Overview
Product teams are always looking to gather more insight from user-generated events and understand product usage in more depth. Sure, this data probably already lives in your data warehouse, but it's most valuable when it can be flexibly analyzed and leveraged for product research. That's where Census comes in.
With Census, you can activate your data and send events (i.e. clicks, page loads, and server-side events) into analytics tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Pendo.
Now, you can automate the process of ingesting user-generated events that live in your data warehouse into platforms that users can interact with and ask their own questions. By doing this, you can get more value from your user-generated events and develop an in-depth understanding of your product usage.
To do so, you'll need these 10 customer fields:
| Field Name | Field Description |
|---|---|
| user_id | The unique identifier for each user. |
| event_type | The type of event that was generated, such as click, form submission, or product interaction. |
| event_timestamp | The timestamp for when the event occurred. |
| event_properties | Additional properties that are specific to the event. This could include things like the button clicked or the form that was submitted. |
| user_properties | Additional properties that are specific to the user. This could include things like the user's name or email. |
| session_id | The unique identifier for each session. |
| device_type | The type of device used to generate the event. |
| platform | The platform that was used to generate the event. |
| location | The location where the event was generated. |
| referrer | The URL that the user came from before generating the event. |
Use Case
If you're not convinced quite yet, here are four more benefits of this use case, linked to your team's goals:
- Improved product engagement & retention: Sending clicks, page loads, form submissions, and product interactions into Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Pendo with Census allows you to gain insights into how users are engaging with your product. This information can be used to improve your product engagement and increase customer satisfaction.
- Data-driven product development: With Census, you can gain a deeper understanding of how users interact with your product, which can help inform your product development decisions. This data can be used to prioritize new features or improve existing ones.
- Detect anomalies and errors: By monitoring user-generated events in near-realtime, you can detect anomalies, errors, or bugs that affect user experience. This can help you proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact your users' satisfaction or retention.
- Improved user experience: By understanding how users are interacting with your product, you can identify areas where the user experience can be improved. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Here's an overview of how you can ingest user-generated events into your Product Analytics platforms using Census:
- Identify the user events that you want to sync to your product analytics platform. These might include events like user signups, purchases, or content views.
- Write a SQL model to extract the relevant user events from your data warehouse. Your query should select the appropriate columns from your database and filter for the events you want to sync. Be sure to include a timestamp column to indicate when each event occurred.
Example: `SELECT user_id, event_type, session_id, timestamp FROM events WHERE timestamp >= '2022-01-01';`
3. Use Census to set up a sync between your data warehouse and your product analytics platform. Configure the sync to use the SQL query you wrote in step 2 to extract the relevant events, including mapping columns from your SQL query to the appropriate event properties. This will ensure that your data is correctly formatted and that all the relevant properties are captured.
4. Start the sync in Census and verify that your events are being correctly synced to your product analytics platform.
That's a high-level overview of how to select user events within a data warehouse and sync them to a product analytics platform using Census. Note that the specific steps and syntax may vary depending on the exact databases and tools you're using.
