The accurate analysis of data is critical for helping data and marketing teams gain insights to optimize the performance of their campaigns and tailor messaging based on customer behavior.
One of the biggest challenges that a lot of modern marketing teams face is having to gather, manage, and make sense of multiple sources of data, that are all structured in slightly different ways.
This is where integrated data can help.
The data integration process can help eliminate the sense of data overwhelm that many data analysts and modern marketers face. Providing businesses with a single source of truth to make their important marketing optimization decisions.
What is data integration?
Data integration is the process of combining data from various sources into a single, unified view.
It involves extracting data from marketing channels, databases, eCommerce platforms, CRM solutions, and file storage systems and loading that data to a centralized data destination.
Before the data is loaded, it often needs to be transformed or enriched to ensure that it’s in a standardized format that can easily be analyzed and acted upon.
For a lot of data teams, integrating data manually can be a frustrating and time-consuming task. It often involves taking a download of data from each data source, running custom scripts, or taking the time to manually standardize data, and then uploading it to a data destination.
Automated data integration tools can help speed up the data integration process, saving time for busy data teams and reducing the chance of human error in the transformation, enrichment, and upload stages.
Why is data integration important for marketers?
The modern marketing landscape is more fragmented and challenging than ever before.
Now, with consumers engaging with multiple online touchpoints and both online and offline channels, the amount of data available to marketers has increased exponentially over the last decade. Giving marketing teams copious amounts of data at their fingertips.
Yet, without a unified view of this marketing data, delivering accurate insights and impactful decisions from multiple sources of disparate data can seem like an overwhelming and almost impossible task.
99% of Chief Marketing Officers we surveyed in 2022 were analyzing marketing data from 10 or more data sources, with 52% saying they were attempting to analyze data from 14 or more sources.
It’s no surprise that over 65% of respondents to our survey claimed that the current volume of marketing data was overwhelming.
Data integration can help bring all the data from different marketing and analytics platforms into one place, standardize and harmonize it, and provide marketing teams with a single source of unified data that they can use to monitor, analyze, and optimize their marketing campaigns.
Most data teams would love nothing more than to provide their marketing department with this unified view of data, but there’s just one problem - manual integration can take a long time to complete.
Automated data integration platforms can automatically connect to all your marketing channels, and speed up the data integration process considerably.
Adverity has one of the world’s largest libraries of more than 600 data connectors, including connectors for common marketing sources, such as:
- Instagram Business
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Ads
- Google Drive
- Amazon Ads
- Google Display and Video 360
- Snapchat
- Google Ads
- Google Search Console
- LinkedIn Ads
- TikTok Ads
- Facebook page insights
- Twitter ads
- Apple ads
It’s also possible to connect Adverity with eCommerce platforms and CRM tools to help provide marketing teams with a unified view of customer behavior.
Working with automated data integration solutions can have a variety of benefits for marketing teams.
Eliminate data silos
Data silos are a common problem across businesses that don’t embrace integrated data, where different teams use different tools and platforms to collect, store and analyze data.
This can lead to isolated pockets of data, with no one person having a complete understanding of marketing campaign performance.
One of the major benefits of data integration is that it can help eliminate data silos by bringing data from different sources together, harmonizing it, and presenting a single source of truth. This helps marketing teams to gain a holistic view of their marketing performance, leading to better decision-making and more effective marketing campaigns.
Reclaim valuable time
When a business embraces integrated data, it means that marketing teams no longer need to log into a dozen different platforms to try and analyze their performance. All the data is available in a centralized location.
But manual integration can be a painstaking and time-consuming process for data teams.
By working with an automated data integration solution, data teams can reduce the amount of time they spend on integrating data, to spend more time supporting marketing teams with valuable data analysis to improve campaign performance.
Benefit from more accurate and insightful data
Trying to make marketing campaign optimizations from multiple different data sources is not only inefficient, but it can also lead to inaccuracies and inconsistencies.
Every platform has different definitions of metrics and dimensions, which means it’s very difficult to approach optimizations consistently across channels.
And if marketing teams view each individual channel in isolation, they are also likely to miss trends and patterns that are more clearly visible when data is brought together in a unified view.
