Grafana Increases Conversion Rates with RudderStack

Highlights

Grafana was looking to better understand customer behavior on their website in order to increase conversion
RudderStack enabled Grafana to collect behavioral data in real-time to personalize customer interactions with tools such as Intercom and Customer.io and run experiments to improve web conversion rates
Grafana instrumented RudderStack to send data to their BigQuery to build a full view of their customer in their warehouse for marketing and BI use cases

Key Stats

Save time: Sending data to a new destination can be done in minutes instead of days saving Engineering time
Make better decisions: Better decisions driven by better data has enabled Grafana to increase web conversion rates resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in monthly incremental revenue
Mitigate risk: Know more quickly when something is wrong and exactly what to fix, resulting in a better user experience and less costly downtime
Increase revenue: Measure the impact of new initiatives more quickly and confidently, resulting in a faster release cadence of changes making a meaningful impact on our business
Reduce costs: Saves days of Engineering time implementing routine API calls by mechanizing the process of routing data to multiple tools all at once

"As a growth person, I need to understand what’s happening at every step of our funnel, and I want to know what works and what doesn’t. RudderStack lets me run experiments and track user behaviors across our marketing funnel, our technology stack, and our product. I can use the resulting event data to increase revenues, save money, and mitigate risks to Grafana Labs’ business instead of relying solely on feedback, intuition, or educated guesses."

—John Marbach - Senior Growth Manager at Grafana Labs

Overview

Grafana is an analytics and observability tool that lets anyone use dashboards to query, visualize, and alert on metrics in real-time, no matter where data is stored. Grafana users monitor distributed systems across a variety of applications, including DevOps, IoT, aerospace, and AdTech. Developed by Grafana Labs, the technology powers factories and farms, SpaceX launches, and even local running clubs. It is also available as a scalable, self-managed Grafana Enterprise Stack with 24/7 support and a composable curated SaaS called Grafana Cloud.

With more than 800,000 active installations worldwide and an expanding user base, Grafana was using Google Analytics to collect page view data and track a limited set of user events. This rudimentary setup didn’t offer deep visibility into the company’s funnel, and there was no way for Grafana Labs to measure conversion rates or monitor user behavior across its website.

Grafana Labs also lacked a tool to aggregate user profile and event data from Google Analytics with data from other sources to generate a complete user profile. As a result, the company could not prioritize changes to its funnel or its products.

To alleviate these bottlenecks and meet its analytics needs, Grafana Labs adopted RudderStack as its customer data platform and now enjoys event stream integration across its technology stack, including Intercom, Customer.io, and its BigQuery data warehouse.

Challenge: Collecting and Acting On Behavioral Data While Respecting Consumer Privacy

To increase conversion, Grafana’s marketing team wanted to implement best practices for building user profiles using Track and Identify calls. They first evaluated Segment but decided to deploy RudderStack given its warehouse-first approach and a deployment model that ensured that Grafana did not send any of their customer data to a third-party.

“I need to understand what’s happening at every step of our funnel,” says Grafana Labs Senior Growth Manager John Marbach. “From signing up, through starting a trial, creating dashboards, and converting to a paid Grafana Cloud account. I want to know what works and what doesn’t. So, I’m constantly running experiments and tracking user behaviors across our marketing funnel, our technology stack, and our product.”

“We wanted a partner who would allow us to view and contribute to the source code,” says Marbach. “We also wanted the flexibility to implement the solution on our own. At the same time, we recognized the need for a managed solution that would free us to focus on improving Grafana. RudderStack was a perfect fit in terms of price and functionality.”

Solution: Instrumenting Events and Augmenting Grafana Labs’ Customer Data Stack

Within a day of deploying the RudderStack Control Plane, Grafana Labs’ team instrumented page views using a RudderStack tracking script on the company’s website. Two days later, they had also instrumented user signups and a few other events representing different stages of the consumer journey.

“It took 48 hours to see the value of RudderStack,” continues Marbach, “and we’ve continued to instrument key events incrementally and add to our stack as the company and our product evolve.”

RudderStack allows Grafana Labs to add downstream applications to its stack with a single mouse-click. The company recently added Intercom conversational marketing and support to its website, and the process was seamless. The marketing team added the Intercom API key to Grafana Labs’ RudderStack Control Plane and a simple JavaScript to the company’s website. Within minutes, they were engaging with customers who don’t typically use email. The Grafana team estimates that this has reduced Engineering time needed to start sending customer data to a new tool like Intercom from 20-40 hours to near zero.

“I didn’t have to write requirements for our Engineering team,” says Marbach. “And I didn’t have to tie up an engineer for a week to make, test, and deploy a change on our website. It’s so easy to augment our stack with the latest marketing technology.”

Results: Better Data And Faster Insights To Save Engineering Time And Drive Revenue Growth

Grafana Labs now uses RudderStack to aggregate user profile and event data in BigQuery to generate a complete view of their users from a variety of different sources. The company can route this data to downstream destinations like Customer.io to trigger marketing campaigns or export it to internal BI dashboards for further analysis.

Using RudderStack data, the marketing team is making changes to the Grafana Cloud signup funnel and testing variants to see how users performed in different cohorts. Marbach and his colleagues can run experiments to see what users are doing and where they are doing it.

RudderStack tracking also helped Grafana Labs catch and correct an unknown signup error. After creating an account, users registering for Grafana Cloud with their GitHub or Google accounts were redirected to the wrong page. “It was another moment of clarity,” says Marbach. “In some respects, we were flying blind, and RudderStack put undetected product experience issues like this on our radar. We see things breaking faster and can fix them before they can have an impact on our bottom line or quality of service.”

RudderStack has given Grafana Labs the tools to move forward with confidence. “Our discussions are no longer about my opinion versus someone else’s opinion but about what our data is showing us,” says Marbach. “Knowing our data is reliable allows us to increase revenues, save money, and mitigate risks to our business without relying on faulty feedback, intuition, or educated guesses.”