Essential Guide to Auditing Product Data for Marketers: Benefits and Best Practices

The key to mastering marketing isn’t more leads, but deeper insights into your product’s user data. While traditional marketing often focuses on generating a high volume of leads, the real game-changer lies in understanding how users engage with your product. Product data is your key to uncover actionable insights that refine your marketing strategies and drive meaningful results.

Why Marketers Need To Care About Product Data

You need to incorporate product activity data into your comms to do better marketing because:

• Enhanced personalization: Product data reveals user preferences and actions, allowing you to craft highly tailored campaigns that resonate more deeply with your audience.
• Improved conversion rates: By analyzing user behavior, you can pinpoint those at risk of churning and engage them with targeted campaigns to boost retention and conversion.
• Informed decision-making: Detailed insights into product usage help shape marketing strategies that are more aligned with actual user needs and behaviors.
• Relevance: Access to up-to-date product data ensures your marketing messages are timely and relevant, increasing their effectiveness.

To harness the power of product data, start by understanding how your company tracks it - whether through Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), analytics tools, or data warehouse. Collaborate with your product or data teams to ensure you have the necessary insights to drive impactful marketing efforts.

Side note: We interviewed more than 100 marketers to know that getting to product data is not too simple for most marketing teams. So, we wrote an ebook on getting Marketing and Product alignment right.

Auditing the Events with Product and Data Teams

Once you find out where the data you need is stored and tracked, you need to check if the right events (for marketing use cases) are tracked. If not, you need to figure out and request tracking of some high-impact events.

Identify the key stakeholders in the product or data engineering team and explain to them your objectives. Explain how having the right product activity data can help you run more effective marketing campaigns. Some common goals for both teams can be to ensure data accuracy, completeness, and relevance.

Detailed steps for auditing product data:

1. Understand your product data orchestration: Find out how product events are tracked, stored, and analyzed. Check if data is directly ingested into the warehouse or passes through an analytics platform first. Direct ingestion helps maintain data fidelity.
2. Identify key events: Find out the events that are tracked and compare them against the list of events that are critical for marketing goals and the specific campaigns you want to run. You will understand which events are crucial but are not tracked. This can include user sign-ups, feature usage, purchase completions, etc.
   
   Review a sample of events to ensure they contain all required data points. For example, when a user upgrades their subscription, including email address, previous subscription level, new subscription level, timestamp, and payment details. These are some key product events that can help you get started on your way to a more comprehensive understanding of product data in marketing.

• User Sign-Up: Tracks when a user creates an account.
• Conversions: Monitors the number of users who convert from a free trial or freemium plan to a paid subscription.
• Product Onboarding Completion: Tracks when a user completes onboarding.
• Feature Adoption: This can be for any feature that makes sense for your business, like creating a dashboard, interacting with the chatbot, etc. Identify your key features and what adoption means to you before requesting to monitor them.
• User Login: Monitor the frequency and recency of user logins.
• Gated Feature Access Attempt: Tracks when a user tries to access a premium or restricted feature that requires an upgrade or additional permissions.
• Purchase/Subscription: Track purchase or subscription completions.
• Cart Abandonment: Similar to an e-commerce scenario of adding to the cart and not completing a purchase, cart abandonment in SaaS could be an unsuccessful purchase after clicking on CTAs like Purchase, Upgrade, and Renew.
• Page Views: Monitor visits to key product or landing pages like the Checkout page.

3. Define data requirements: Specify what data points are needed for each event so that they are meaningful for marketing use cases. This can include user identifiers (email, user ID), timestamps, event-specific details (product ID, feature used), and any additional metadata.
4. Cross-check event logging: Compare the defined data requirements with the actual data being logged in the data warehouse. Note any discrepancies or missing data points. Verify that similar events are logged consistently across different user sessions and devices.
5. Review data flow and transformation: Understand how data flows from the product to the data warehouse. Check if there are any transformations or processing steps that might affect data fidelity.
6. Hashed data: Understand if and why certain data is hashed (encrypted for privacy and security reasons). While hashing is crucial for data security, marketers need to collaborate with data teams to ensure they can still leverage this data effectively. Explore options along with the product/data team to de-hash or match with existing customer records.
7. Validate data quality: Use queries and data analysis tools to validate the quality of the event data. Look for inconsistencies, duplicates, or anomalies.
8. Document findings and actions: Create a detailed report of your findings, including any issues identified and recommended actions to address them.

Product event auditing can take a while but it will be worth the effort. Be prepared to dedicate resources for a few months even for a thorough audit. Schedule regular meetings with the product and data teams to discuss findings, address issues, and plan for future data needs.  

Also, understand that many engineering or data teams take some time to implement the change requests made during the audit.

Understanding and leveraging product data is a necessity for modern marketing. By tapping into product activity data, you gain the ability to create more personalized campaigns, improve conversion rates, make informed decisions, and ensure your messages are timely and relevant.

Audition Product Data As A Marketer

Engage with your product and data teams to ensure you're collecting the right events and insights that align with your marketing goals. Regularly audit the data and event tracking to maintain accuracy and completeness, and address any gaps or discrepancies.

Sit with Product or Data to understand how your data infrastructure is set up. Engage with your product and data teams to ensure you're collecting the right events and insights that align with your marketing goals. Auditing product data is necessary for you to make sure the right events (like sign-ups, and conversion from free to paid) with the right data points (like timestamp, and email address) are tracked and are available for Marketing use cases.

If you are wondering how to deploy your product data for marketing purposes, you should check out Inflection.io. Inflection is a marketing automation platform that lets you activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, product adoption, and revenue expansion, all from one platform. Request a demo.