HockeyStack Academy 101 - Define Properties
This guide explains how HockeyStack data model works, even with messy datasets that have duplicates and/or no defined relations.
We discussed that each action and entity in HockeyStack can have properties. If goals are nicknames for a group of actions, defined properties are nicknames for a group of properties.
Let’s go back to our Actions table.
This table depicts a list of website sessions from various sources. The properties Source, UTM Source, and UTM Medium have meanings on their own. But they have a much larger meaning when looked at together. For example, a UTM Source = linkedin and UTM Medium = paid_social might mean LinkedIn Ads, and a UTM_Source = empty and Source = facebook.com might mean Facebook Organic.
Let’s say we want to add another column to our table to depict this meaning, which will be called “Channel” Our ruleset will be:
- If UTM Source contains “linkedin” and UTM Medium contains “paid” → LinkedIn Ads
- If UTM Source contains “linkedin” and UTM Medium contains “organic” → LinkedIn Organic
- If UTM Source is empty and Source contains “facebook”, or if UTM Source contains “facebook” and UTM Medium contains “organic” → Facebook Organic
This Channel property doesn’t actually exist in our dataset, but it can be inferred from the list of other properties that our actions have. This is called a “Defined Property”. You can apply the same thing on any Shared Property as well.
For example, a common Defined Company Property to define is “Region”. If your CRM only stores countries, you can create a Defined Company Property that groups relevant countries into regions.
For a ruleset like Country = “Canada” or Country = “United States” → NAM, you can imagine the below Company Properties:
In HockeyStack, navigate to Definitions > Properties.
This page is your property dictionary.
You can click on the + icon on the top right corner to create a new defined property.
Each mapping in a defined property will have:
- A ruleset
- And a value that the ruleset maps to
The ruleset can be constructed using and/or logic using any property in the HockeyStack dataset.
The mapped value can either be:
- A static value
- For example: I want to map Canada and United States to “NAM”
- A dynamic value
- For example: I want to create a property called Resources that stores all my resource interactions. This property will show 1- the URL of the page if the action is a pageview on a resource page, 2- the name of the email, if the action is an email open on an email with a specific subject schema, 3- blank if it’s neither.
High level filters like Action Name, Action Type, or Touchpoint Type are often overlooked by beginners to HockeyStack. In the above case, we wanted to add a specific filter to only include pageview actions, because clicks and form fills might also have a page url. The significance of this becomes clearer when you are doing attribution, where the number of touchpoints is really important.
Touchpoint Type property
Touchpoint Type is an action property that helps distinguish between different categories of sales and marketing actions.
Below is a full list:
Odin automatically answers mission critical questions for marketing teams, builds reports from text, and sends weekly emails with insights.
You can ask Odin to find out the top performing campaigns for enterprise pipeline, which content type you should create more next quarter, or to prepare your doc for your next board meeting.
Nova does account scoring using buyer journeys, helps automate account research, and builds workflows to automate tasks.
For example, you can ask Nova to find high intent website visitors that recently hired a new CMO, do research to find if they have a specific technology on their website, and add them to the right sequence.
Our customers are already managing over $20B in campaign spend through the HockeyStack platform. This funding will allow us to expand our product offerings, and continue to help B2B companies scale revenue with AI-based insight products that make revenue optimization even easier.
We are super excited to bring more products to market this year, while helping B2B marketing and sales teams continue driving efficient growth.
A big thank you to all of our team, investors, customers, and friends. Without your support, we couldn’t have grown this fast.
Reach out if you want to learn more about our new products and check out HockeyStack!
About HockeyStack
HockeyStack is the Revenue Acceleration Platform for B2B. HockeyStack integrates with a company’s CRM, marketing automation tools, ad platforms and data warehouse to reveal the ideal customer journey and provide actionable next steps for marketing and sales teams. HockeyStack customers use this data to measure channel performance, launch cost-efficient campaigns, and prioritize the right accounts.
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has more than $18 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).
