Firstparty Reports are powered by custom, calculated Metrics. Define any number of custom Metrics and Firstparty will calculate them for each of your Reports.
What is a Metric?
A metric is a numerical value that represents something about your app or business. In Firstparty, metrics are used to display data in reports. You can use Firstparty’s pre-built metrics as a starting point for your own custom metrics, or create entirely new metrics from scratch.
Metrics are customizable, and can be used to measure any data that is available in Firstparty. Metrics are defined by specifying an equation that dictates how Firstparty should calculate the value of the Metric for each row of data returned in a Report. Metrics may calculate everything from counting the number of Events to measuring the lifetime value of a customer Profile.
You can use Firstparty’s pre-built metrics as a starting point for your own custom Metrics, or create entirely new Metrics from scratch. Once you’ve defined a Metric, it will be available for use in any of your reports.
Custom Metric Equations
Every Metric has an Equation which defines how Firstparty should calculate the value of a Metric for each row of data returned in a Report. Equations are easy to write, and are evaluated by following the typical arithmetic order or operations, further specified by the inclusion of parentheses.
Filtering Metric Values
Metrics also support Filters, which limit the data that is included when calculating the value of that Metric. Filters are applied to the entire Metric, and will affect how the equation is calculated at runtime within a Report.
Filters are useful when you want to combine different Event types in the same Report. For example, you have a “Landing Pages” Report that shows the first Page Viewed path, but you want to also show the number of Transaction Completed events that each landing page contributed.
For more information on creating custom Metrics, please see our Metrics documentation.
We’re excited to share some new features in Firstparty that improve reporting and conversion optimization, and we’re even more excited that they’re all available today!
Create Custom Reports & Navigation
Customize your KPIs, table properties, and table metrics
Reporting in Firstparty is now completely customizable. Create an unlimited number of Reports with exactly the information you want to see, and even customize the navigation to design the analytics product of your dreams.
We’ve provided you with some familiar reports to start with, but we’d love to help you setup your first custom report. Schedule a call with us when you’d like some assistance!
Create Custom, Calculated Metrics
Reports are powered by custom, calculated Metrics. Define any number of custom Metrics and Firstparty will calculate them for each of your Reports.
Easy Report Discovery & Navigation
Reporting navigation in Firstparty is also customizable. Each Report can be assigned to a Group and Subgroup, and have a custom title for use in sidebar navigation.
Now your analytics can be truly designed for your organization, ensuring that the reports needed by your team are readily available without hunting through an obscure list or dozens of folders.
The modern business advertising on Google and Facebook often wants to optimize their campaigns for objectives that cannot be collected from the web browser. This could be offline conversions like sales made in a store or over the phone, subscriptions, or other lead generation objectives. While it is important to track these events in an external system like Salesforce, you can also send this data back to your advertising platforms for more effective ad campaign optimization.
There are two key ways to do this: offline conversion tracking for Facebook Ads, and offline conversion tracking for Google Ads.
Rather than building a custom integration with Facebook and Google APIs, Firstparty makes it easy to send conversions to either platform based on any Event you collect with Firstparty. This makes it easy to optimize ads for a conversion in the browser that historically may have been missed due to an ad blocker, a sale that occurs weeks later after a trial is complete, or for closed-won opportunities tracked in a CRM like Salesforce.
To get started, simply create a new Firstparty Rule and specify the following:
– A “Match Event Name” Condition where you’ll specify the name of the Event to listen for (e.g. “Offline Conversion”)
– A “Send Google Ads Conversion” Action where you’ll choose your Google Ads Connection and specify the Conversion Action to send to Google Ads
(You may follow the same steps for Facebook Ads; you’ll just need a few more pieces of information including your Facebook Pixel ID)
Once you have created the Rule, Firstparty will automatically send the conversion to Google Ads. Now, when people see and engage with your ads on Google, any offline conversions that occur will be attributed back to your ad campaign and optimization will be based on those offline conversions.
