Marketing Data Integration

When it comes to analyzing marketing performance, organizations often focus only on web analytics insights, such as those provided by Google Analytics. But this can leave important marketing insights out and lead to suboptimal decision-making.  To holistically analyze the impact of your marketing effort, it is essential to connect multiple data points such as performance, user response, campaigns, spend, conversion etc.  

What is Marketing Data Integration?

Marketing data integration integrates all of your marketing data from a myriad of sources like social, display, video etc. Unlike other departmental data, marketing (especially your digital marketing data) is typically available with third-party sources such as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Getting data from several such sources and integrating them can be tedious.

Importance of Marketing Data integration Tools

At times, brands or agencies manually export the data out of their advertising platforms, such as Google adwords or Facebook ads, and load this data in excel or some BI tools.
This manual process can be extremely taxing, and you may spend most of the time integrating data rather than analyzing and using it for improving marketing effectiveness. There are tools in the market that make it easy for you to get data from these different platforms. 

What Marketing data are we talking about:

Campaigns data from individual Channels- This is all the data related to your campaigns in a particular marketing channel (Campaign name, Execution window, amount spent, Number of clicks and impressions etc.).Depending on your marketing strategy, there can be many more different channels from where you might need to source this data.This can also be your internal marketing initiatives through email or calls.

Web Analytics Data– This is the data generated by users interaction with the website. It helps you track the user’s behaviour coming from different paid and organic channels. This data predominantly include two things:-

• User Attributes –  Visitor’s Location, Language, IP address, Device Type (Laptop/ Mobile/ I pad), Browser Type (OS, Android), Screen Resolution, etc.
• User behaviour – User entry point, page navigation, time spent, drop of point, action such as purchase or registration and many more.

CRM Data – CRM contains a history of interaction with a customer. It can often be the source where you store your sales or conversion data and can prove crucial for integrated insights

Offline marketing Data- This can related to your offline marketing campaigns and corresponding performance data. Or reports shared by your agencies and other such data sources.

Insights that use integrated marketing data

Once you integrate, cleanse, combine the data, it can be loaded in your warehouse, a BI tool or other downstream marketing/sales applications.
Although integrated marketing data can help you answer any question concerning your marketing performance, it is particularly useful for the following applications.

Marketing Dashboard

A marketing dashboard can give you a holistic view of your marketing efforts across online and offline channels. Many organizations only depend on the pdf/excel reports they receive from their agencies. These isolated  insights may not give the flexibility to analyze performance across multiple dimensions, drilldown into details and analyze trends week on week, month on month and year on year

Cross-Channel marketing Performance

Every Marketing Channel such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads provide their own analysis of marketing performance, but it ends there. You do not get a comparative analysis of your effort across channels.  Integrated data can help you with Cross-Channel marketing Performance analysis. This way, you can compare the cost of clicks, impressions, and conversion across the channels, thereby helping you plan your marketing strategies and tweak your investment.

Return on Ad-spend

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a marketing metric that measures the amount of revenue earned for every money spent on advertising.  Analyzing your ROAS can help you improve your marketing impact by modifying your marketing strategy, reducing under-performing spend and scaling up your best performing campaigns. However,  conversion/sales data is often available in a separate source than advertising spend data making it difficult to compute this fundamental metric unless you create an integrated view.

Marketing Attribution –

During their lifecycle from prospect to customer, a user come in touch with the business through multiple channels. Each channel may play a certain role in propelling the use towards conversion. Often organizations only give conversion credit to the last touchpoint leading to inaccurate marketing impact assessment.
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) or Marketing Attribution is a marketing measurement method that evaluates each touchpoint’s impact in driving a conversion, thereby determining the value of that specific touchpoint. The MTA algorithm takes the user’s journey to conversion as an input to compute weights. If you want to understand more details about marketing attribution, visit our marketing attribution blog

Tools for Marketing Data Integration

There are toolsthat can make sourcing data from all these third-party marketing channels a cakewalk. These tools provide prebuilt connectors to marketing sources such as Facebook, Google Ads, Twitter, Google Analytics and many more. The prebuilt connector saves you 100s of hours of effort required to integrate the data.

Mentioned below are some of the tools that can help you with marketing data integration:

Windsor.ai

If you are looking for a solution to integrate users journeys across channels  and compute attribution using multiple algorithms, this can be a perfect tool
Windsor.ai automates collecting and integrating all the marketing data, easing marketers woes. It provides prebuilt connectors to most leading marketing and CRM platforms and streamlines data preparation and formatting, freeing your time to focus on insights instead. Several downstream connectors are available to help you send the integrated data to a warehouse, a BI tool, or stream data to other analytics tools such as R or Python.
It stitches a single view of a customer’s journey across channels to provide complete visibility into conversion paths. The advanced marketing attribution algorithms help you understand the true return on your marketing spends enabling you to optimize your spending. Know more details about the solution here.

Why should you go for  Windsor-
–    Prebuild Connectors
–    Pree-built Marketing Dashboard Templates
–    Marketing Attribution
–    Pocket-friendly Cost

Funnel.io

Funnel.io is another cutting-edge marketing and advertising data collection solution for companies of all sizes. It’s a powerful tool that lets users aggregate information from many different marketing and advertising sources and sends it to any visualization tool, analytics platform, or data warehouse. 
Funnel takes away marketers dependency on IT by providing an easy to use interface to source, transform and analyze data with easy to use GUI interface. It allows you to create your own rules to segment your data based on your specific needs without writing a single line of code. 
With  500 plus integration Channels, you can rest assured that all your integration requirements are covered. Know more details about the solution here

Why should you go for Funnel
–    500 plus connectors
–    Self –service data Import
–    Code-free data transformation