What BI and IT leaders should look for in a marketing data integration solution

It starts innocently enough. A new marketing platform gets added to the stack. At first, it’s just another integration to manage, but you know what’s coming. Soon, you’re patching broken connections, reworking API calls and manually updating fields every time something shifts. What was supposed to make your life easier turns into another drain on time and resources.

Your job isn’t to build pipelines just for the sake of it. It’s to get trusted, analysis-ready marketing data into the right hands quickly, without wasting hours chasing schema changes, handling constant platform updates or dealing with tools that promised to simplify things but ended up adding complexity.

Every new platform means more drift, more maintenance and more risk. That was never the goal of marketing technology innovation. 

The real value in marketing data integration today isn’t in building bigger, more complex systems with more moving parts. It’s in speed, trust, autonomy and scalability. If your stack demands more energy than it saves, it’s holding you back. If you want marketing data integration that actually moves your business forward, it starts by knowing what to look for — and what to leave behind.

Five essentials for modern marketing data integration

When evaluating a marketing data integration platform, surface-level features rarely tell the full story. The real differentiation lies in how well a tool adapts to complexity, handles change and empowers teams to act on insights quickly.

That’s why it’s critical to look beyond technical checkboxes and evaluate how a solution performs under real-world conditions. So what should you look for? Below are five essentials every modern marketing data integration platform should deliver.

1. Automated, zero-maintenance connectors

API access is just the beginning. The real challenge starts when platforms update endpoints or quietly retire key metrics. That’s when most ETL tools leave your team scrambling — rewriting queries, fixing pipelines and risking broken dashboards.

Funnel takes that burden off your plate. Its fully managed connectors are continuously monitored and automatically adapted to changes across 500+ marketing platforms. Funnel also manages complex API behaviors like rate limits and quotas automatically, ensuring pipelines don’t fail under platform restrictions or unexpected spikes.

No surprise errors. No engineering fire drills. Just stable, reliable data — even when APIs shift.

Crucially, Funnel also preserves historical data through schema changes, so teams tracking performance over time don’t lose critical context when fields are renamed or restructured.

Instead of pushing API maintenance onto your team, Funnel makes it invisible, so analysts stay focused on insights, not infrastructure.

What to look for:

• Does the platform maintain and update connectors automatically?
• Are key metrics preserved through schema changes?
• How is historical data handled when APIs evolve?

If your connectors can’t keep up with the platforms they’re built for, everything else falls apart. A solid integration strategy starts with stability.

2. Governance that scales without slowing you down

Governance often gets in the way. Many marketing data integration tools treat it as an afterthought, layering on complex permission systems that drain IT resources and stall projects.

Funnel takes a different approach. Governance is built into the core platform. Role-based access control, audit trails and compliance with GDPR, CCPA and SOC 2 are all included. That means no need for custom builds, no manual scripting and no compliance gaps.

As you integrate marketing data from more platforms and scale your marketing efforts, Funnel keeps the data integration process secure and transparent. Business users can manage access without filing IT tickets, and compliance reports are ready when you need them.

Governance is also preserved as raw data moves through transformation and delivery to your data warehouse, ensuring security at every step while combining data from hundreds of sources.

What to look for:

• Is access control simple enough for business users?
• Can compliance reports be created without engineering support?
• How is auditability maintained as data flows through transformation?

Successful marketing data integration depends on more than clean connections. It relies on centralized governance that protects data integrity without slowing down your team.

3. Seamless delivery into your data lake or warehouse

Today’s marketing stacks don’t live in one place. They're multi-cloud, hybrid and constantly evolving. Your integration method has to match that flexibility.

Funnel offers native integration with Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Azure and more, supporting direct delivery into your data lake or warehouse without manual pipelines or brittle exports. Built-in data transformation tools let you map fields and apply logic before the data even lands.

Whether you're consolidating data for cross-channel reporting or powering visualizations with clean customer data, Funnel eliminates the need for intermediate staging or file-based workflows.