If you’re not already using Firstparty to collect Events sign up for free today and see how easy it is to get started.
We’re excited to announce that you may now turn data in Salesforce into Events in Firstparty, making your CRM data even more actionable.
Businesses selling products to other businesses often experience long sales cycles that conclude in a win or loss outside of the browser that captured the original lead. Marketers and engineers want to record these sales as conversions and attribute them to the original source that started the initial conversation. Ad networks like Meta (Facebook) and Google make collecting these “offline conversions” possible, but these complex integrations require custom code and may take months to configure.
Firstparty makes it easy to send Salesforce Opportunities (or anything else) to Meta Ads as a conversion.
Firstparty retrieves data from Salesforce automatically, turns each returned Salesforce object into an Event, and sends it to Meta ads as a conversion. You may even send these conversions without including the Meta Pixel on your website by relying on the data collected from your website visitors with Firstparty.js.
Firstparty provides default options to retrieve new or updated Opportunities, and also allows you to write a custom Salesforce Object Query Language query to retrieve just about anything from your Salesforce instance. Firstparty will create an Event with the name you choose for each row of data Salesforce returns, and include all of the columns your query selects as Properties on that Event.
You may immediately start sending Salesforce Opportunities to Facebook Ads / Meta Ads by following the Send Salesforce Conversions to Facebook Ads recipe. This will guide you through a Workflow explaining exactly how to configure each step necessary to send data from Salesforce to Meta Ads as a conversion event.
We would not only love your feedback, but are happy to walk you through setting up these new solutions. Sign up for a free account, or get in touch with us anytime.
We’re excited to announce that Firstparty has raised $5.75 million in seed funding! The round is co-led by Chris Howard at Fuel Capital and Boris Wertz at Version One Ventures. Participants in the round include Flybridge Capital Partners, Volo Ventures, John Sheehan, Chad Etzel, Tyler Willis, Pete Kim, Scott Yacko, Lane Becker, Chuck Reynolds, Kim Kressaty, and Daniel and Kathryn Clark.
Firstparty is on a mission to make it easy for companies to collect and take action on their customer data. The company was founded in August 2021 by long-time colleagues and friends Jonathan Kressaty and Danielle Morrill, who share deep domain expertise in marketing and developer tools. Through our work with companies including Twilio, Parse, Mattermark, GitLab, Github, and Frame.io, we’ve seen first-hand the power of first-party customer analytics.
We’re using this funding to obtain product-market fit and grow our team, and we’re hiring!
What Is Firstparty
Firstparty provides businesses with a complete view of their customer’s journey, from initial awareness through conversion. We generate first-party cookies on behalf of the brand, allowing for highly segmented, granular, detailed data collection and personalization of the customer experience.
Instead of passing personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties, we enable businesses to store events in their own data warehouse. Firstparty also anonymizes this data so our customers can generate targeted audiences to run advertising campaigns without revealing sensitive consumer information.
We created Firstparty as a product because we saw companies trying to build this solution in-house. It’s challenging to keep up with the rapidly evolving data privacy landscape as it intersects with sales and marketing technology. Even companies who have the engineering resources to create customer solutions prefer to specialize and outsource this challenge to us.
Universal Analytics will stop processing new events on July 1, 2023, and Google is encouraging users to migrate to GA4. A notable shortcoming of GA4 is that it does not include some of the granular information Universal Analytics currently provides, such as what keywords people use to find a website and specific products a visitor adds to their shopping cart. The consequences of this change for marketing teams may include degraded reporting and data-driven automation that no longer performs.
Firstparty is the perfect solution for businesses that want to maintain, and increase, their current level of data and insight without relying on third-party platforms.
With this change more than a year away, most marketing teams are not yet thinking about how they will address these changes. We’re looking for a Content Marketer to help us educate the market.
Cookieless Marketing is Coming
Safari and Firefox no longer support cross-site cookie tracking in the browser, and Google Chrome, the dominant browser in use worldwide, will stop supporting it by the end of 2022.
