Snowplow Analytics Reviews

I like the availability of granular data and the autonomy to be able to use the data easily in whichever way you choose. It gives complete freedom to build downstream products tailored to the business needs. I also think their customer services level is extremely high, they are always available to suggest best approaches to problems and work with you on solving your own challenges.

It does have a bit of a knowledge learning curve, traditional users of behavioural data have only experienced data through a familiar UI and so some of the bits of knowledge behind how certain areas of data are populated requires a fair amount of reading and playing with the data.

Learn about how tracking actually works and how the raw data is presented. Understand what the business needs to report on from tracking and make sure tracking is in place in those scenarios. Spend time really thinking about a scalable way to track new features.

Precise understanding of user experience of new features. Identity stitching. Consolidated metrics across different Web platforms (app, Web, third party affiliates, acquisition companies). Removed areas of doubt of the data from issues such as ad blockers and transmission issues when implementing server side tracking.

We've been using SnowPlow here at General Assembly for almost 7 years. We started with the opensource version and decided to move to Enterprise so we didn't have to use data engineering resources to maintain and upgrade the pipeline, which has saved us a ton of time to work on other things. Our account manager and support at SnowPlow have been amazing and we've had no issues. Just sit back and let them administer the pipeline and has been up 100%. Having access to raw data in snow plow is key to creating your own data models. Having access to almost real time data is crucial as well.

Would LOVE to see some cookie cutter reporting templates like Google Analytics gives you. I understand SnowPlow is not designed for that but would save our analysts a ton of time if SnowPlow provided some built in reporting as well. SnowPlow does have some templates for Looker and other visual tools, would love to use this in Tableau at some point.

Having access to almost real time raw data is crucial at our company, which gives us the ability to create custom data models and also QA easily and quickly. Having SnowPlow enterprise team handle all the maintenance and uptime is key as well.

- You can track everything you need: browser-side, server-side, custom events

- You can customize the tracking to your needs

- You can prevent any compliance or security headache by hosting the processing and storage on your own infrastructure

- Snowplow's support is first-class

- Any powerful tool comes with some complexity to handle on your end. You will have to spend some time understanding Snowplow's data structure, but once you have done it, it's ready for the long term.

- The tracking of user interactions with UI elements could be more intuitive

If you need a customizable and powerful product analytics solution, Snowplow Analytics should be at the top of your list.

- Providing comprehensive analytics on user activity and interactions across websites, web apps, and mobile apps, no matter where it's running.

- Tracking custom events based on product teams needs.

Snowplow lets us store very granular data about customer interactions with our site. It's great to have full access to the data and it's open source, so the cost is MUCH lower than comparable products like GA 360 and Adobe.

The data still needs a front-end. Snowplow is just a collection tool. Also, this is pretty difficult to self manage without a dedicated person. We talked to some implementation partners, and the costs can be quite high just for the management. Also, there's quite a bit of integration with Engineering required to get events fully logged. Therefore, getting buy-in and time in the Eng roadmap is key to getting the most out of the tool.

Allows us to debug tracking issues with GA or look at very specific situations to understand bugs that customers are encountering.

All infrastructure is already done and the strategy to use de Kineses for bad data queue is amazing.

I would like to have more flexibility in the tools. (maybe use Kafka instead of Kineses)

The Snowplow team is amazing and always available.

Now we can tracking all events of our clients with a simple changes in the frontend

Tacking configuration is simple and clear

Enrichments are useful

Pipeline just works

Support is really-really helpful

There is now URL shortener solution ingrained. We use redirect links for tracking, they are really long and could be shortened and resolved on the collector. It would require some integration of course. But it's better than using two redirects and external service.

There is no way to interact with the collector. For example, send id of a client to a collector, so that collector returns executable js code to a tracker which is fired instead of a placed once and forever one.

We put tracking code on career websites of our clients to show them insights on how their candidates behave.

We could implement and support it ourselves, but instead, Snowplow does it for us. It's a huge win and saves us a lot of tie and money.

We transitioned to Snowplow in 2014 when we were looking for a way to control all of our own web data. We made the move from Google Analytics and never looked back. Snowplow gives us total control of what we can and can't track. It also has a great standard set of tracking for example, everything you'd want to know about a page view. The team at Snowplow is great to work with, professional, attentive, and flexible.

Setting up a thoughtful structure for your data, web events, and then making it usable to your organization with analytics tools takes time. Snowplow makes it easier, but there's no getting around that you need someone internally to take responsibility for the initiative. Great analytics isn't plug and play - but once you get it set up properly with snowplow, it just works!!

Their support and pipeline management is awesome - I'd recommend having them manage that for you. It keeps everything running smoothly.

We have fully integrated data analytics the cover everything from a user coming to our website to the messages they send in our system to sales to profits, etc. It's all integrated in our Redshift warehouse so that we can do analytics we need to in Looker. Before snowplow we had to hace out parts of the data we needed from Google Analytics, export from SQL and then put everything together in a spreadsheet. Those days are over - and are replaced by self-updating dashboards, etc. in Looker.

Before deciding on Snowplow we looked at many event driven analytic platforms and hands-down Snowplow was the most customizable. We were able to tailor the pipeline to our business needs and didn't need to change how we operate in order to fit into strictly defined concepts that other packages required. In addition, the team at Snowplow are top-notch and provide excellent support and advisory services when needed.

With great power comes great responsibility... There is a learning curve to get up and running and ongoing maintenance. Much of the setup is manual text-file driven configuration, although I understand this is changing.On the flip side there is a great community supporting the product so most answers are dealt with quickly.

I attribute a lot of our success to our working with the Snowplow team in a rollout engagement. I would recommend you include at least some of the support services as part of your project.

We have much deeper insight into our users behaviors and are abel to turn this around and provide data driven solutions across our customer base.

having clickstream data without paying for GA360

There is a lack of set up documentation which makes it difficult for our team to set up

lots of questions about website behavior, effectivenss of freetrials for SAAS companies, etc

The Snowplow platform is so powerful. It is allowing us to rethink how we do analytics in our products and it's opening new avenues for us to explore both internally and with our clients.

The ability to send entities with each event that are specific to our organisation and business domain has become a very powerful tool and the quality of the data on the other side of the pipeline when it ends up in Google BigQuery makes it very easy to work with.

Combined with Looker as a BI tool, we're able to very quickly inspect and find insight from our products.

It's definitely has a steeper learning curve than some other tools but with the help of the Snowplow team we've ended up with a solid implementation very quickly. The documentation is very tailored to the Open Source community and isn't as useful for those on the Snowplow Insights platform although that seems to be improving all the time.

We've got so much more granularity in the available data that we're able to be very precise with how our users are using our products across the web. The fact our data isn't sampled and we are get access to the row level data is incredibly useful.

It's already helping to inform the next phase of product development across our development teams.