These days, plenty of channels and numerous techniques are available for marketing. However, if not knowing what works best for your business, you might end up just wasting your resources.

Some of the challenges that businesses face sound like:

“Our customers use various touch points before purchasing (e.g. web, app, in-store, over the phone) and we don’t have a single customer view. Therefore, we can’t effectively group our users.

We released an app and see that it’s being downloaded, however, users are not buying on it. This gives the impression we’re losing revenue.

We don’t have a clear picture of how our marketing expenditures across different channels affect revenue.”

For a marketing team, it is extremely important to figure out which of the methods they use should be prioritized, which ones renounced, and which optimized. How to do it? By collecting and analyzing data on user journeys.

In this article, we will talk about Snowplow, one of the most powerful user data collection tools.

What is Snowplow?

Snowplow is an open-source clickstream data collection tool.

It allows you to collect data from your website, app, and server, as well as third-party data, such as email openings, or customer events captured in your CRM system.

Some examples of the events that you can track include page views, link clicks, searches, email openings. The events are tracked with 130 properties, such as user IDs, device and platform information, webpage information, marketing parameters. Besides events, you can track entities. Entities are attached to events and describe the environment in which events take place. For example, for the “search” event, entities are search results. Some other examples of entities include user, product, transaction.

Do note, however, that Snowplow only collects the raw data. Its processing pipeline captures, cleanses, enriches, and saves all the information (as shown in the picture below). It doesn’t analyze the data giving back easy to interpret reports and graphs. How you use this data depends on your data team (further we present some ideas).

How to use the data?

Snowplow provides a very rich set of data, so the possibilities of using it are only limited by your needs, imagination, and team expertise.

Below we will talk about some of the ways in which you can apply the data.

User engagement on the website, mobile, and offline

Web and mobile data are collected in the same format, both with a session and a user ID. Using this data, you may answer questions like:

• Which pages are more visited?
• How do users engage with the site/app? With which features do they engage more?
• What products are the most popular?
• Which category of users looks at which products?
• Which users bring the most value?
• Are we getting repeat users?

In addition to online data, Snowplow (using server-side tracking) can pull the data from your CRM. Thus, you can track purchases made over the phone or in-store purchases that are logged in the CRM.

You can track data from other third-party platforms, for example, subscribe events to your mailing list in MailChimp, or social media clicks.

Joining all this data allows you to track user journeys even before customers have identified themselves (for example, ad clicks). Internal user ID and third-party cookies facilitate this.

Marketing attribution models

With the data on your users’ behavior, you can build attribution models in order to optimize marketing expenditures and conversion rates. If you’re not well-familiar with attribution models, you can get a solid basic understanding from this article.

While there are several standard attribution model types, access to the underlying data enables the analysts to build fully custom models that would suit the exact needs of the particular business.

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis helps to understand how users move through different workflows on your platforms. The workflows might be:

• A sign-up process
• Buying a product
• Paying a bill
• Making a return
• Researching some question

As a business, obviously, you want to know where customers drop without performing the desired outcome.
The funnels help to:

• Identify the steps that users take along the flow
• Identify the set of users at the beginning of that funnel
• Define users who drop out at each step in the funnel
• Figure out what caused the user to drop out of the funnel

Such insights can help a team to find ways to maximize conversions where possible.

More advanced ways to use the data

In case your data team is large enough and has experienced, you may go further and:

• Set up marketing automation (for example, send some marketing emails or display an ad when user behavior corresponds to some conditions)
• Set up anomaly detection (as Snowplow streams data real-time, it makes it possible to quickly detect some functions of your site or app not working as usual, therefore, you can react to it quicker and fix timely)
• Predict and prevent frauds
• Detect and fulfil unmet customer needs (by carefully analysing user sentiment from their actions and searches)

What are the benefits of Snowplow?

• Full control of the processing pipeline and the data
• Full customization. You get good quality raw data and can do whatever you want with it without being limited by out of the box offerings
• Snowplow data is very rich, so you can get a very deep understanding of your users
• Data is available in real-time
• Data from all your platforms and 3rd party sources is stored in the same place and structured similarly
• Cheaper than GA360 or Adobe Analytics
• Tools for GDPR compliance

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If you plan to implement user behavior analytics in your eCommerce business, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation. ISDK has a solid experience of setting up various analytical platforms, including Snowplow (see our latest case).