These changes mean businesses will no longer be able to track people across the web using cookies and will need to find alternative ways to collect data. Firstparty enables customers to use their first-party cookies to collect usage events. Our data collection method will continue to work when third-party cookies are no longer supported.
The Power of First-party Data
We believe marketers building first-party data assets are setting the standard for marketing success. By taking control of customer profiles, brands leverage granular information that is more accurate, complete, and timely than any other source.
First-party data is collected directly from individuals’ interactions with a company and include any part of the customer journey that a brand controls. Traditionally, these would consist of interactions like website visits, app downloads, e-commerce purchases, and other significant funnel conversion steps.
First-party data is essential for understanding how your customers interact with your brand across all touch-points. Data-driven insights into which marketing messages resonate with audiences are powerful because companies can use them to create a single customer view to personalize the customer journey and improve conversions.
Finally, first-party data enables companies to stitch together interactions across many channels, including social media, product usage, sales conversations, live chat, and customer service interactions. We are excited to see what developers build with programmatic access to the entire end-to-end customer experience through our APIs.
Firstparty provides businesses with detailed analysis and attribution of their customer’s journey, from initial awareness through conversion. We’re constantly adding new features and integrations, so be sure to check back often to see what’s new.
Today we’re excited to launch audience management and conversion attribution in Firstparty, to help our customers increase campaign performance by better utilizing first-party data.
To help businesses retain their leading edge in marketing, it’s imperative that we support them in simplifying data collection processes and reducing friction in the customer adoption journey. This is now possible with our new Audiences and Attribution features.
We’re also introducing a new set of guided recipes that make it easy to create complex Workflows in just a few minutes, eliminating the weeks of setup between Marketing and Engineering teams required in the past. Together, these solutions address major data and marketing challenges raised by Firstparty users who are spending significant budget on campaigns, especially with Meta Ads.
Segments, Audiences, Rules, and Workflows
Segments define smaller sets of Events and other collected data, making it easier to build Reports and Audiences. Documentation / API Reference
Audiences define a set of Profiles who are all part of one or more specific Segments. Audiences may be sent to Destinations like Facebook Ads, and are great at improving accuracy of first-party audiences without relying solely on matching email addresses. Read More / Documentation / API Reference
Rules define automations that execute in response to collected Events. Rules allow you to set Actions that should be taken based on a set of Conditions evaluated against Events you collect with Firstparty. Read More / Documentation / API Reference
Workflows guide you through configuring new and existing Firstparty components to help solve marketing problems like analytics, attribution, and audience creation in just a few clicks. Read More / Documentation
Analytics & Reporting Improvements
When analyzing your collected Events, you may add your Segments to Reports, making it easy to compare performance against multiple user cohorts.
Data collection has also been improved, with faster response times from the browser of your website visitors. Plus, you may now visualize Events collected with our new Warehouse Sources, which make it easy to turn SQL queries into actionable Events.
Get Started
We would not only love your feedback, but are happy to walk you through setting up these new solutions. Sign up for a free account, or get in touch with us anytime.
The Firstparty marketing team uses Firstparty to measure page views and user engagements on our website, firstpartyhq.com.
In addition to pages with product information and a way to signup to use the application, there is a form on the website that visitors can fill out to contact the Firstparty team with questions or requests.
Collecting the information from that form has three major requirements:
Measure how many visitors fill out the form
Provide context of the visit alongside the form submission
Ensure that no customer information is sent to third-party systems
This post walks through how we meet these requirements with Firstparty, including step-by-step instructions for anyone who wants to do the same thing. If you run into any issues or have questions, please reach out to support@firstpartyhq.com and we’ll be happy to help!
Restrictions of the status quo
It’s not a new idea to track website form completions in a web analytics tool. Typically, a marketing team will configure web forms to send a “completion” event to tools like Google Analytics, Segment, Facebook Ads, or Google Ads.
