ABOUT PARSE.LY (& THE MUTATIONS PARTNERSHIP)
Parse.ly is a tech company that provides an analytics dashboard to marketers and media companies. As is typical for many tech startups in resource-constrained environments, their product is their focus—all their development efforts center around improving the product, and developing their website was a distraction for their software engineers.
As Parse.ly has grown more successful over the last few years, its marketing team has also begun to run more campaigns and create more features. They came to Mutations needing regular attention to their website’s codebase in 2020. The partnership meant that Parse.ly could rely on Mutations to own and accelerate the development of their website, while Parse.ly’s own engineers focused on product feature development.
THE CHALLENGE
After Parse.ly was acquired in 2021 by WordPress VIP (part of Automattic), an organizational decision was made to merge the Salesforce instances of Parse.ly and WordPress VIP. To facilitate this move the Parse.ly marketing site needed to move from Marketo to Pardot (part of Salesforce) for their marketing automation needs (WordPress VIP already used Pardot). The move brought up several challenges that needed to be addressed:
First, the volume of forms. Every form on the Parse.ly site – of which there were hundreds – needed to be converted from using Marketo to Pardot to handle form submissions. The Parse.ly marketing team relied on these forms to properly track customer conversions. The challenge here was to ensure all of the forms were fully tested so that the marketing team could continue to properly track conversions after the migration was complete. Mutations also needed to make sure that from the user’s perspective the look, feel, and functionality of forms on the site remained the same.
Second, analytics continuity. The Parse.ly marketing site had several analytics integrations built into the form submission flow that needed to be maintained throughout and after the migration. For example, the marketing team needed to continue to leverage tools like Google Analytics and Parse.ly Analytics to track and measure their efforts post-migration.
Third, added complexity of working with iframes. The Parse.ly marketing team wanted to use the Pardot iframe forms to complete the migration. These iframe forms gave the marketing team better tools to track the customer journey on their site and would also facilitate a longer-term goal of moving the Parse.ly site onto WordPress VIP. This need presented a challenge with maintaining the same level of customizations as the previous forms with the added complexity of working with iframes.
THE SOLUTION
Given the requirements for Parse.ly, the solution was obviously to move their marketing automation to Pardot. However, given the challenges facing the project, Mutations needed to be diligent about how to implement and sufficiently test the integration before launching them into production.
To address the challenge of the volume of forms, the first step was for Mutations to complete a comprehensive audit of all forms on the Parse.ly site. Mutations then worked with the Parse.ly team to ensure every form from the audit was recreated in Pardot. Mutations then leveraged the staging site to rigorously test the flow for every single form submission on the site to guarantee that the data made its way into Salesforce.
To address the analytics continuity concern, Mutations configured the staging site to use sandbox environments for all of the analytics providers. This allowed Mutations and the Parse.ly team to test conversion tracking in an isolated environment without impacting analytics data in production. Furthermore, it allowed Mutations to ensure that the Parse.ly marketing team would be able to continue leveraging these tools to support their marketing efforts.
To address the iframe complexities, Mutations needed to work closely with the Parse.ly team to develop a strategy to ensure no loss of functionality. The biggest piece of this work was incorporating the analytics continuity piece from above and making sure that conversion tracking of customers continued to work. Mutations also made sure to style the iframes so that there would be as minimal a difference as possible after launch.
THE OUTCOMES
By the end of the project, the Parse.ly website forms were successfully switched to Pardot. The Parse.ly team was happy with how Mutations addressed the challenges. The outcomes for the client side:
- All conversion tracking was maintained post-migration, with no dips in functionality for the marketing team.
- All of the analytics tools worked seamlessly, with data continuity from pre-to-post-migration.
- Users saw no negative impact of the form switch.
And all of the above continued to work within the iframe forms. The client team was thrilled. One of Automattic’s Marketing Operations Managers:
“The Mutations team is definitely one of the best vendors I’ve ever worked with.”
Sally Liu, Marketing Operations Manager, Automattic
THE TECH
- MARKETO
- PARDOT
- PARSE.LY ANALYTICS
- GOOGLE ANALYTICS
- GATSBY