Improving your data pipelines

Published Apr 20 2022 Last updated May 24 2023 2 minute read
Better data pipelines
Contributors

Do you want to perform quicker analysis on your marketing data

While data teams do their best to help digital marketers improve performance, long backlogs are a common occurrence. This can lead to inefficient workflows between the teams.

Data teams want to ensure data integrity and marketers want to perform analysis faster. So, how do you find the right balance?

 

 

Data Integrity

Business intelligence and data teams are relied on to extract, maintain and facilitate data, which is why they often feel uncomfortable handing over the keys to a marketer. However, times are changing, and modern marketers are becoming more data-savvy. That newfound comfort with data brings new demands on data teams.

A common workflow for data teams is:

Although some marketers are capable of working with data in data warehouses, it isn’t a common or necessary skill for them to have. This means that marketers are left making requests to data teams in order to get answers to fairly common questions.

This forces marketers to go through a ticketing system that, while allowing data teams to maintain control and integrity of the data, doesn’t facilitate agility.

Agility in marketing

Modern marketers are required to process and analyze data in real time to extract quick insights in order to adapt campaigns and affect change. 

That requires a process that facilitates speedy feedback from data in platforms to data analysis. It would be great if the data that flowed out of advertising platforms was ready for analysis, but there is a necessary data cleaning step to make it useful.

Given that marketers are not data engineers or business intelligence experts, there is a limit to the level of data cleaning they can be required to do. With that said, they know the purpose of the data and the desired outcome of the analysis better than anyone.

This means that finding a solution that allows marketers to work with their own data will help them gain faster insights and reduce the number of requests placed on data teams.

Striking a balance between integrity and agility

Data teams want to focus on strategic projects rather than fulfilling tickets for marketers. That is where a marketing data platform helps strike a balance. A common workflow for data teams looking to make marketers more independent could be:

 

 

With a marketing data platform, no coding is required, but powerful transformation is possible. With such a solution, data collection is simple and easy for both teams. Data teams can create the guardrails in which the marketer can operate within the marketing data platform. This gives the marketer the freedom to explore their data, creating new segments and data sets that they can easily send to a data visualization tool with the click of a button.

On the other hand, data teams can send the same data to a data warehouse where they can take analysis one step further by mapping data with other business data.

With this workflow, the marketer has the freedom to work with real-time data on a daily basis, without the possibility of affecting or disrupting any data pipelines or larger data projects that the data teams are working on. 

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