Mammoth Growth establishes a single source of truth with a new Segment tracking plan, overhauled Mixpanel instance, and integration with marketing tools.

Barre3, founded in 2008, is a fitness company that manages over 170 studios and offers an online-workout platform that streams workouts in over 156 countries. Its approach incorporates strength, cardio, and mindfulness to build mind-body connection and encourages sustainable fitness practices that produce positive change from the inside out. 

Barre3’s expansion efforts are primarily driven by its studio locations and online platform, as well as an online shop that offers fitness, beauty, and wellness-related apparel and accessories for women. The company’s CEO, Sadie Lincoln, is a 2022 MO100 Impact Award winner.

Problematic Data and A Shrouded Customer View

Though eager to expand, Barre3 faced a major roadblock when it came to properly tracking and reporting on the customer journey. The company’s existing Segment implementation structure was untrustworthy, as it could not determine how and where customers were being acquired.  

Additionally, internal identity management across its platforms was lackluster, with its ecommerce shop (managed using Shopify) using an entirely different identity style than its subscription-based site. Most concerningly, Barre3 had zero visibility into customers acquired through its in-studio subscriptions within Mixpanel—which was already rarely used in place of manual spreadsheet reporting. 

And so, the company approached Mammoth Growth—global leaders in data analytics and growth consulting—to overcome these issues and streamline its expansion.  

Implementing A New Segment Tracking Plan

To initiate development of a solution, Mammoth Growth consulted with Barre3’s marketing, engineering, and product teams to best identify its primary cross-functional data points and the gaps in data that were keeping it from achieving accurate reporting.  

Following this was an analysis of Barre3’s Segment instance and Mixpanel instance to determine how they were being implemented in their existing state and identify any issues. The most critical concerns found from the analysis included: 

• Many sources coming into Segment contained sync errors or high violation percentages, resulting in missing or incorrect data 
• There was no separation of staging and production data, causing data pollution in analytical environments 
• Naming conventions and case styles across events and within single events contained inconsistencies    
• Segment protocols and personas weren’t being leveraged properly or following best practices 

Because Barre3 was no longer using (nor trusted) the legacy data already in its Mixpanel instance, Mammoth Growth wiped it clean and reset it to allow the company to start fresh and reinstate a more holistic and relevant customer view solution. The team also supported Barre3 as it negotiated with Segment to prepare for a historical backfill, which consisted of the engineering necessary to recreate subscription- or account-based events dating back several years.

Mammoth then led the implementation of a new Segment tracking plan that concluded with 56 unique events, which were updated in Segment Protocols to ensure data flowing in remained clean, consistent, and standardized—without back data entering production data. 

Throughout the process, Mammoth advised on best practices to ensure the backfill was conducted properly - without causing data pollution or issues with identity/user traits in its Mixpanel instance - and QA’d historical event data before the backfill took place.

The team also standardized Barre3’s event triggers and cohorts across analytics & ad destinations. This was accomplished by first revamping its GTM instance to be built off of Segment triggers. This consisted of an audit that led to the deletion of old or unused variables, triggers and tags and the renaming of anything left following a standard naming convention (for cleanliness and consistency within Google Suite), along with a migration to Google Analytics 4 (to improve GSuite’s analytics capabilities). Additionally Mammoth then migrated Facebook Pixel & Google Ads to be launched by Segment, built out Barre3’s Persona’s within Segment, and then forwarded them all to destination tools for standardization across its marketing and analytics teams.  

Next, Mammoth integrated Google and Facebook conversion API destinations, enabling client-side tracking along with Segment’s server-side events as a backup, which ensures that Barre3 has the most accurate conversion data being used in reporting, measurement and optimization in their ad destinations. Mammoth also connected its customer support tools (such as Intercom) to further standardize data.  

Some specific marketing automation and ad network tool enhancements included: 

• Pushing in-studio event data into Facebook & Google to allow Barre3 to match ads with verified studio conversions (in place of directional click-based attribution) 
• Troubleshooting and optimizing ad destinations for improved matching accuracy  
• Establishing trust for conversion reporting within their ad destinations, and enabling  accurate measurement of CPR
• Improving standardization and establishing a singular source of truth across all tooling

Mammoth worked iteratively with the Barre3 team to create a tracking plan for offline data and lead it directly into Segment (which was previously impossible), as well as audit and QA the implementation to ensure it met the highest levels of trust and accuracy. These steps granted Barre3 visibility into in-studio behavior and its relation to online behavior, establishing a 360-degree customer view. Finally, Mammoth collaborated with Barre3 to troubleshoot and implement solutions within Facebook and Google, allowing them to match their online ads with verified in-studio conversions. 

Establishing A Single Source of Truth

Whereas Barre3 had originally dealt with separated and decentralized data, Mammoth’s solutions enabled the company to match it against Segment as a core driver. Other downstream destinations Barre3 previously couldn’t trust or utilize could also now be brought in to sync up its customer view. 

As a result, customers’ online and offline activities became entirely visible within a single Mixpanel project. 

Thanks to Mammoth’s holistic data approach, Barre3 can now more accurately identify its conversion data and formulate informed plans for expansion.    

“For our studio business, we previously were optimizing off of intent-based conversions in Meta. Our process was incredibly directional and purely based on clicks. Mammoth helped us connect the data from our server to Meta so now we’re positioned to effectively measure campaign efficiency and invest in campaigns that drive measurable growth.” - Stacy Ying, Acquisition Marketing Lead