Keep this in mind as you’re building your marketing data stack:

What to look for:

• Are exports native to your existing data infrastructure?
• Can field-level transformations be applied pre-load?
• How flexible is the scheduling and orchestration model?

Delivering clean, standardized data where it needs to go shouldn't require constant oversight or engineering-heavy workflows. Funnel makes accessing reliable marketing insights without technical knowledge so much easier. 

4. Built for analysts, not just engineers

Most ETL platforms are designed with engineers in mind, creating bottlenecks when marketing and analytics teams can’t act without technical support.

Funnel takes a different approach. With no-code interfaces, analysts can manage routine data extraction, transformation and delivery independently. Features like drag-and-drop transformations, visual schema mapping and cross-platform data blending make it easy for non-technical users to work with data, without needing to escalate every change to IT.

This doesn't eliminate the role of engineers, but it reduces dependence on them for everyday updates and maintenance. Instead of routing basic requests through development queues, teams can move faster with self-serve tools that put them in control of their data flows.

Reducing reliance on engineering support doesn’t just accelerate workflows — it frees up technical resources for more strategic projects.

What to look for:

• Can analysts deploy new sources without writing code?
• Is the UI intuitive enough for non-technical users?
• How easily can data be blended across sources without SQL?

Making data usable starts with making data tools usable. Funnel gives your team autonomy where it matters most while maintaining structure and trust.

5. Time-to-value that reflects real marketing cycles

If your data integration takes six months to deploy, it’s already out of sync with marketing needs.

Funnel gets teams operational in days, not quarters. With pre-built connectors, onboarding templates and live support, even complex stacks can go from disconnected to fully integrated quickly.

Greg K., MarTech and Operations Strategy Consultant and Advisor, says Funnel “accelerates how quickly the marketing team can get answers to key questions.”

This faster time-to-value means faster insights, better decision-making and more agile campaigns.

What to look for:

• How long does it take to connect and normalize 10+ sources?
• Are there playbooks or templates for common platforms?
• What kind of support is included during setup?

In dynamic environments, speed isn't a luxury. It's a requirement. And platforms that lag in setup inevitably lag in value.

Uncovering how a platform handles maintenance, compliance and usability under real-world pressure is essential to choosing a solution that scales without draining your resources.

The right questions reveal the real capabilities

Sales decks gloss over the hard parts. To evaluate a platform's real ability to manage marketing data complexity, you need to ask about the mechanics — API maintenance, data governance, usability and adaptability.

On maintenance and resilience

Questions to ask should include: 

• How do you handle API versioning updates and schema changes?
• What happens if a marketing platform deprecates a metric we rely on?
• How much maintenance still falls on our internal team?

Funnel reduces this overhead through automated API monitoring and schema stabilization. Funnel’s zero-maintenance connectors help digital agency Sparro save over 25,000 hours annually on manual data management.

On compliance and security

• Is the platform GDPR, CCPA and SOC 2 compliant?
• How is ongoing compliance maintained?
• Can we manage access and generate audit trails without custom coding?

With compliance built in from the start, Funnel helps you pass audits without adding complexity.

On speed to deployment

• How fast can we connect and standardize 10+ marketing sources?
• Are there templates for popular platforms?
• What support is included?

Broadhead, a full-service marketing agency, reduced its data management costs by 50% by accelerating onboarding and enabling faster delivery of customer data to stakeholders with Funnel.

On usability and flexibility

• Can non-technical users manage pipelines?
• How easily can we add new platforms or destinations?
• Does the platform support multi-cloud or hybrid environments?

Platforms that can adapt across diverse data sources and infrastructure types deliver long-term value through reduced friction and lower operational drag.

Even with the right questions, finding a platform that delivers stability, compliance and speed without technical debt isn’t easy. That’s the gap Funnel was built to fill.

Funnel: built for the realities of marketing data

Funnel is not a traditional ETL platform. It’s a marketing-focused integration layer designed to cleanly extract, standardize and deliver data from over 500 platforms into your existing architecture.

