Campfire Analytics Blog

After nine years of architecting, engineering, and wrangling cloud data into submission using GCP products, we finally went and made it official: Campfire Analytics is now a Google Cloud Partner.

As a new parent, you are always worrying if your newborn has everything that she needs. The flexibility and empathy that the Campfire team provides is like no other place I have worked at.

At Campfire Analytics, we recruit by evaluating candidates holistically instead of just bullet points on their resume. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

The temporal table is a valuable tool that automates row-versioned processes, streamlines data archiving, and facilitates slowly changing dimension operations.

A big mistake businesses often make is not having a well-defined web optimization strategy, which will lead to wins when it aligns with your business goals.

If you monitor your website’s performance with an Adobe Analytics dashboard, you may notice that the total visits for a prior month sometimes change. What’s going on?

Campfire Analytics stands with people of color in protest against systemic racism in the United States.

Our mission is to build sustainable analytics solutions for our clients, and a common choice our clients make is which platform is best for web analytics.

After reading this blog, you will have a simple React application with a couple of Google Analytics beacons implemented that fire upon clicking any of the application buttons.

Campfire Analytics was founded with a singular guiding principle: put people first. This isn’t a plan for COVID-19; this is how we’ve run our business from day 1.

Apache Airflow is a platform made popular for automating ETL and other data analytics pipelines, but it can also be used for almost any kind of programmatic task.

Every month at Campfire, we set aside time to celebrate birthdays and work anniversaries. Here is a look at the recipes I made for these celebrations in 2019 using a Tableau dashboard.

By moving a client’s Excel-driven dashboard to a cloud-connected Tableau view, we improved pipeline resilience, decreased update time, and expanded analysis capabilities.

If you are a Digital Marketer, chances are you are using social, paid, email, and/or affiliate campaigns to drive click-throughs to your website. While your marketing tool may be showing you a good volume of clicks, it is important to not simply take those numbers at face value. Several factors can inflate click volumes, so before you dedicate your whole budget to an ad platform, it’s important to have an analytics program in place to validate the impact of your campaigns.

Reporting gaps

There can be a large gap between the “clicks” that your ad platform reports and the impact you might see in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Here’s three reasons why that might be:

  1. "Clicks" do not equal "Visits"
    Email servers and ad networks usually count the number of “clicks” on a link. This can be very different than the number of visits counted in Adobe or sessions counted in Google. Users can click a button multiple times, whether it be inadvertent, or in frustration because of a long load time.

  2. The Click’n’Close
    Ad networks may report clicks from users that never actually reach your site. Users may close their tab or browser before the page load data can be sent to Google or Adobe.

  3. Filters
    Your implementation of Adobe or Google Analytics will have filters to block some traffic. Ad networks will have their own set of filters.

Start small and scale up

If you want to know what impact your click through campaign is really having, it is important to not try to do everything at once.

Start with smaller audience

Why should you limit your audience? A bigger audience is going to have a bigger impact on your bottom-line, right? In actuality, broadcasting your content can be costly and ineffective.

Make it an easy transition

You may think it is important to ‘wow’ users on the landing page with a big image or video. The best landing pages have few buttons and limited text.

Grow into optimization

A/B optimization is a great way to improve your campaign methodology. A dedicated analyst is needed to ensure proper hypotheses are tied to the right success metrics.

Evaluate success

Having a low cost-per-click is nice, but it is not an accurate measure of success. Revenue is a much better metric, but even that can be insufficient. While you may have created a campaign to drive purchases, users may have signed up for your newsletter instead.

Working from home is a formidable transition for everyone, so we’ve asked our staff for their tips and tricks on effectively working away from the office.