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  • 🍐#85: Data engineer on attribution, anti-retention patterns, and an ad breakdowns gallery

🍐#85: Data engineer on attribution, anti-retention patterns, and an ad breakdowns gallery

Author

Jakub Czakon
October 13, 2024

Hey,

Yesterday I went to my very first omakase sushi dinner. And low and behold they served a Japanese pear called nashi🍐for dessert. Wow, it was good. The sushi I mean. The pear was ok ;).

This week on the agenda:

  • Data engineer turned marketer on attribution

  • Dev tool ad breakdowns gallery

  • Anti retention patterns

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Dev tool ad breakdowns gallery

Zachary Short has compiled a fantastic gallery of (mostly dev tool) ad breakdowns.

They are organized by the ad style and campaign focus. Great stuff if you are looking for inspiration when it comes to ad creatives.

Also, give Zach a follow if you want to stay in the loop for ad breakdowns and/or really funny rants ;)

2. Data engineer turned marketer on attribution

Sarah Krasnik Bedell is a Data Engineer turned Director of growth marketing and put together an awesome article and video on marketing attribution.

My takeaways:

  • (First-party cookie) ad-blocking is perhaps not as common. For Prefect the % of devs who signed up and used ad-blockers sits consistently at around 10%.

  • It is likely way higher for third-party cookies but you can use a reverse proxy and first track things with first-party cookies (your server) and then send the cookie to the third-party.

  • To assess how important doing the reverse proxy is for you compare signups by month as tracked in your database vs signups tracked in your analytics tool.

  • Consider the ranked touch model (vs first/last touch). You rank which channels/programs should be attributed if multiple touchpoints occur. Like you read a blog (channel 1) and click on a social ad (channel 2). If I rank paid social over Blog I’d attribute that to paid social.

  • When reporting, each chart should answer a question you care about. If you look at a chart, say cool, and do nothing, it is likely not a good chart. Examples of good is knowing which channels bring the most top-of-funnel awareness, or where the most active users come from.

  • Test out the implementation. Look at the analytics tool and your website side-by-side and see that what you do on the website gets properly attributed to the real-time dashboard of your tool. Most of the weird-looking dashboards are the result of a bug, not actual behavior.

3. Anti-retention patterns

This is an interesting concept coming from Gonto he discovered while working on Auth0 adoption/retention.

Anti-retention adoption patterns:

  • You have a product that has many features, many levels of value extracted

  • Adopting certain features too early may actually lead to lower retention later

  • You should compare users who retained and haven’t after a mid/longer term and see which features they adopt and when. Plot out feature adoption by time for those two groups.

  • They did that with multifactor auth at auth0 and it turned out that “blocking” it, or giving devs a big fat info box saying that this is not recommended to implement yet, pushed the retention up.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.

I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "

Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."

Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

1900+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

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