Building it beautiful: Analyzing the effectiveness of platform products and marketing at scale

Description

Squarespace is dedicated to helping creative individuals succeed, but creative clients pose unique challenges to analytics professionals, as they use the company’s product in different ways across a number of use cases. At the same time, Squarespace’s product and marketing teams create new features and channels regularly, further muddying the picture around whether any particular user is directed to the right experience and able to get what they need out of the software.

The question of understanding the product and marketing effectiveness is not just a conceptual one: keeping tabs on teams of engineers building different user pathways becomes more and more difficult as a company grows. Squarespace’s advertising partners provide it with different sets of data, which makes attribution difficult. Enforcing semantics around tracking is critical when engineering and external teams who do not work together contribute to the same event log, especially if we expect nontechnical team members to be able to interact with and learn from the data.

Joshua Laurito explores systems Squarespace built for acquiring and enforcing consistency on obtained data and for inferring conclusions from a company’s marketing and product initiatives. Joshua discusses the intricacies of gathering and evaluating marketing and user data, from raising awareness to driving purchases, and shares results of previous analyses.