Privacy-first analytics solution for PandaDoc to align marketing efforts with revenue

How OWOX Empowered Pandadoc to Align Marketing Efforts with Revenue keeping Data Privacy in Mind

In this case study, you’ll discovery how PandaDoc team has been using OWOX to enhance the understanding of customer behavior, achieve greater visibility into marketing performance, establish unwavering trust in their marketing data & save time on manual reporting

The company

PandaDoc is a leading document automation software, revolutionizing the way organizations create, track, and manage their documents. PandaDoc enables businesses to streamline their entire document workflow so they can improve productivity, close deals faster, and create better customer experiences.

PandaDoc was founded in 2013, and now is a a trusted solution provider for over 50,000 clients worldwide, from startups to enterprise-level organizations who want to create, manage, and e-Sign docs with ease.

The challenge

It’s hard to properly track the website user behaviour with today’s privacy restrictions…

The same is true for Pandadoc — they were using Google Analytics Universal for tracking, and their analytics was on the verge of collapse due to a request from the legal team regarding privacy concerns.

• It all started with Google Analytics being banned in some of the EU countries

Free guide: How to protect sensitive user data and comply with the GDPR in EU →

Another challenge was not having a 100% trust in Google Analytics data. The problem is, when you implement a consent banner for your website or app, GA4 will be missing data for users who decline consent. Behavioral modeling for consent mode uses ML to model the behavior of users who decline cookies, based on the behavior of similar users who accept analytics cookies. GA4 has a great potential, but for now its interface is not a self-service solution for marketers.

• The wrong data may cause the wrong decisions

Today’s customer journeys are long and complex: people rarely convert during their first visit to the website and often switch devices and browsers within the journey.

That’s why our client also wanted to collect all of the raw data in the same place for more comprehensive data analysis, so they could gain valuable insights into user behavior in order to optimize marketing campaigns and website performance. The absence of a unified analytics solution resulted in fragmented data silos, making it difficult to measure the impact of marketing initiatives and attribute conversions accurately.

• Struggle to connect spend and revenue

We were struggling to connect the dots between our marketing efforts and actual business outcomes. Our analytics setup was fragmented, and it was challenging to gain actionable insights.

-- Olga Asheychik, Web Analytics Manager at PandaDoc

The goals

Pandadoc’s primary goal was to establish a robust analytics infrastructure that would provide them with accurate, reliable, and comprehensive raw data, that is a 100% privacy compliant to get the only source of truth, and therefore, create reports and dashboard based on that.

After evaluating all of the options, they chose OWOX as their preferred analytics platform due to its match with the privacy legislations, advanced website tracker, flexibility, analytics expertise and ability to integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure.

Free guide: Google tech stack compliance checklist →

The implementation process

The first step was to take care of the data collection by setting up GDPR-compliant user behavior tracker:

• The recommendations for changes in tracking on the website based on the expert analysis were implemented;
• A webstream (using sub-domain as an access point) was created;

As a result, the accurate real-time website user behavior data is now collected using OWOX Streaming. Data is then consolidated in Google BigQuery and processes within the EU location.

For reporting purposes a light-weight table with user activity data aggregated by sessions is what suits the best. That’s why the second step was to handle the data preparation for analysis with sessionization, which means organizing raw event data into meaningful groups based on user activity.

Working on this task was highly intriguing as we witnessed the transformation of fragmented data into insights. OWOX provided us with the tool and templates we needed to achieve our goals.

-- Olga Asheychik, Web Analytics Manager at PandaDoc

The third and final step was to set up the reporting based on the trusted data to build dashboards.

Free guide: Top 30 Handpicked Google Looker Studio Dashboards for Marketers →

Benefits and advantages for PandaDoc

Once OWOX was implemented and fully set up, Pandadoc started experiencing several benefits, including:

• Pandadoc gained a unified view of their analytics data, enabling them to trust the collected data and understand user behavior so they can optimize marketing efforts effectively.
• OWOX Sessionization template made the raw data business-ready by grouping events into sessions;
• OWOX Attribution template allowed Pandadoc to attribute conversions to sessions accurately, providing insights into the effectiveness of various marketing channels and campaigns.
• Customized dashboards and automated reports in Tableau providing marketing team and C-level executives with real-time data insights and KPI’s.

We didn't expect the data quality to be much better than what GA4 provides by default.

-- Olga Asheychik, Web Analytics Manager at PandaDoc

Business results for PandaDoc

After implementing OWOX and optimizing their analytics infrastructure, our client achieved the following business results:

• Became 100% privacy compliant;
• Is ready for Google Analytics Universal sunset;
• Saved tens of hours on manual reporting every month;
• Gained a 100% trust in collected data;
• Improved understanding of customer behavior and preferences;
• Increased visibility into marketing performance and campaign effectiveness;

With OWOX as their analytics partner, Pandadoc continues to enhance their marketing and analytics capabilities. They now have the ability to make data-driven decisions confidently, implement targeted marketing strategies, and gain a competitive edge in the e-sign document automation software market.

We are extremely satisfied with the results achieved through our partnership with OWOX. I'm also impressed by quick and effective support we get from OWOX.

-- Olga Asheychik, Web Analytics Manager at PandaDoc

Next steps

Pandadoc plans to import historical data from Google Universal Analytics so that they can not only build records based on current data, but also compare them to what they had last year or the year before. This is quite important for the marketing team, especially for evaluating seasonal trends to improve performance.