The Challenge of Analytics and a Second Product

When we launched Creative Market Pro in February, we had to re-evaluate our data capture and analytics infrastructure. The initial infrastructure was built with the vision of a single product. The launch of a second product created the need for our infrastructure to evolve and become more flexible.

Building the infrastructure to capture all the data generated by a new product is riddled with challenges. How granular or abstract are your event definitions? How do you prevent dirty event data from being generated? How do you structure the event schema so that its clear to engineers for implementation? How clear is it to product managers working with that data in Amplitude? You also need to consider the limitations of each tool that you send this data to.

Over the past two years our product usage data capture has been streamlined and optimized and a lot of these challenges have been solved. We’ve built better documentation and established a clear naming convention for our events. After working with this data in various analytics tools, people became familiar with it.

With the launch of Creative Market Pro, a big question arose — do we collect usage data for Creative Market & Creative Market Pro separately? Or do we mix the two data sets together?

The first option would give us neat and clean data for each product. At the same time, it would compartmentalize the data by product. You can no longer have a single view of the customer across both products. The second allows us to see a more holistic view of user behavior across both products but creates a muddied data set.

Having your cake and eating it too

We chose to capture all our event data in one place. Having a single view of our users allows us to better understand the relationship between our products. We established a clear naming convention for all the product usage data streaming into our analytics tools. Here are a couple of the challenges that we faced and how we approached them:

1. We sometimes need to split our data for tools that we add to our growth stack

We use Segment to capture & stream our event data. It’s a great tool that abstracts away a lot of the redundant engineering work needed every time your company on-boards a new tool that works off of event data (ex. Google Analytics, FullStory etc.).

On a very broad level, here’s what the journey looks like for event data currently being captured on Creative Market and Creative Market Pro:

Since the combined data is in Amplitude, we can now ask and answer questions like — What products did a user look at on Creative Market, before they went over to Creative Market Pro and subscribed? Likewise for Google Analytics & Looker.

On the flip side, sometimes we want to only use the event data from one product. For example, we use FullStory to understand product pain points. But… it’s unfeasible to send FullStory the event data from Creative Market, since we have a user base of over 4.5 million and the pricing for FullStory scales based on data volume.

A benefit of Segment is that it allows you to maintain some granular controls over your data flow, even if you’re combining the event data from two products. Our Segment setup allows us to stream only the event data from Creative Market Pro to FullStory by creating a direct pipeline, resulting in something like this:

This is both cost-effective and engineering-friendly. Having these granular controls over our data pipelines result in time and money saved.

2. Google Analytics does not look at domain-level information by default

When we launched Creative Market Pro, a decision was made to keep it on a sub-domain “pro.creativemarket.com”. The tricky aspect of Google Analytics is that for most of it’s reports, the default settings only capture everything after the domain name. Which meant, Google Analytics viewed “creativemarket.com/” and “pro.creativemarket.com/” as the same page.

We needed to better understand which aspects of the site were being used and this did not work. We could have setup separate GA views for Creative Market & Pro, but that does not give us a holistic view of user behavior.

The second challenge was that GA retains channel attribution. What that means is that if a customer takes the following path:

1. Clicks on a Creative Market marketing e-mail
2. Visits Creative Market
3. Leaves the site, then directly goes to Creative Market Pro

GA would say that the user discovered Creative Market Pro via e-mail, even though the discovery channel was direct.

Firstly, we needed to segregate that information across GA and came across some nifty solutions using filters to start capturing domains in our reports. But it’s not a retroactive solution. My advice to anyone implementing GA is to capture domain information right from the start. It makes life much easier.

We also created individual sections in GA for each product. The setup now looks like this:

This gives us the global view within GA along with the individual views for each product. There was no clear solution for channel attribution within Google Analytics & Amplitude. To overcome this, we wrapped our event data into sessions in Looker (more on this in the next post!) and can now perform extremely granular session level analysis and play with different attribution models to see what works for us.

We now have tooling to best analyze how both our products are being used. With the infrastructure in place, we’ve set ourselves up to tackle all challenges with data. Some of the really interesting problems we’re trying to solves in the near future include:

• Understanding the relationship between Creative Market & Creative Market Pro. How do users flow between the two? Does growth in one impact growth in the other? How do we provide the most value to our creators using both products?
• Finding the behavioral differences between subscription customers vs. transactional customers. By understanding our customers, we can better support them.

The awesome part is that as we create more value for our customers, our creators benefit as well. All this is possible because we are able to trust and play with the massive amount of data we collect.

We’re always looking for amazing people to join the Creative Market team. We value our culture as much as we value our mission, so if helping creators turn passion into opportunity sounds like something you’d love to do with a group of folks who feel the same way, then check out our job openings and apply today!