It sure has been a hot minute since my last Umbraco Package Developer update, six months to be exact, and for those who have been following along Umbraco's news would know that a lot has changed! Just over a year ago I dived into the world of Umbraco Package Development over at uMarketingSuite, and there's no better opportunity to reflect on what I have learned and experienced over the last year than the present... so let's go! 🚀
The acquisition of uMarketingSuite
Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room; Umbraco has acquired uMarketingSuite, both the product & the team. With this comes an incredible opportunity to continue our development on the product, but as part of Umbraco HQ themselves! 🎉 Even more exciting for me is that with that I've now taken on the role as Technical Team Lead within the Commercial Products team at Umbraco HQ, where I'll be working together with brilliant minds like Matt Brailsford (Commerce) & Nathan Woulfe (Workflow), both of whom have also been acquired by HQ over the last years.
It still feels quite surreal to me that my journey has lead me to working for Umbraco HQ, after all these years of being part of the Umbraco community and working with & extending on the Umbraco CMS, something I'm very grateful for. Unfortunately this does mean that I won't be able to go beyond the 3x MVP award, but that's a sacrifice I was willing to make! 😉
Time will tell what the future has in store for us, but all I know for sure is that we'll continue building out the amazing product that is uMarketingSuite, and building even better integrations with other products of Umbraco.
Campaign Attribution Modeling 📊
During my career I've worked with Marketeers on a regular basis, but rarely did I have to go into such depths involving campaigns as I have recently. Campaigns have been a feature of uMarketingSuite since its early days, but they rarely showed their true potential until recently. This is when I learned about the various Attribution Models that you can choose from when working with campaigns. What are attribution models you may ask? As Factors.ai would describe them;
"Attribution models are frameworks that help analyze the customer journey and assign credit to the various touchpoints prior to the conversion", or in layman's terms; "When should a goal completion be credited to someone as part their customer journey?"
For uMarketingSuite we decided to re-implement the crediting of Campaigns & Goals by going for the Last-Touch Attribution model, which means that 100% of the attribution credits (goal completions) will be credited to the touchpoint closest to a customer’s conversion milestone (their last campaign visit). Let's say I've started my customer journey by going to a webshop through a LinkedIn campaign, looked around, but didn't buy anything. A while later I visited the webshop once more during a black-Friday campaign, and another week later I decided to purchase something from said webshop. With the Last-Touch Attribution model the purchase will be credited to the black-Friday campaign, not the initial LinkedIn visit. This is one of many different models out there, and is definitely some interesting material to dive into! 💭
Split URL A/B Tests 🔀
A feature we've introduced earlier this year, which I've never heard off prior to working on it, is Split URL A/B Testing. What we have been able to do previously within uMarketingSuite is to create variations of the same page, and change let's say a title or a button, assign a goal you wish to measure, and see how the two content versions affect your goals. With Split URL testing you start testing entirely different pages and see how they perform against each other!
Let's say we run a webshop selling tickets for an event, which is the main goal of our site. With split URL tests we can divert visitors between 2 different routes and see which one gets the most revenue; The one where customers end up directly on checkout page after clicking "Checkout", or the one where they see an intermediary page with "Perhaps you are also interested in this?" page before then heading to the checkout.
It's interesting to get inside the theory & psychology behind this, and how this can positively (or negatively!) impact your site depending on how you set it up! 📈📉
More than just Code💻
When looking back over the last year, including everything I've mentioned in my Post 30 days in and my Post 6 months in, I seem to find myself learning a lot more about things that aren't C#, or even code related at all, than I would have expected! While the code itself may be the thing that solves a specific problem, it's the mentality and learning process behind finding & resolving said problems that has the biggest impact, and teaches you the most about the world you're trying to solve problems for.
Building a product for a wide variety of clients forces you (in a good way) to keep up with the current problems one may face, whether it's about the various real-world applications your product may be used, or the technical challenges one may face when you are not the one in charge of someone else's infrastructure.
With my journey continuing at Umbraco HQ, I'm more exciting than ever to continue building awesome stuff for people all around the globe, and I can't wait to see wat the future has in store for me! All I know is that I'll never stop learning, because there will always be something new to discover, something to optimize, or something to extend upon!
If you've made it all the way to the bottom, I would like to thank you for your interest, and if there is anything I've mentioned that you'd like to learn more about feel free to contact me over at my socials available at the Contact page, of which I may expand on in a future blog! 😊
