How Animoto gains a clear picture of the user journey with Snowplow

Background

Animoto is an easy-to-use, cloud-based video creation platform for generating video slideshows and customized web-based presentations using photos, video clips and music. Available on web and mobile, it has grown rapidly since its inception in 2006.

Since the beginning, Animoto looked for ways to understand their users and how they engage with the product. Behavioral data is at the heart of this endeavor, and creating a data-driven culture at Animoto would ensure transparency and data-informed decision-making.

Challenge

As the company grew, Animoto needed answers to increasingly sophisticated and complex questions. They knew that rich, granular behavioral data would tell a compelling story, and help them build a comprehensive understanding of their customers. Their original analytics solution, Google Analytics, however, had too many limitations for the kinds of analytics and attribution Animoto wanted to do.

Challenges included:

• Missing or incomplete data
• No universal tracking to track users across different platforms and devices
• A need to account for non-standard user journeys

Animoto knew that data quality and completeness were essential to creating the customized analytics solution they were striving for. They also needed the flexibility to determine their own events and entities, so they could answer questions specific to their business.  

As well as moving to a freemium model and driving mobile adoption, Animoto also sought to answer key questions about the full user journey. By expanding their event tracking, Animoto could begin to understand users at an individual level.

We needed a solution to help us understand how users were interacting with our website. However, it quickly became obvious that the Snowplow solution would allow us to analyze product usage as well. It was a no-brainer—an innovative, cost-effective tool that checked all the boxes and let us own our data."

‍ALEX BESKIN | HEAD OF ANALYTICS AT ANIMOTO

Solution

Using Snowplow, Animoto can now track users across channels and platforms, with flexible, self-defined data structures and the ability to apply custom business logic to the data they create.

With an emphasis on data quality—that is, complete, accurate, well-structured data, across platforms and devices, regardless of data volume—Snowplow supplies a granularity that was absent from other solutions to give Animoto what they needed. The solution enables them to:

• Move from siloed to complete data – Animoto creates behavioral data across web and mobile, and delivers it to their warehouse in a single, consolidated format—ready to be used for advanced analytics.
• Craft custom data models – Animoto relies on the completeness, flexibility and customizability of Snowplow to help create data models that work specifically for what they want to track and attribute.
• Flexibility to self-define data structures – Snowplow enables cross-platform, cross-device tracking, with flexible, self-defined data structures and own business logic, allowing for custom-stitching and reconstructing user journeys, proprietary attribution modeling, and advanced testing models.

Results

With Snowplow, Animoto has tackled its data challenges head-on. The team now has a clear picture of the end-to-end user journey, and can use the insights about how users interact with their products to iteratively improve their offering. They have built a number of powerful new models to support their growth:

• Sign-up journey – Built to understand what users are doing prior to registration, to calculate metrics such as visit-to-registration conversion rate and ultimately optimize the acquisition funnel. This is usually a complex model because of the difficulty connecting users across time and devices—but data created with Snowplow makes it easy.
• Milestones model – Built to stitch together each user’s sessions to understand the customer experience post-registration—for example, how users interact with product features and how these actions drive conversions.
• Multi-touch attribution – Built to attribute orders to various touchpoints and optimize ad spend. To get this right, Animoto needed the ability to set and apply their own business logic, so they could connect all touches for each user, which they can use to attribute to the various sources from which users visit their website.

As Animoto continues to grow, so too does their data maturity. Their proprietary models are supporting teams and functions across the business, including marketing, product marketing and growth, and have helped identify trends to help improve the product and make marketing more relevant.

Into the future, Animoto will continue enhancing and building on their existing models, including the use of real-time data to personalize the user experience on their site. With the power of customizable data collection, Animoto is speeding ahead to answer increasingly challenging but important questions that arise from the user journey—from retention and churn, to lifetime value and path analysis.

With Snowplow, we are empowered to make more informed, data-driven decisions that allow us to iterate much faster while gaining a multi-dimensional view of the user experience now and in the future.”

ALEX BESKIN | HEAD OF ANALYTICS AT ANIMOTO

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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