Hey folks.
And welcome to the latest episode of the small tech podcast by Ephemere Creative.
I'm your host Raph and today we're going to be talking about unifying user data.
So before we start, what do I mean by user data.
That might mean counting the number of pages that someone views on a website,
or it could mean the number of screens or which screens they visit in an app.
It could also mean the things that they do within an app.
So if they submit a form or they interact with some elements or whether
it's an app or a website really.
Or it can be something else tied to a feature.
So if someone submitted some audio and it gets processed in the background
and that finishes, you might want to track that somewhere so that you can
send the user an email about that.
And so being able to control how all of that data flows and make
sure that it's all well coordinated is what we're talking about today.
How can you unify that data?
It's coming from a lot of different places, right?
You might want to figure out how someone moves from a landing
page to your marketing site, maybe through, to a pricing page.
And then they start using your app on the web, and then eventually
they install the mobile app and they start interacting with that.
And you need to know how they are interacting with your ecosystem
of technology across all of these different touch points.
And you need to know that to send the messages or maybe it's to make
sure that you understand how people come into your app and interact with
it so you can improve your product.
It can be so many different things.
It can also be for customer support to make sure that they have a full
context of what someone's doing so that they can support them.
There's so many reasons.
So to cover that you'll need some way to funnel data from
all of those touch points.
You could build something custom where you submit a request to a server that
you've built out just for this purpose.
That takes something like a user ID and an event name, and
some metadata about that event.
And keep that all in a database yourself, but you lose out on a lot of potential
functionality if you build it yourself.
You could also build that functionality.
If you have deep pockets that might make sense.
For most of us in this small tech context.
It does not make sense.
That is a lot of stuff to build out.
I would recommend using a platform.
I think they generally call themselves CDPs customer data platforms.
Something along those lines.
I am most familiar with one called a segment.com.
It's pretty neat.
You can install.
A variety of sources.
So you can say that I'm going to funnel data from my API, from my web app, from
my marketing site landing pages, you can even integrate with other platforms.
So you can say I'm going to funnel data from Stripe or MailChimp and
pass that all through Segment.
And so it funnels into Segment and then you tell it where
you want to spit it out to.
I think one thing that every project should do is have
some sort of data warehouse.
If you're really tiny app, you can just run a simple database.
Segment will allow you to funnel all of that data into snowflake
or Redshift and others um.
PostgreSQL is nice and easy if you're a small company, small product.
If you're a bigger company, bigger product, you can use the other ones.
But that will give you a nice place to take a look at all
of your data from one place.
Basically the idea is that you take all of the information from those different
sources and you funnel them through one tool where you can manage the data.
You can apply transformations.
You can say actually, I don't want to send this type of data.
So if it does come through, stop it here.
And then you funnel that into your data warehouse
And also into other tools.
And I think this is where it can become really powerful.
The data warehouse is really practical because it gives you a place to
ask questions about how people are interacting with your product.
You can say.
I need to know how people interacted with something in a marketing context and how
they transitioned into a user context.
And.
I don't know, graph out that, that relationship.
But.
While that is really valuable.
I think it becomes particularly valuable when you move that into
tools that are really built to understand those flows and act on them.
You can hook into other platforms like Intercom, for example, or
one of my favorites, Customer.io.
And from there you can say if someone did go from being an active user to being an
inactive user, perhaps we want to wait a few days then we want to send them an
email to ask them what went wrong with the platform or why they haven't been around.
And gather feedback.
That sort of thing is really valuable.
And you can also use these platforms to submit more transactional style emails.
So with the example I used earlier about the audio processing.
You want to let someone know that's complete, you could do
that from within your app's code.
But then you might lose some of the styling and branding that
all of your design and marketing team has been working on so hard.
You may also want to use many of these tools and knowing that your
data is going to be consistent across all of them, because you've used a
platform like Segment to do that.
Is going to be really beneficial.
You'll know that everyone is on the same page.
About what data goes, where when, why.
Yeah, I recommend using a Segment.com.
There are others that I've looked into that I think look really interesting.
One that I came across recently is called fresh paint.io.
It looks really neat.
It looks quite friendly to non-technical users.
So you won't need a developer to integrate the signals that you want to track.
I think they actually let you use their tools to just point on a
webpage and say, I want to track when someone clicks this thing or clicks
that thing or submits this form.
So that's really neat.
I find that the promise of that kind of tooling often falls short.
I do believe they have a way for developers to integrate with code and
properly submit exactly what's going on.
So that's good.
You can do both.
As I understand it the other two that I came across recently,
are Rudderstack and Jitsu.
Jitsu looks a lot more immature.
They don't have a lot of integrations, but they are really pushing that
they are an open source solution.
Rudder stack also seems to be open source, but isn't pushing it very hard.
So I don't know.
Sometimes when I see an open source product, Not pushing the
fact that they're open source.
It makes me wonder if they're rethinking their open source
philosophy that may not be the case.
It looks pretty awesome.
They have a lot of integrations.
And yeah, it looks pretty cool.
So I personally would gravitate towards Segment or Rudderstack at the moment.
But I think one way or another, these are all tools worth exploring.
If you are not familiar with them.
So that is all for this episode.
Let me know what you thought.
How do you unify your customer data?
Do you use any of these tools?
How do you use them for automation, communication and understanding how
people are interacting with your products?
I would love to know if you want to talk to me about it on the
podcast, you can shoot me an email at raphael@ephemerecreative.ca.
Make sure to like, and subscribe on the YouTubes or subscribe
in your podcast app of choice.
And we all want to do some good in the world.
So go out and build something.
Good friends.
See ya.