ETL –  What is it and How Do I Do it?

Collecting data, cleaning it, and making sense of it, is sometimes a lot to deal with. So how do you take control of data and get it to work for you? The answer is ETL.

The Adverity Bitesize webinars series continue with a look at ETL. In this episode, Adverity’s Joseph Caponsacco takes us through the first steps you should take in setting up your data foundation to ensure automated, consistent, and accurate reporting.

Prefer to read instead? No problem, here are four key takeaways:

1. Automate Data Extraction to Save Time

To start delivering value to the business, you first need to stop spending (wasting?) hours and days on consolidating CSV files and Excel sheets. If you have a tool that is able to automatically extract data from all your marketing tools, it can save you a lot of time and effort in preparing data for reporting and further analysis.

2. Use Transformations to Match Data

Not all data sources are created equal, so you need to shuffle the extracted data before sending it over to the next stages. Just matching budget spend figures throughout tables coming from different data sources, or standardizing time and date fields, can take hours of your precious time. Using data transformations can shorten this process and is key in creating a useful centralized dataset.

3. Send Harmonized Data to Your Tool of Choice

Once you have created a fully harmonized dataset, you are ready to send it to any data warehouse, database, BI tool, or any other type of data storage, for safekeeping and further analysis. As the final step in the ETL process, it also needs to be seamless and solve problems, not create new ones.

4. Embrace Data Governance

As you have completed the first three steps and mastered ETL, you’ll have a lot of data on your hands. Creating a company-wide structure that defines how data is stored and managed will help you a lot down the road, as the data volumes will only grow. The data governance framework will ensure that you are able to provide the right data to the right people at the right time.

After completing the ETL process, you are ready for the next steps - creating data insights and providing proactive suggestions, and our colleague Joe will talk more on these steps in the upcoming Adverity Bitesize events.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more on how you can utilize ETL to improve your data operations and management, watch the whole webinar on-demand.