Snowplow Analytics

General usage

Behavioural data is the holy grail of data. It gives companies deep granular insight into how customers and prospects interact with products and services. These insights can be leveraged in powerful ways to make businesses grow faster.

Here are just a few ways in which behavioural data can power competitive advantages: 

Product analytics, personalisation, custom marketing attribution, content analytics, churn reduction, A/B testing, machine learning, dynamic pricing and recommendation engines.

Building and running a behavioural data platform for complex applications like marketplaces are not simple tasks though. Collecting and processing data from multiple sources across platforms and devices and then redeploying it in suitable format to different teams via their chosen applications are beyond most startups. 

Snowplow’s robust, flexible data delivery platform is a game changer that enables any company, including early-stage startups, to collect, process and distribute behavioural data at scale. It runs in a cloud environment like AWS, giving companies full ownership and control of data and the flexibility to define their own data structures, data modelling logic and data pipeline configuration.

Some of the great benefits of using Snowplow:

• Collect rich behavioural event data from any platform or product using its trackers for web, mobile, server-side apps, IoT, or chatbots.
• Up-front validation, based on your parameters, ensures high-quality data in the pipeline. Failed events (bad data) get sent to separate storage where it can be analysed to fine-tune validation parameters.
• Enrich datasets by adding complementary first-or third-party data. Enrichments can expand the scope and depth of behavioural, demographic and geographic datasets. An example would be to add the size of a subscriber’s organisation with a tool like Clerabit.
• Snowplow makes validated data available in near real-time and can be visualised with a BI tool such as Cube.js or Google Data Studio. This empowers faster decision making and can be used for real-time dashboards and dynamic personalisation.

Popularity

Snowplow was recognised in Gartner’s Cool Vendors 2020 Report as a ‘Cool Vendor in Marketing and Data Analytics’. Since its first release in 2012, there’s been steep growth in the adoption of Snowplow among the world’s top 100,000 sites:

Source: Builtwith

Marketplace benefits

CobbleWeb has developed powerful data pipelines with Snowplow. For instance, our client, Affordable Art Fair, a global marketplace for art, wanted better behavioural data for their marketing campaigns:

1. Snowplow allowed us to track specific user events, such as which product categories were viewed or which artists were added to wish lists, across applications and devices, e.g. front-and backend frameworks, mobile apps, email and ads.
2. We combined the collected data with Amazon Kinesis (captures & analyses streaming data), Google Merchant Center (for marketing automation) and Cube.js (for BI dashboards) to create their marketing data pipeline.
3. Affordable Art Fair used the data pipeline to create more targeted Google, Facebook and Pinterest ads, based on different buyer personas such as Art Lover or Art Investor. This increased user engagement 2 – 3 times.