Intro: Why Lassoo Headless Analytics?

Today’s data teams depend on accurate first-party behavioral data for advanced analytics, personalization, marketing attribution, and more. Standing up the data pipelines needed to execute these use cases has traditionally been costly and complex. Software engineers must instrument extensive tracking code. Data engineers must wrangle data from across multiple black box data sources. Both are resource-intensive and prone to costly errors.

By decoupling the data collection from reporting, Lassoo’s Headless Analytics architecture gives data teams a better way. First, it efficiently collects, organizes, reconciles, and enriches behavioral data, leveraging Lassoo’s auto-capture capabilities. Secondly, direct access to the data via PostgreSQL gives data teams the ultimate flexibility, allowing them to use their preferred tools for both reporting and activation.

In this article, I’ll show you how to use Lassoo to quickly roll out a behavioral data pipeline that gives you the control you need to deliver on your advanced data use cases. I’ve divided things into three parts:

1. Data Collection using Lassoo’s auto-capture capabilities
2. Accessing your data via direct connection to PostGres
3. Visually generating starter queries

Data Collection using Lassoo’s Auto-Capture Capabilities

Rolling out our pipeline starts with adding the Lassoo auto-capture snippet to our site or app. We can do this by adding the snippet directly to our code base, through one of our platform connectors, or with a tag manager.

After installing Lassoo on our example eCommerce site, each session, click, input, and more will automatically be tracked, enriched, and sent to Lassoo.

The Livestream in Lassoo shows the events as they are collected and ensures the tracking snippet is installed correctly. Each tracked event is enriched with dozens of relevant properties, and identity information is attached as it’s collected along the visitor’s journey.

In addition to auto-capturing user behavior, client and server-side events can be sent via API. You can try this by firing an event from a terminal window.

curl -v -X POST \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
      "name": "foobar",
      "userId": "test_user"
    }' "https://app.lassoo.io/analytics/trackwebhook/**YOURKEY**"

Accessing Your Data via Direct Connection to PostGres

Accessing the data collected by Lassoo is done with a direct connection to the underlying Postgres database. There are no specialized APIs or middleware required. This makes connecting your preferred ETL, warehouse, or other tools extremely quick and easy. All you need to do is specify the IPs that must be whitelisted, and use the provided credentials to connect.

On my Mac, I use Beekeper, so in Lassoo, I’ll add my local IP in the whitelist box and copy the credentials I need over to Beekeper. Once I’ve successfully connected, I can see the simple table structure of Lassoo’s DB and query the database.

Visually Generating Starter Queries

The Lassoo onsite builder opens over your website or application. It shows a list of system, user-defined, and programmatic events available. You can click on one of these listed events or any element on your site to select it for analysis.

After choosing your event or multiple events for a funnel, an editor opens with several contextual panels shown. Panels include the count of event occurrences, a visualization, grouped property breakdowns, and more for a time-series event. A funnel would have its own set of relevant panels.

Opening the SQL panel shows the underlying SQL for the data shown in the other panels.

To execute the SQL in your reporting, ETL, BI, or other tools, simply copy and paste it over. As you make changes on the onsite editor, the SQL being generated updates to reflect them.

Here’s the funnel query copied to and executed in Beekeeper for illustration.

Summary

These steps show how Lassoo Headless Analytics simplifies the complex task of setting up a first-party behavioral data pipeline. From effortless data collection using auto-capture to seamless access via a direct connection to Postgres, Lassoo streamlines the process, providing ultimate control and flexibility to tackle your advanced data use-cases.

Give it a try for yourself today at lassoo.io