New highlights added 2024-02-09
Usually, what I observe is that… tracking or analytics gets pushed to the back. And very often, it’s not always, of course, some companies are very data-driven, but very often, uh, companies are rushing to get a product out, which is understandable. (View Highlight)
And once they get the product out, they realize that they’re flying blind, so to speak, because they are making many assumptions, and now they don’t really have a way to validate those assumptions. And that’s where tracking becomes very urgent. And that’s also when it becomes trickier to do and some tech debt if you’re into it. But if you integrate it into the development process in advance, it just becomes, as you described it, part of the requirements. (View Highlight)
And that is, for me, kind of the goal. So I would just say that if you’re already in a situation where you’re adding tracking into an existing product, that’s okay to do it after the fact. And then, say, moving forward, start integrating it into the tickets themselves as part of the acceptance criteria. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2024-12-24
in single-page applications that don’t really have full page loads all the time, you always have a problem with page views. You always have to find a custom solution. I haven’t seen tools really dealing with that perfectly yet. There have been improvements, but, for example, sometimes they make assumptions in these pixel tracking, right? That a page is relatively stable until it’s moved around or navigated, where, in fact, in a single-page application, for example, pages are extremely dynamic. (View Highlight)
A Brief Summary of User Analytics Engineering User tracking is essential for any online business. It provides business stakeholders with: • Insights on user journeys — For example, insights on parts of your UI that need improvement (with a high user dropout rate or low usage). • Metrics on critical payment funnels — For example, to identify a high-impact product and allocate more resources to it while de-prioritizing unimpactful markets and channels. • Metrics on onboarding funnels —For example, these metrics might indicate that you should invest more in marketing platform “X“ because it converts better. In terms of technical investment, there are usually two teams who have a vested interest in getting tracking set up properly:
- The product engineering team implements logic to track user interactions. These interactions could be direct UI interactions between the user and the frontend or user-initiated transactions between the frontend and the back end. These two streams of data are often tagged with some form of shared identity (session IDs, user IDs), which allows the data team to match frontend and backend events.
- The data team handles data enrichment, transformation, persistence, and visualization of data. They are often responsible for producing reporting dashboards for commercial teams such as marketing and sales. With unified tracking data about events in the front and back end, the data team can then answer questions such as: — “What proportion of intents to purchase a product actually succeed?” — “How many products does one user typically purchase?” Tracking is typically implemented by listening to activity on the UI and logging corresponding user events to an analytics service (with some context parameters). However, there are some common challenges and pitfalls that you should account for in the product development process:
- **The Interaction Logic Challenge **In some cases, you might be asked to track something that you don’t normally log — e.g., a “list_scroll_end” event when the user has reached the end of a listing page. In this case, it’s extra work because we can’t recycle any existing logging logic. You have to build your own. So you should find out ahead of time if this is part of the tracking requirements.
- **The Compliance Challenge **Tracking often involves user consent management to ensure that it is only done to the extent legally approved by the user. This usually means managing some global “consent state”, which is manipulated by some “consent UI” (like a cookie banner). The user analytics module must be able to access the consent state and connect or disconnect tracking accordingly. This must be thoroughly tested, which can add time to t
- The Testing Challenge: As the end-to-end functionality involves several systems, as well as several data transformations, testing the implementation of user analytics isn’t trivial. You need to test: — The UI layer in isolation to ensure interactions are being logged locally. — The integration between the UI layer and the analytics platform to ensure logged events make it into the analytics database. — The end-to-end data pipeline to ensure that user tracking data in the UI layer is matched with events in the back end and shows up correctly in the analytics tool.
- **The “Page View” Challenge **Page views are key to observing user journeys, as all other events are usually analyzed in the context of a page view. But apps with client-side navigation and rendering pose a challenge in two parts: — Defining what constitutes a “page view”, especially when it comes to modal dialogs and tabbed pages. — Accurately logging a page view for single-page applications. To understand this problem in detail, see the Google Analytics guidelines for SPAs. The guiding principle for tackling this is the user journey. Pages should be defined and tracked in a way that allows stakeholders to observe a user’s progress through the app in rich detail. This is a challenge shared by stakeholders, data teams, and product engineering teams. Consequently, those teams need to discuss these tracking challenges together. (View Highlight)