Sending a visitor’s personal identifiable information (PII), such as an email address, to third-parties that track behaviors of the visitor is becoming increasingly restricted. In some cases, such as when using Google Analytics, it’s impossible to submit PII without violating the product’s terms of service. Most organizations are required to request visitor consent before collecting any browsing information. This is becoming even more important as legislation such as GDPR and the California Privacy Rights Act continue to be enforced. And with recent changes to Apple’s iOS, maintaining an accurate measurement of an app user over time requires the user to explicitly opt-in to tracking.
Unfortunately, meeting these requirements are often at the expense of accurate measurement and quality customer service. Google Analytics can’t show you exactly which pages a specific email address viewed. Segment implementations require cookie consent before loading any external tag. Google Ads and Facebook Ads track visitor interactions across the web, and therefore require the visitor’s consent to set the cookies that track them – so a lack of consent means a lack of measurement and attribution.
Avoid restrictions by maintaining user privacy with Firstparty
Firstparty is a closed system that doesn’t move your data without your explicit instructions. Your visitor data isn’t being used to track your customers across websites and is never sold to other companies. This means that you can submit most information needed for day-to-day business reasons without any concern, and with several additional benefits compared to legacy tools:
Collect your measurement data without sharing with third-parties
Maintain a profile of your website’s visitors by setting a first-party cookie on your domain, often without the need for consent
Reduce the negative effects of enhanced browser restrictions and ad blockers
Accurately measure form completions with Firstparty
Let’s verify that all three of our original requirements can be met by using Firstparty before we configure our web form to collect any information.
Requirement 1: Measure how many visitors fill out the form All of the form’s data is submitted to Firstparty alongside the event, rather than only measuring the completion event. A “Form Completed” event is collected in Firstparty each time a visitor fills out that form. This allows our marketing team to measure website effectiveness in real time.
Requirement 2: Provide context of the visit alongside the form submission Including the entire history of the visitor on firstpartyhq.com lets the support team respond to customer inquiries with complete knowledge of the pages the visitor has viewed, how many times they’ve visited, and how the visitor found our website.
Requirement 3: Ensure that no customer information is sent to third-party systems The entire company can be confident that customer information, such as a name or email address, is never sent to third-party measurement platforms – it was only collected with Firstparty. All data stays inside Firstparty until instructed to send data to the attached data warehouse.
Step 1: Setup the contact form
The form visitors can complete at firstpartyhq.com is fairly straightforward, including fields for a name, email address, information about their company, and an optional field to ask a question. You can see this form at https://firstpartyhq.com/contact/
Unlike many websites, submitting the form doesn’t actually post the data to a database, backend service, or third-party system like Salesforce or Hubspot. Instead, all of the values from the form are sent directly to Firstparty by submitting a custom event called “Form Submitted”.
firstparty.track('Form Submitted', {
first_name: "Jerry",
last_name: "Seinfeld",
email: "jerry@seinfeld.com",
message: "Hi there! I have a question about Firstparty..."
});
Step 2: Retrieve form submissions
Firstparty syncs the data collected on this website to a warehouse every hour. This includes every page view, as well as our “Form Submitted” event.
We can easily retrieve all of the form submissions from our internal warehouse with a simple SQL query:
select * from events
where event = 'Form Submitted'
This makes it easy to pull a list of every form submitted along with the entire payload of data we sent from the form. We even get information on the user’s browser and location, making it easy to provide even more context when responding to their question.
Step 3: Act on form submissions in real time (coming soon!)
Retrieving data from the warehouse every hour can be cumbersome, and requires a host of additional processes to make that data available to the people who need it most.
Our team is currently working on a new set of features that make it easy to build marketing automation processes that react to any event you send to Firstparty.
This means that when you submit the form on our website, we automatically notify our support team, without needing to wait on data to sync to the warehouse.
Beta Test Firstparty Marketing Automation Tools
If you’d like to try our marketing automation tools, make sure to signup for Firstparty and then fill out our contact form! We’ll be notifying individuals as we expand this feature in the coming months.