By removing the complexity of marketing APIs, Funnel accelerates analysis and decision-making without requiring custom builds or dedicated engineering support.

To fit directly into your stack, Funnel:

• Extracts and normalizes marketing data from adtech, martech and analytics sources.
• Delivers it to cloud data warehouses, lakes and destinations without delay.
• Supports data integration strategy across centralized, hybrid or multi-cloud setups.
• It does this while maintaining data quality, compliance and usability.

Funnel helps because it:

• Proactively handles schema and API changes
• Retains historical data through transformation updates
• Empowers teams with no-code workflows
• Provides audit-ready compliance by default
• Supports scalable data management without lock-in

Funnel’s data integration enables businesses to overcome the marketing data problem by making the first mile of data processing resilient and fast, so your warehouse, lake or BI tool can focus on value, not cleanup.

In a modern data stack, Funnel becomes the specialized layer that controls complexity at the edge, letting your centralized systems stay focused on storage, transformation and analytics. 

What this means for you: Some teams still believe building everything in-house gives them ultimate control, making it the best data integration option. The reality, especially for marketing data, is usually different because of the need for constant maintenance and ongoing engineering support. This is why SaaS solutions have become such a popular choice for those who prioritize speed to insight.

The hidden costs of building your own marketing pipelines

At first glance, building your own pipelines seems flexible, with full control over data structures, flow and monitoring. But that control quickly becomes costly.

APIs change frequently. Schema definitions shift. Dashboards break. Engineers get pulled into reactive maintenance just to keep things running. When those engineers move on, so does the tribal knowledge holding your system together.

Security and compliance? They’re rarely built in from the start. Retrofitting audit logs, access controls and GDPR/SOC 2 compliance into custom pipelines is both time-consuming and risky.

And the hidden cost? Momentum. When clean data isn’t ready on time, campaigns stall, strategy slows and analysts work with incomplete information. What began as a tailored solution becomes technical debt.

The real total cost of ownership (TCO)

What looks like a low-cost solution quickly becomes a drain on time, people and progress.

Engineering capacity is the first to suffer. Instead of building value-added features or driving innovation, engineers spend their time reacting to API changes, rewriting schema logic and troubleshooting broken data jobs, often with little notice and no reuse.

Marketing and analytics teams are next. Access to clean, usable customer data is delayed, sometimes for days. Campaigns stall, measurement windows are missed and decisions get made with incomplete information.

Compliance costs rise over time. Retrofitting access controls, retention policies, encryption and audit logs into a custom stack takes significant effort. As privacy laws evolve, the cost and complexity of staying compliant only increase.

Opportunity costs accumulate invisibly. When teams can't rely on timely data, experimentation slows. Strategy shifts are postponed. And the competitive edge that data is supposed to deliver disappears.

Technical debt grows with every change. The longer a custom solution is in place, the more brittle and difficult it becomes to modify, especially as your platform ecosystem expands.

Operational drag becomes unavoidable. What once felt like freedom turns into friction. Even small schema updates or new platform integrations require cross-functional support and coordination.

For teams with limited engineering bandwidth, these compounding issues transform a custom solution from an asset into a liability.

Why SaaS platforms like Funnel reduce the burden

SaaS platforms offer a different model — one that’s built to absorb complexity, not pass it on.

Funnel is a marketing-specific data integration platform designed to keep your pipelines stable, your data governed and your teams moving fast. Unlike generic ETL tools or in-house builds, it solves the problems that custom solutions create.

• Predictable, subscription-based pricing means no surprise costs when APIs change or schema updates roll out.
• Proactive API and schema management keep 500+ connectors running without relying on internal engineering time.
• No-code interfaces allow marketing and analytics teams to launch pipelines, apply transformations and adapt outputs directly.
• Built-in governance and compliance eliminate the need to retrofit SOC 2, GDPR or CCPA requirements.
• Native support for multicloud and hybrid environments scales as your data landscape evolves — no reengineering required.
• Rapid time-to-value means teams get access to clean, standardized marketing data in days, not months.

