Introducing Tracking Scenarios: Snowplow’s new tracking plan

Snowplow has just released a powerful new tracking plan feature called ‘Tracking Scenarios’ for BDP Enterprise and Cloud. With this specification for your data and tracking requirements, your tracking designers can fully communicate their intentions to your devs, engineers, and analysts.

Why are tracking plans important?

We generally see teams follow a workflow similar to the diagram below:

Tracking specification is the stage at which having a centralized definition of your tracking intentions becomes critical. With this useful functionality, teams can step away from ad-hoc spreadsheets and move towards creating collaborative living documentation, which evolves with your tracking. Tracking Scenarios can bring different stakeholders together and ensure that the tracking correctly reflects product requirements and broader strategic initiatives. 

How Tracking Scenarios enhances workflows

Tracking Scenarios works as a tracking plan to make sure that your team is communicating from a central source of truth. To date, we have seen many teams adopting spreadsheets to define their events and entities, however, these often lack the appropriate detail and perspective and do not provide a list of automated instructions to ensure that your front-end devs implement tracking correctly. Furthermore, spreadsheets are very poor when it comes to sharing and versioning information, which can cause confusion. With Tracking Scenarios, event definitions are carefully versioned for better accountability, and the software allows for collaboration, sign-off from multiple stakeholders, and effective execution. Creating tracking is a project which requires input from many different team members, so ensuring that communication is seamless is essential.

Creating data contracts with Tracking Scenarios

Tracking Scenarios can be used both in Snowplow data management UI and API. When using the API, a front-end developer can get all the information contained in the plan back as a structured JSON, which can then be used to create unit tests or continuous integration tests on their tracking implementation. This means there is an automated way of checking whether the intention of the tracking designers was actually implemented and this forms a data contract which is observed at various stages of tracking development.

Features of Tracking Scenarios

With Tracking Scenarios, you can:

• See how, when, and where an event should be fired.
• Define how your events and entities are connected.
• Create detailed implementation instructions to dictate how each event property should be populated.
• Add entities to each event for contextual tracking, including your own custom entities.
• Share draft scenarios with team members for feedback or approval.
• Make implementation of tracking faster by publishing scenarios, so your data engineers know precisely what tracking to implement.

If you are not yet a Snowplow customer, book a chat to find out how we can help your data team collaborate more effectively.

Customers can find Tracking Scenarios in the Data Structures section of the Snowplow UI or go to the Tracking Scenarios documentation to learn more.