In the modern world of digital marketing, businesses are often faced with more data than they can handle.
As a result, important insights may be overlooked, and decision-making can often be delayed.
For businesses finding themselves in this situation, automated data integration is an increasingly necessary step to take in building an effective data strategy.
Data integration enables businesses to have a consolidated, standardized view of their data to help deliver clear, actionable business insights.
When evaluating various data integration platforms, it can be tempting to get drawn into comparisons of each platform's advanced features and add-ons.
But the reality is the true effectiveness of a data integration platform lies in its ability to gather, unify, and transform data from disparate sources into something businesses can make fast, accurate decisions from.
In order to make accurate decisions quickly, marketers first require fast and accurate data aggregation.
What is data aggregation?
In simple terms, data aggregation is a process through which large amounts of information are compiled into a central data environment in a standardized format, and, therefore easier to analyze.
Let’s take an example of data aggregation in marketing.
Imagine you’re an e-commerce business that pulls through every single transaction into your data warehouse - complete with date of purchase, SKU, product title, category, and price.
There’s a lot of granular line-by-line data here that’s difficult to analyze.
Data aggregation would allow you to sum the data by different criteria, so you could compare the total sales by SKU or product category easily - making your data more actionable.
Why is data aggregation important for marketers?
When your data is loaded into your data environment, it needs to be sufficiently granular for you to deep dive into specific campaign performance on any one day, or compare metrics like total spend and CPA (cost per acquisition) for different channels over a defined time period. So, you need all your granular data aggregated.
When you’re looking to select the right ETL or data integration platform for your business, it’s important to make sure that your chosen solution is capable of effectively aggregating data to help you gain insights quickly and make swift, responsive optimization decisions.
In this post, we will look at four of the most popular data integration platforms and how they fare as a data aggregation tool.
Data aggregation tools compared
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Who is it for? |
Tailored for marketers and those managing marketing data. |
Data teams with SQL knowledge that don’t need extensive support. |
Marketing teams that need a simple way to extract and load data. |
Larger enterprises that need data integration and visualization in one platform. |
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Data connectors |
600+ |
160+ |
100+ |
1000+ |
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Data fetch frequency |
Up to every 15 minutes |
Up to every 5 minutes |
Every 24 hours |
Up to every 15 minutes |
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Data aggregation functions |
Sum, minimum, maximum, average (plus key pair values) |
Sum |
Sum, round |
Sum, minimum, maximum, average, count, median, standard deviation. |
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G2 Review |
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Clients |
Vodafone, IKEA, Bosch |
Forever21, Spanx, Carwow |
Dyson, Warner Bros, Accenture |
Dell, ESPN, New York Times. |
1. Adverity
Adverity is a leading integrated data platform designed to empower marketing teams to make more informed campaign decisions.
With one of the market's largest data connector libraries, Adverity guarantees seamless integration with all your business data sources.
One of the platform's key benefits is the ability to access almost real-time data, with an impressive fetch frequency of every 15 minutes. Unlike some competitors, Adverity offers complete flexibility in data destinations, including data warehouses, data lakes, BI tools, and cloud storage.
The platform's data transformation and enrichment capabilities also help to set Adverity apart. While it offers a range of predefined data enrichments, it also enables data teams to code their own enrichments to suit your specific business needs.
One of its distinctive features is the platform's capability to join data streams from multiple sources linked by an ID. This functionality gives marketers a comprehensive view of campaigns across various platforms. Additionally, when it comes to data aggregation, you can dynamically calculate the sum, maximums, minimums, and averages of your data and create key-value pairs.
User reviews on G2 give Adverity an impressive 4.5 rating, with reviewers particularly calling out the impressive connectivity and quality of customer support, which is rated at 92%
2. Fivetran
Fivetran is another popular data integration platform specializing in quickly extracting data from various business sources.
The platform offers a reasonable library of 160+ native data connectors, so while it's more than capable of connecting to all popular marketing channels - it is missing some nice-to-haves such as connections with Moz, SemRush, and Google Trends.
In terms of data destinations, Fivetran supports 11 native options but notably misses out on popular choices like Looker Studio.
When it comes to data visualization, Fivetran also keeps things simple and straightforward. Users can interrogate their ingested data via tables, but the platform doesn't venture into the realm of visualizations or dashboards.
All data transformations within Fivetran require SQL coding, which is fine for businesses that have the relevant in-house SQL expertise. But for businesses that want to avoid this complexity, opting for a solution with out-of-the-box transformations is better.
It’s a similar story with aggregations. There is built-in functionality to aggregate basic data from common marketing channels like Facebook, Google, X and LinkedIn, but any more advanced aggregation will likely need in-house expertise.
Fivetran has a commendable 4.2 star rating on G2, with users praising its pay-as-you-go affordability but others calling out spiraling costs and its complexity to configure.
3. Supermetrics
Supermetrics is an ideal entry-level solution for businesses that want a simple data integration tool that pushes their data to a common destination like Google Sheets, Looker Studio, or Big Query.