The impact is measurable. Instead of losing hours to maintenance, your engineers focus on innovation. Analysts move from data wrangling to insight delivery. Marketing strategies adjust in real time, not after the fact.

Why SaaS wins

Custom pipelines offer control, but often at the expense of agility, security and team efficiency. Mid-market teams don’t just need flexibility — they need resilience, automation and speed.

Funnel delivers all three by acting as a plug-and-play layer that simplifies marketing data integration without compromising scale, governance or performance. It empowers business users while protecting your stack from constant rework.

The result is a lower total cost of ownership, a faster path to insight and a data infrastructure that helps your team stay focused on growth, not upkeep.

Choosing the right tool for the job

Choosing the right marketing data integration platform isn’t about chasing the longest feature list or the deepest configurability. It’s about finding a tool built for the day-to-day realities of fast-moving teams, shifting marketing platforms and constrained technical resources.

You don’t need a custom-engineered Formula One car to get to work. You need a reliable, fast, scalable vehicle — one that adapts when the route changes and doesn’t require a pit crew every time an API shifts.

Modern marketing data integration demands four non-negotiables:

Speed

Your team needs access to integrated data swiftly to fuel reporting, campaign optimization and strategic decisions. Waiting months to deploy pipelines means your data is out of date before it’s usable.

Trust

Marketing data must be accurate, compliant and resilient to change. If a platform updates its schema or deprecates a metric, your pipelines can’t break. Gaps and inconsistencies damage dashboards and erode confidence in your data.

Scalability

As you add new platforms, teams and reporting needs, your integration layer must scale with you. Manual maintenance doesn’t scale, and solutions that depend on it collapse under growth.

Autonomy

Marketing and analytics teams can’t afford to wait in line for engineering support. They need to manage their own pipelines — adding sources, mapping fields and transforming outputs — without writing code or filing tickets.

Generic ETL tools may promise flexibility, but they typically pass the burden of change management and maintenance onto your team. When APIs shift or quotas are hit, your analysts lose visibility, and your engineers lose time.

Funnel was built to eliminate that burden.

• No-code workflows let business users manage data pipelines directly, speeding up access and reducing dependencies on IT.
• Proactive platform maintenance handles API changes, version drift and quota management automatically — keeping your pipelines stable without engineering intervention.
• Secure data retention ensures that transformation updates don’t wipe historical records, preserving continuity across reporting periods.
• Built-in governance and compliance include SOC 2, GDPR and CCPA from day one, with role-based access controls and audit logs ready out of the box.
• Multi-cloud and hybrid flexibility let you deliver clean data wherever it needs to go — Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure, Redshift or a distributed data lake.

This is why mid-market teams choose Funnel. It’s not just about faster setup — it’s about long-term resilience, data integrity and operational efficiency. You don’t need to build more complexity into your stack to handle complexity in your data. You need a platform that manages that complexity for you.

But don’t just take our word for it. Hamis Badarou, CAO at Hanalytics, partner of Sephora says “Funnel has become our preferred tool for integrating marketing data, we think it is the industry leader in the category.”

Marketing data becomes a competitive advantage, not a constant source of friction, when integration works the way it should.

Transform your marketing data into a competitive advantage

When marketing data integration works, it becomes the engine behind faster insights, sharper decisions and stronger outcomes.

Modern marketing teams need data that is accurate, compliant and ready for action — without dragging IT and BI teams into endless maintenance cycles.

Choosing the right marketing data integration solution is critical to breaking down data silos, improving data accuracy and accelerating the data integration process — connecting fragmented marketing data to centralized data warehouses and powering faster insights through data visualization tools.

SaaS platforms like Funnel give you the stability, speed and autonomy you need to stay ahead while keeping governance, compliance and scalability at the core.