A TASTE OF SNOWPLOW ANALYTICS

by Rob Kingston

www.optimisationbeacon.com

AGENDA

• Problems with analytics vendors today

• Introducing Snowplow Analytics

• Live demo

• Getting started with it

THERE ARE LOTS OF PROBLEMS WITH WEB ANALYTICS TODAY…

… AND THEY PREVENT US FROM DELIVERING VALUABLE INSIGHTS THAT COULD GIVE OUR BUSINESSES A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

THE STUFF OF (ANALYSTS’) NIGHTMARES

SOMETIMES COMPLEX EVENTS DON’T FIT INTO OUR TOOLS

Pageviews Events Ecommerce Social / Timing

Add to cart

Split test

trackingWeather data

Logins

Item views

Scroll reach

Form tracking

Copy Paste

Offline dataSize, Price

and Availability

External systems Click

trackingSocial

WHEN WE START GENERATING SERIOUS TRAFFIC WE’RE SOMETIMES FORCED TO

CAP OURSELVES

• … unless you go GA Premium or Site Catalyst.

Alright Google

BUSINESS RULES CHANGED: NEED TO REPROCESS DATA?

New retroactive

goal

Change to IP filters

Exclude query

parameters

Reprocess old logs with

new enrichments

Excluding erroneous

data

Forgot to capture full

referrers

New rules for

identifying users

Update session

definition

AND WHEN DATA IS PROCESSED, YOU CAN’T VALIDATE IT OR CHECK THAT IT’S OK

• “Hmmm… what’s this spike in organic traffic?”

Well… it’s not organic traffic. It should have been classified as referral

ONCE THE DATA IS ‘IN’ IT’S HARD TO GET OUT AND COMBINE WITH OTHER SOURCES• Use the Analytics API or Ask Adobe for your logs…

• Only 7 dimensions and 7 metrics at a time

Web Analytics data

Other business data

FOR HIGHER-VALUE BESPOKE ANALYSES YOU NEED TO HACK TOGETHER API

QUERIES

“My eyes!”

ENTER SNOWPLOW ANALYTICS

AN OPEN SOURCE WEB ANALYTICS PLATFORM

• Developed by Alexander Dean & Yali Sassoon since the start of 2012

• Their core users collect lots of data (billions of events)

YaliAlex

BUILT TO SCALE. SERIOUSLY.

• Can theoretically handle hundreds of millions of events per day

MODULAR DESIGN SO YOU CAN CHOP AND CHANGE COMPONENTS THAT BEST SUIT

YOUR BUSINESS

YOUR ANALYTICS DATA IN YOUR DATA WAREHOUSE

Other Business Data Web Analytics data

STRUCTURED + UNSTRUCTURED DATA (GEEK SPEAK FOR REALLY FLEXIBLE DATA

COLLECTION)

HERE ARE JUST A FEW EXAMPLES OF THE COOL THINGS IT ENABLES OUT OF THE BOX• Scroll reach heatmapping

• Total value by user, purchase latency

• Tracking split tests with enormous samples (no example, but very much possible to do)

EXCELLENT DOCUMENTATION AND AN AWESOMELY HELPFUL COMMUNITY…

• Technical guides for advanced implementations• https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Snowplow-technical-documentation

• Setup guide to get started• https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Setting-up-Snowplow

• Google Group for questions support and blue sky thinking• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/snowplow-user

PLAYS NICELY WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS, TAG MANAGER AND YOUR OTHER SCRIPTS

A PRICE TAG THAT WON’T BREAK THE BANK EITHER…

KEY SNOWPLOW TAKEAWAYS

1. Enables high-value bespoke analytics difficult to do in GA/Other vendors

2. Can be customized for many types of businesses

3. Free, open source and excellent community support

4. You own your data – and you never need to worry about sampling

5. Perfect accompaniment to a Google Analytics Standard account

QUESTIONS?Rob Kingston

www.optimisationbeacon.com