Another platform favored by digital marketers, the Supermetrics library of around 100 data connectors, includes most of the popular marketing channels that form part of many online marketing strategies. However, some marketing teams may find the lack of native support for sources like Amazon Selling Partners, eBay, and Zendesk to be a drawback.
There are a range of out-of-the-box data transformations and enrichments available within Supermetrics, including automated normalization and the ability to create custom fields from your existing data. The platform also supports data blending, which allows you to combine data from different sources based on unique IDs or values - ideal for cross-channel campaign analysis.
From a data aggregation tool perspective, Supermetrics also includes a number of basic functions to help you manipulate your data to make it quicker and easier to understand - including the ability to sum and round your data.
For businesses looking for a data integration solution that can help enhance their data governance strategy - this might be the sticking point when it comes to Supermetrics.
Although it’s great as an entry-level platform for extracting, transforming, and loading data from popular marketing sources - its support for ensuring data quality, data security, and data democratization is limited.
Supermetrics scores an impressive 4.4 on G2 with many users praising its ease of use and suitability for digital marketers looking for a simple data integration solution. However, it’s worth taking the time to read the reviews in full as some users also report complexities with setting up connections that aren’t supported out-of-the-box.
4. Domo
Domo does everything a data integration platform should do - connecting, extracting, and transforming your data before loading it into a data destination of your choice. It also has a suite of BI and analysis tools that offer real-time and predictive insights to help you stay on top of current trends and make proactive optimization decisions.
One of the stand-out features of Domo is its extensive library of pre-built data connectors, which allows you to connect to more than 1,000 different data sources with ease.
When it comes to data transformation, Domo’s Magic ETL feature allows any user to connect and transform data using a handy drag-and-drop interface. For more advanced users (or more complex data transformations), the platform has support for SQL-based ETL.
Domo also has great functionality as a data aggregation tool, allowing you to easily calculate the sum, average count, median, and standard deviation of any data field.
The platform also has robust data governance capabilities, with features like data lineage and personalized data permissions in place to help protect the quality and security of your data.
Domo receives a commendable 4.4 stars on G2, with users talking positively about its data visualization suite and the ease of use of the Magic ETL drag-and-drop tool.
However, some users report finding the platform a little overwhelming due to its extensive feature set and customer support perhaps not being of the quality they’d expect. The pricing model may also be on the higher side for smaller businesses.
What should you look for in a data aggregation tool?
It’s crucial to ensure your data aggregation tool presents your data how your business needs it if you’re going to make fast, informed optimization decisions.
But in addition to how well a platform aggregates your data, another four key factors should be part of any effective decision-making process about which data integration platform is right for you.
1. Connectivity
A data integration platform will only deliver optimal business benefits if you can connect to and integrate all your important data sources.
Every platform has a number of out-of-the-box data connectors, and before you sign on the dotted line, it’s worth making sure that all your essential marketing channels are supported.
If you have your own file storage system or use lesser-known marketing platforms, you may still be able to connect to them, but you’ll need a bit of technical knowledge to create a custom connector in order to bring that data through.
So it’s imperative to have a complete evaluation of whether or not all your important sources are supported out-of-the-box or how simple it might be to create a connection to them.
2. Scalability
As your marketing activity expands and evolves, it’s important that your chosen data integration solution is able to adapt alongside it.
When you’re choosing a data integration platform, it makes sense to look to the future.
While it’s important to consider the solution that best meets your needs right now, it’s equally important to ensure that your data integration platform can continue supporting your business in the future.
3. Speed
Every data integration platform has different capabilities when it comes to fetch frequency, which refers to how regularly it can pull data from each of your connected sources.
The closer you can get to real-time data integration, the more you’re able to benefit from a wide range of advantages:
- Better decision making
With real-time data, your business can make decisions based on the most recent and relevant information available - reacting to what is happening right now rather than yesterday.
- More reactive to market changes
Market conditions can change rapidly. Real-time data integration allows your business to respond to market changes almost instantly.
- Gaining a competitive advantage
Accessing real-time data can give your business a significant competitive edge, putting you in a position to outperform your competitors.
When considering your choice of data integration platform, consider choosing a data integration solution capable of near real-time data aggregation.
4. Cost
When it comes to data integration platforms, the benefits of choosing the right solution that enables you to make better, faster decisions from accurate aggregated data will likely outweigh the costs.
However, when you’re weighing up the pros and cons of different solutions, costs are bound to be one of the factors you use to make a decision.
It’s important to think about future scalability when evaluating platforms with pay-as-you-go pricing, there are often hidden costs as data requirements increase. Data integration platforms with a fixed monthly cost can give your business consistency and stability.
Make better, faster decisions from aggregated data with Adverity
The ability to make swift, informed decisions from your data can be the difference between leading the market or trailing behind.
Choosing the right data integration solution is an important decision.
It's not just about collecting data; it's about how that data is presented, processed, and made ready for analysis.
With its comprehensive feature set, Adverity ensures that businesses have access to data that is extracted, transformed, aggregated, and presented in a way that's immediately actionable - in near real-time.
Ready to transform the way you make decisions with data?