Manual data integration is a huge step in the right direction for helping marketing teams work from a single source of truth. But manual data processing is always prone to human error. Incomplete or incorrect data can lead to marketing teams making erroneous optimization decisions.
By automating the data integration process, marketing teams can have the confidence that they are making decisions based on accurate and up-to-date data.
Empower the team to make better, faster decisions
Without an integrated data solution in place, marketing teams often have to spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data from each of their different channels before they can make decisions.
Manual data integration can take this time-consuming task away from marketing teams. But the burden is often passed over to data teams, who have to spend hours downloading, transforming, and loading data into a data warehouse or data visualization tool.
The time it takes to manually integrate data means it’s a task that can only realistically be completed at set intervals, such as every day or every week. So, although manual data integration has the benefit of providing marketing teams with a unified view of performance, in most cases, it won’t be based on the most recent data.
Automated data integration tools can speed up the process, enabling marketing teams to make better, faster decisions on almost real-time data.
As an example, all of Adverity’s datastreams can be updated as often as every 15 minutes, so marketing teams can have the confidence they are making their optimizations based on the most recent data.
Improve marketing performance
In today’s fast-paced world, marketers need to be able to respond quickly to changes in campaign performance or market conditions.
This can be challenging if marketing teams are overwhelmed with data, or spending their time accessing and analyzing campaign performance across a variety of disparate data sources.
By embracing data integration, data teams can empower marketers with a unified view of all their data sources to help them drive better data-driven decisions that drive better results.
With the power of integrated data, marketing teams can take the performance of their cross-channel campaigns to the next level and deliver a stronger return on investment.
What is involved in the data integration process?
There are typically two ways to approach data integration.
One approach is manually, where data teams are responsible for the extraction, harmonization, and loading of data. The other approach is using an automated data integration tool to help save business time and improve the accuracy and recency of data.
Either way, the process of achieving integrated data has three main steps:
Identify target sources
The first step in data integration is to identify the various different data sources that a business wants to integrate.
If an automated data integration tool is going to be used, it’s important to check that it’s able to connect to all the important marketing sources that are running campaigns.
Extract, transform, and load
Commonly referred to as ETL, Extract, Transform, and Load describes the different steps in the process of getting business data from multiple disparate sources into a single unified view.
- Extract relates to the capturing of data from various different data sources, in its rawest form.
- Transform is where raw data is cleaned and harmonized. At this stage, data might also be enriched. One example of enrichment is using currency conversion across different sources of data so that the unified view only contains a single currency.
- Load is the final stage of the ETL process, where data is loaded into a data warehouse, data lake, or preferred BI or data visualization tool.
Analyze
Once all data is integrated, the business will have access to accurate unified data that can help marketing teams to effectively optimize their campaigns and gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior.
A case study of data integration success
Vodafone Italy and Vodafone Germany both used data integration to consolidate their online and offline marketing performance data.
Using Adverity for their automated data integration saved their team a full week every month that would have otherwise been spent on manual data integration processes.
Our solution unified data from various sources, and seamlessly integrated with Vodafone's existing BI tool, Power BI.
The reduction in manual data work and the ability to work with a single source of truth enabled the Vodafone team to get more control over their data, deliver more insightful analysis, and be more confident in their marketing decisions.
"With Adverity, we were finally able to transition to generating the level of analysis that offers more value to our stakeholders. Adverity’s data integration solution freed up significant time for our digital marketing team, giving us more control over our data and rapid results."
Emiliano Bozzi, Digital Marketing & Performance Data Analyst, Vodafone
Transform your marketing performance with data integration
Data integration is the cornerstone of modern marketing.
By using automated data integration tools, marketing teams can operate from a single source of truth with complete confidence that data is accurate and up to date.
By allowing marketing teams to reclaim valuable time and empowering them with the ability to make better, faster decisions, the increase in the performance of marketing campaigns can be significant.
Are you ready to find out how Adverity can help your business achieve more with your data?
Take a look at our educational resources for a more in-depth overview of our platform, or book a demo to take the first step in understanding how you can unlock valuable insights from your marketing data.
