How Welcome to the Jungle beats the ad blockers with first-party data from Snowplow

Background

Welcome to the Jungle is a media company and jobs board that connects professionals with relevant employers through its dynamic content hub. Launched in 2015, the platform has grown rapidly with almost 2 million unique monthly users and more than 3000 company profiles. 

To stand out from the crowd, Welcome to the Jungle takes an innovative approach to the job application process—using articles, videos and podcasts to attract job seekers and business professionals to its platform. 

Challenge

Enabling employers to showcase their brand to potential applicants is a core part of Welcome to the Jungle’s business model. To do that, they needed to track users reliably and collect accurate data to prove the impact of their features to potential clients. 

Feeling the limitations of Google Analytics, Welcome to the Jungle found that they could not get a full picture of individual user behavior, or a complete view of their journeys across time and platforms. They did not have access or ownership of their raw data, making it impossible to combine data sets or implement user stitching. 

Making matters worse, a high number of users were not being tracked at all. Users with ad blockers were not picked up by Google Analytics, which meant a large volume of data was not being captured. Without complete data on job application reports, calculating accurate conversion rates for clients was difficult.

Solution

Welcome to the Jungle chose Snowplow to collect granular behavioral data that they could model in their data warehouse and visualize in Metabase. 

With Snowplow, Welcome to the Jungle could circumvent ad-blockers (while respecting web visitors’ right not to be tracked) to capture complete user data, by using first-party, server-side cookies that aren’t subject to the restrictions of ITP or ad-blockers. This gave them a more complete picture of their users, which meant they no longer had to guess the true number of unique visitors to their platform. 

It was especially important for us to calculate conversion rates accurately for our clients, so they could compare us to other job boards. This wasn’t possible before Snowplow.”

AURELIEN RAYER | HEAD OF DATA AT WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Snowplow also made it possible to precisely track how users engage with content. By using ‘page pings’ to send a regular beacon every ‘n’ seconds to track time on page, Welcome to the Jungle can now measure how users interact with content—in much more detail than was previously possible. 

And, with full ownership of and flexibility with their data, Welcome to the Jungle can implement user stitching to follow individual users across different platforms and journeys. With this unified view of user behavior, they’re no longer forced to work with data sets in disparate silos, and can take these insights forward to further develop their product and enhance the user experience.

Results

Using data created with Snowplow, Welcome to the Jungle has gained a deep understanding of user behavior. Media-specific metrics such as true time engagement and scroll depth are easily accessible, and ‘page pings’ send a regular beacon to track time on page. Using insights like these, they have improved the online experience and realized significant improvements in web analytics. 

It’s finally possible for Welcome to the Jungle to calculate conversion rates accurately to share with clients and internal teams. They can now see how well job ads were performing, and offer additional services to clients who needed to boost their exposure. 

As Welcome to the Jungle expands their offering and forges ahead on their mission to redefine the modern-day ‘jobs board’, Snowplow now plays an important role in the product roadmap and supports their strong culture of data-informed innovation.

I’m really happy that Snowplow supports our entire event collection system on every platform we use today. It plays an important role in our business decisions, product roadmap … everything!”

AURELIEN RAYER | HEAD OF DATA AT WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

How you can get started with Snowplow

To learn more about how Snowplow can empower your organization with behavioral data creation, book in a chat with our team today. Alternatively, Try Snowplow is our free, easy-to-use version of our technology, which allows you to create your own behavioral data in under 30 mins.

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