Marketing Stack Audit and Optimization for Stacklist

Stacklist needed to get to the bottom of why their metrics weren't lining up across their various analytics platforms despite originating from the same sources. I signed on to perform an end-to-end audit of their marketing technology stack to identify what was causing the disparity.

While completing this work, I also assisted with the implementation of Posthog Analytics as a replacement for Mixpanel, and AppsFlyer for measurement of campaign performance for marketing efforts through Reddit Ads across Stacklist's web and native mobile apps.

Complex technical problems often bare multiple contributing factors, so it was unsurprising to find that Stacklist's data integrity issue was no exception to this.

An exhaustive audit of the tracking configuration housed in Google Tag Manager, along side a second layer of programmatic tracking that was implemented via their code revealed a host of discrepancies contributing to their data disparity. A following evaluation of Termly, Stacklist's cookie consent management tool, revealed misconfiguration of the platform as a secondary leading cause.

It is not common to come away from a complex troubleshooting exercise with only tangible, easily addressable problems to resolve, and this holds especially true when an analytics implementation is as advanced as Stacklist's. I sincerely believe that this ultimately speaks to the prowess of their development team for creating a highly-desirable but rarely achieved simplicity in software architecture and supportive tooling.

A simple round of changes to Termly enabled comprehensive coverage of Stacklist's tracking tools and accurate classification of the cookies they set, thus alleviating data disparity issues resulting from only partial governance of cookie-setting platforms. In anticipation of a significant cost increase for use of Mixpanel when Stacklist's startup grant expired later in the year, phasing this platform out and replacing it with Posthog Analytics was a timely convenience that made way for also addressing many of the tracking defects present in the code layer that were identified during the audit.

Everyone loves a happy ending!

Google Analytics

Mixpanel

Firebase Analytics via BigQuery

Google Tag Manager

Termly Cookie Consent

AppsFlyer

Reddit Ads Conversions

Posthog

Looker Studio

Google Open Refine