Measurement & Engagement Made Easy
It’s easy to create simple forms that send data to Firstparty for both measurement and customer engagement. Firstparty users can trust that data never leaves without their explicit permission, and only transfers to the specific locations they choose.
Today we’re happy to share that we’ve shipped Firstparty reporting. With this improvement, you can view a histogram of the events, sessions, and profiles you’ve collected.
Use Reporting to Drill Down on Your Data
Reporting supports segmenting and filtering the events you’ve collected by any property. This makes it easy to answer questions from “where are my users visiting from geographically?” to “how many visitors have looked at our pricing page?”
Start Collecting Events with Firstparty
If this is your first time learning about Firstparty, welcome!
Looking to perform more advanced analysis on the event data you’ve collected? You can connect your Firstparty account to your data warehouse and use popular business intelligence tools such as Looker, Tableau, Mode, etc.
Google BigQuery, AWS S3 and Redshift, and Postgres are currently supported, but if you’d like another data warehouse to be added just drop a note to support@firstpartyhq.com or use our contact form.
Firstparty collects your web analytics and syncs every event to your data warehouse. Firstparty makes it easy to serve all analytics code from your own domain, collect every hit without being blocked by ad blockers, and keep customer information secure.
When you sign up, your free account will be set up with 1 million free events. After that, you can continue with a paid account for $0.00005 per event ($50 per 1 million events). Learn more on our pricing page.
Get Started
After you sign up, you can get started immediately after a quick DNS update and installing the Firstparty javascript snippet on your website – simply follow the instructions after logging in.
Firstparty is still young, and we appreciate your feedback as we onboard our initial users. If you have any questions or issues, please feel free to email support@firstpartyhq.com.
You Rock
Thank you to everyone who has already had a conversation with us – your insights and feedback are super appreciated. If you’d like to schedule a call with us, feel free to choose a time that works best for you.
We are so grateful for your interest in what we’re building, and we are committed to featuring customer stories, code examples, and hope to continue working with you to make Firstparty better.
The roles of Marketers and Developers are colliding
Marketers are working with their Engineering counterparts more than ever, especially as new tools become increasingly complex. Through these partnerships marketers are now de-facto engineers themselves, using complex logic to build automations, understanding what cookies and HTTP requests are, and learning how to write SQL and Javascript.
Engineering has learned from this partnership that Marketing has budget for tools and an insatiable appetite for data. Marketing’s analytics and measurement tools give Engineering insights into where customers are coming from and what they are doing. As Marketing’s tool kit expands, Engineering can focus more on the core product and less on commoditized features.
We are marketing and software development experts who have been solving this problem for over 10 years
Firstparty comes from years of wearing both of those hats – growing businesses as digital marketers and building products as engineers and company operators. We witnessed the consequences of adding tool after tool on top of poor measurement strategies, overpriced software, and fragmented data. We felt the pain of integrating marketing tools inside of custom software and processes.
We also learned that these issues helped form a new partnership between Marketing and Engineering.
We’re building Firstparty with an aim to provide huge value to both Marketing and Engineering by embracing the partnership and acknowledging the new skill sets that marketers and engineers have acquired.
We are building an alternative to Google Analytics that enables companies to store their own data
Firstparty makes it easy to collect accurate marketing analytics and get that data where it needs to be – next to all the other data your business is generating.
Data warehouses are becoming the single source of truth in organizations from startups to the largest enterprises. Combined data in a warehouse provides rich context about the customer journey to teams that are not only marketing to the customer, but also building for the customer.
We've been talking a lot about the intersection of marketing and engineering, and both @DanielleMorrill and I are super interested in conveying that as part of our product vision.
I'll bet a bunch of you are already living this, and if you have thoughts, we'd love to hear them! https://t.co/Lpknx3U8R4
This intersection of Marketing and Engineering is a convergence that we believe is unlikely to slow, and we are super excited to build solutions that support these teams as they work closer than ever!
