The Snowplow team has been busy this Autumn!
Our focus has been on optimizing for the ability to treat data as a product (with the emerging role of Data Product Manager taking center stage), accelerating the adoption of new data products, and opening up Snowplow’s tech to a wider range of users.
Here’s a quick rundown…
BDP Cloud Preview
BDP Cloud marks the beginning of the new Snowplow BDP portfolio, which will give Snowplow users the flexibility to choose their deployment model.
BDP Cloud offers the benefits of Snowplow’s rich and granular data without the technical demands of hosting the pipeline in your private cloud. This is designed to make advanced analytics and AI-ready data available to more businesses.
BDP Enterprise, the other deployment method, is our private SaaS offering, with which customers host the entire pipeline infrastructure in their own private cloud environment.
“Already, customers like Strava, Gousto and DPG Media are forging ahead with Data Creation using Snowplow. These new offerings will pave the way for more organizations across the globe to tap into the rich possibilities of using behavioral data to power advanced analytics and AI applications.”
President, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Nick King
BDP Cloud will be available for a select number of customers to preview before the end of 2022, with the full launch happening Q1 2023.
Data Product Accelerators
Data Product Accelerators (DPAs) are step-by-step implementation guides, created by our engineers to simplify and facilitate the deployment of best-practice data applications in record time.
Getting started with a new data application can be a daunting business, as the fully flexible nature of Snowplow’s data means you can literally take an application in any direction. DPAs are best-practice guide rails to get you started with some of the most common use cases and give you a chance to iterate on firm foundations.
The Composable CDP DPA, as an example, will use Databricks, machine learning, and Hightouch to enable the creation of a composable CDP. Organizations can use this data product to better understand all customer touchpoints and build a single customer view. Ultimately, this means using best-in-class Modern Data Stack tools on top of Snowplow ML data to enhance your understanding of user behavior and power personalization at scale.
The DPAs available now are:
- The Advanced Analytics for Web DPA
- The ML Composable CDP DPA
- The Advanced Analytics for Mobile DPA
- The Advanced Analytics for Hybrid Mobile DPA (works across mobile web and mobile apps)
There are many more to come soon, including our GDPR and marketing attribution accelerators.
Tracking Catalog
Tracking Catalog allows you to break down technical bottlenecks in your team by helping any stakeholder to easily see which events, entities and properties have been tracked in the last 90 days.
The relationship between events, entities and properties is shown in an easy-to-understand, visual format and properties are described in everyday language. This makes data fully discoverable and allows you to treat data like a product.
Previously, engineers would be called on to help stakeholders understand exactly what was being tracked, which caused delays to data projects and siloed information. Tracking Catalog enables a self-serve data culture where everyone understands the structure of the tracking and the technical bottlenecks are removed. Those in the emerging profession of Data Product Manager will also be able to get data projects moving in record time and get buy-in from the business with easy-to-interpret, non-technical information about the company’s tracking.
Tracking Catalog is only available to Summit and Ascent customers. If you are new to Snowplow book a chat to learn more; for exisiting customers, please reach out to customer success.
“Tracking Catalog should allow us to review the graph of events and entities holistically – with the goal being to review our tracking architecture and increase the quality of our event collection. It can also provide a non-technical view to our Product Managers – helping them understand what events they are collecting on the product.”
Auto Trader, Engineering Platform and Data Director
Other releases you might have missed
Scala Tracker 2.0.0
– A shiny new version of the Scala tracker comes with some breaking changes, as it’s now compatible with Cats Effect 3!
– Along with this, http4s has been bumped to resolve some security vulnerabilities.
Iterable Tag for GTM-SS v0.2.0
Similarly to the latest Amplitude and Braze GTM-SS Tags, in this release:
– The Snowplow Event Context Rules configuration section has slightly changed to allow excluding an entity from the Iterable payload and specifying whether the configured mapping applies to all versions of that entity.
– The Logs Settings configuration section is introduced following the standardized logging format.
– This release also fixes the enabling condition of the userId in Identity Settings.
IOS and Android Mobile Trackers version 4.0.0 and WebView Tracker
– WebView Tracker enables passing events to the iOS and Android trackers from embedded Web views.
– These releases bring two exciting new features to the trackers: support for hybrid apps, and anonymous tracking.
– The mobile trackers have enhancements such as: adding interfaces to subscribe for events tracked in Web views, adding anonymous tracking features, and returning tracked event IDs from the track method.
As always, please reach out on Discourse or via your customer success representative if you have any questions about these releases, or to send us feedback.
Good luck!
The Snowplow team
