Introducing Snowplow’s Marketing Attribution & Optimization Data App

Unveiling Our New Data App to Measure & Optimize Your Marketing Budget.

Today we’re delighted to announce the launch of our Marketing Attribution Data App. It is our latest solution to enable companies to operationalize their own rich, first-party behavioral data to accurately measure and optimize marketing performance. With this new data app, marketers will gain a comprehensive and unbiased view of their campaign effectiveness across multiple channels and touchpoints, powered directly from their own cloud data warehouse or lake, rather than relying on third-party cookies and analytics tools

It is estimated that businesses waste more than 25% of their marketing budget on ineffective channels and strategies, according to a study by Rakuten. This is due, in part, to cookie decay and the increasing complexity of customer journeys, which limit marketers’ visibility, making return on investment (ROI) challenging to measure. It has become more difficult than ever before to trust the data marketers see in their third-party adtech and analytics.

In the case of Google Analytics, trust is further eroded by the fact that Google has a monetary stake in the output of their attribution models since a significant portion of their revenue comes from selling paid search and display ads. Google is the ultimate fox guarding the hen house.

According to Digiday, the challenges associated with marketing attribution have led 41% of marketers to resort to simple last and first-touch attribution models to make sense of their campaign and advertising effectiveness. Both of which have several drawbacks.

Marketing and data teams need a more accurate and unbiased view of marketing performance to improve marketing ROI.

Addressing a Critical Need for Trustworthy Multi-Touch Attribution

Our new Marketing Attribution data app provides marketing teams with the multi-touch attribution models, reports, and visualizations they need to measure and optimize marketing performance by campaign and channel, powered by the first-party behavioral data in their own data warehouse or lake.

When Snowplow customers use our Marketing Attribution data app in combination with our powerful behavioral data pipeline and data management capabilities, it unlocks new business value for marketers, marketing analysts, and data scientists who support the marketing team.

• Marketers can not only improve the effects of their optimizations by adopting a more sophisticated multi-touch attribution modeling approach, but they can also rest assured knowing the underlying data is unbiased and powered by rich, first-party data stored in their own data warehouse or lake, as opposed to a third-party tool. This presents potential savings in third-party martech costs.
• Marketing analysts can move beyond overly simplistic first- and last-touch attribution models to understand marketing performance on a multi-touch attribution basis (e.g., positional, linear). This provides a more comprehensive view of marketing performance that accounts for marketing and advertising influence across all the touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Data scientists can leverage the rich, high-quality customer behavioral data that is captured and loaded into the data warehouse or lake by Snowplow. Because the data is AI-ready, data scientists can use it to build and train advanced machine learning attribution models to further improve marketing performance.

With the new data app, Snowplow customers can select which attribution model they want to use, including first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch models like linear and positional. They can also bring in channel spend information, ie: marketing and advertising cost data, by simply creating a spend source table of your choice and configure conversions using the Snowplow Unified model. Customers can also transform source tables containing transactional data into the format of the conversions table generated by the unified package.

Advanced settings permit custom transformations and logic, similar to methods employed by Google’s Last Non-Direct.

Additionally, the Marketing Attribution data app features three primary dashboards:

• Attribution Overview: Presents essential metrics related to marketing performance, including attributed revenue and conversions, campaign spend, associated ROI, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by campaign or channel.
• Path Summary: Identifies the highest-performing campaign customer journey paths by revenue and conversions.
• Model Comparisons: Conduct a side-by-side comparison of attribution models to understand how each weights credit across your channels and campaigns for conversion and eCommerce metrics.

As with all Snowplow data applications, which are built upon Snowplow’s incremental dbt model, the Marketing Attribution data app is based on the new Attribution dbt package, which means customers can ensure efficient and cost-effective queuing.

Why Trust Snowplow to Fuel Marketing Performance Measurement & Optimization?

• Accurate, first-party customer tracking & identity resolution: Snowplow ensures precise customer tracking and identification, which is essential for businesses to understand the complete customer journey. It uses first-party cookies and an array of customer identifiers to track user behavior for up to two years. Furthermore, it offers an ‘ID Service’ for unique browser identification, thereby enhancing tracking, especially when Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention is enabled
• Glass Box Approach: Snowplow takes a “glass box” philosophy. Our code is available to provide visibility into how Snowplow processes data. You can see exactly how our dbt models process your data or access the underlying data tables to power your own visualizations directly.
• Compliance and Data Ownership: We prioritize compliance and privacy, giving you full ownership over your customer behavioral data. You can control what and where the data is processed to strengthen your data and analytics strategy.
• Private Managed Deployment: Opt for Private Managed deployment, where your Snowplow pipeline is hosted in your own cloud account and VPN (AWS, GCP, or Azure). You will have complete end-to-end ownership, ensuring that your data never leaves your infrastructure.
• Data Anonymization & Consent Management: Apply IP Anonymization and PII Pseudonymization in-stream and in real time so that sensitive fields such as the user IP address don’t reach your warehouse or lake. Snowplow also provides full transparency into customer consent with its ‘basis for tracking’ contexts, allowing you to record a full GDPR context (or other regulatory framework) with every event. You can access a complete consent status in a single schema table for every user.

How to Get Started

If you would like to get started with the Marketing Attribution data app or any of our other digital analytics data apps, including Funnel Builder or User & Marketing Insights, request a full demo here or via the Snowplow console.

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