Overview

A typical data warehouse is filled with all of the data your business generates: Order history, user interaction events, an updated snapshot of the data in your app database, all of your ETLed SaaS data... The list goes on. 

This is often called "first-party data" (i.e. data that only you know about).

But there's a lot of other "third-party data" (i.e. datasets collected by other service providers like Clearbit and Apollo) out in the wild that can be invaluable for building a single source of truth in the warehouse – especially when it comes to lookalike models.

Lookalike modeling creates a target audience by identifying individuals who have similar characteristics to a known set of your existing customers or prospects. That way, you can develop a marketing campaign (including ads, content, and events) that reach folks just like your best customers.

And using data enrichment, you can gather third-party demographic data, behavior patterns, and other relevant information to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your target audience and create more accurate lookalike models.

Use Case

Enrichments are configured on Entities at Census, so every entity has a Data Enrichment tab that allows configuring enrichment. 

The data within the entity will act as the source data that is passed to the enrichment service, and Census will automatically store the results in the warehouse as well as add the data you specify to the entities.

Before you start, you'll need to create a service connection to your enrichment service. You can add these in the Connections tab. You'll see a Data Enrichment tag indicating a service can be used for enrichment.

With enrichment services enabled, you'll see the option to turn on enrichment on your entities. Enabling enrichment requires three pieces of configuration:

• Data Category or type to use, if the service provides multiple. For example, do you want to enrich users or people? If your entity is a User or Company type, this will be automatically selected for you.
• The identifier (or identifiers) to pass to the enrichment service. Enrichment services use these identifiers to match against their databases. The type of identifier needed will vary depending on which data category was specified.
• The attributes from the enrichment service to add to the entity. You can choose which attributes to add to your entity, you don't need to add them all so you can skip attributes that would create duplicate columns and confusion.

Once your enrichment is configured, Census will start querying your enrichment service and populating results.

Now, you can immediately use this unified customer data to:

• Create lookalike audiences to target potential customers with high conversion rates
• Sync to automation tools like Marketo, Braze, and Iterable using Reverse ETL
• Segment customer lists based on third-party data attributes
• Power any BI tool, ETL process, or SQL integration connected to the warehouse

Want to dive deeper? For a step-by-step demo, check out this video: