How Paragon Unlocked New Insights from Their Data with HockeyStack
Immediate insights led to more informed growth strategy planning
Easy, flexible reporting for insight into growth-marketing specific questions
Different models to see the impact of channels at various funnel stages
“HockeyStack’s designed for a marketer, for marketing analytics on paid — so just customizing, being able to answer the questions that we have was a huge plus.” — Forrest Herlick, Growth Marketing Manager @ Paragon
The Who
Paragon is an all-in-one platform for building and managing product integrations, allowing developers to ship integrations that sync users' external data or automate tasks across users' other tools.
Brian Yam is the Head of Marketing and Growth at Paragon, where he oversees ad strategy, funnel optimization, product marketing efforts, and revenue operations. Forrest Herlick is a Growth Marketing Manager at Paragon working with Yam on ad campaigns, events, and marketing operations.
The Problem
Before HockeyStack, the marketing team at Paragon used Google Analytics and HubSpot for reporting and analytics. The downside to these tools was that the team could only report using a last touch attribution model, making it difficult to track channels that influence prospects prior to the last touch before conversion.
“Certain channels are more last-touch heavy, like Google ads — it’s fine to rely on last touch because [the customer] is probably coming through the Google ad with high intent of converting on the spot. But we know – given that we spend a lot on LinkedIn – most of those conversions occur outside of an ad click,” he adds.
“A lot of the process with manually reviewing the analytics of the people’s journeys — and with scale — it gets tough.”
Using only a last-touch attribution model, it was difficult to track and attribute pipeline and revenue to LinkedIn. They needed a solution that would provide actionable insights on which experiments were working to optimize the efficiency of the channel over time.
“It got harder and harder to justify not having any way to measure whether or not [LinkedIn] was working, and just trusting that our efficiency was going to stay trending in the right direction,” Yam says. “It became really hard for us to actually compare experiments within LinkedIn.”
In general, using tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot was time consuming, particularly for reviewing customer journeys. “A lot of the process with manually reviewing the analytics of the people’s journeys — and with scale — it gets tough,” Herlick adds.
The Requirements
Yam and Herlick wanted visibility into conversions throughout the funnel and to better track channels like LinkedIn, newsletter sponsorships, and Reddit, so a new reporting platform needed to allow their team to:
- Switch between attribution models to see the impact of channels at different stages of the funnel
- Build custom reporting to answer the team’s specific questions, particularly in relation to paid marketing
- Segment data to identify the most effective touchpoints and channels for targeting different customer profiles
- Gain a complete picture of the customer journey from impression to closed won
- Use an intuitive interface for reporting, visualizing campaign performance, and comparing channel activity against one another and over time.
“HubSpot’s pretty basic in what you can report on. And it’s hard to build custom reports when you have specific questions.”
The Alternatives
Using Hubspot and Google Analytics for marketing analytics and reporting did not address their immediate business needs, especially due to the level of customization they required in their reporting platform to answer their most pressing questions.
“HubSpot’s pretty basic in what you can report on,” Herlick said. “And it’s hard to build custom reports when you have specific questions.”
HockeyStack, on the other hand, felt more aligned with their visions as marketers. “HockeyStack’s designed for a marketer, for marketing analytics on paid — so just customizing, being able to answer the questions that we have,” Herlick adds, “was a huge plus.”
The Insights
“We’re able to do more segmentation because you can define properties — maybe that was possible with HubSpot, but it wasn’t intuitive.”
With HockeyStack’s solutions, Yam and Herlich can still leverage HubSpot insights while also addressing concerns such as:
- Which LinkedIn campaigns are working the best?
- How are different channels/content performing?
- Which channels have the most touchpoints and impact?
They can also get more granular: “We’re able to do more segmentation because you can define properties — maybe that was possible with HubSpot, but it wasn’t
intuitive,” Yam says.
The Results
An immediate upside from implementing HockeyStack was a more thorough review of Paragon’s growth strategy in 2024. Taking that reflection, Yam and Herlick could better plan and prepare for the year ahead.
“It just allowed us to ask questions and actually get to an answer, versus before it was pretty much impossible really to get to some of those insights.”
“‘What is more efficient: targeting product leaders or targeting engineering leaders?’ We could ask ourselves questions like that and look at spend all the way down to pipeline. We can splice and cut the data in different ways to get insights, which we just previously couldn’t, whether it’s in-platform or even in HubSpot,” Yam says.
“It just allowed us to ask questions and actually get to an answer, versus before it was pretty much impossible really to get to some of those insights,” he adds.