per device.

* We expose the Named Users and associated analytics data in Performance Analytics and the event stream, helping you determine how to maximize the impact of your notifications for your real users, not just on an abstracted group of channels.

## Activity Log

The [Activity Log](https://www.airship.com/docs/guides/reports/activity-log/) provides a unified list of messaging activity from both the dashboard and API. It shows what messages were sent, when, and to which channels and audiences, serving as an operational audit trail of your project's messaging activity.