Overview

Analytics is only as good as the data that feeds it.

Poor data only leads to flawed insights and misguided decisions.

But in today's data-driven world Đ where there’s an ever-growing volume of event data to wrangle Đ it's tricky to ensure that all the data going into your analytics tool is high-quality. 

So it's crucial to have a robust data infrastructure in place to ensure that data governance, quality, and trust are maintained. A huge part of this includes unbundling your event collection and event routing.

To implement this solution, you'll need the following components:

1. Event collection: Tools like Snowplow to collect event data into your DWH.
2. ETL: Tools like Fivetran to pull transactional data into your DWH.
3. Data activation: Tools like Census to activate and route data from your DWH to all your downstream tools, with a marketer-friendly UI.
4. Analytics: Mixpanel, which works well with all these tools.

By using your data warehouse as the hub for all data in your company, you can reap benefits like:

1. Improved data governance: Unbundling event collection and routing leads to better data governance by giving you full control over your data. You can easily manage access rights, apply data retention policies, and ensure that sensitive information is handled securely. This level of control fosters trust in your data, empowering your marketing team to make more informed decisions.

2. Higher data quality: By separating event collection and routing, you can ensure that only relevant, high-quality data is used for analysis. This results in more accurate insights and improved product and marketing strategies. Additionally, in-house data collection can help mitigate the impact of ad-blockers and provide cleaner data for analysis.
3. No vendor lock-in: Unbundling enables you to choose best-in-class tools for different stages of your data pipeline, avoiding reliance on a single vendor. This flexibility allows you to adopt new tools or switch providers with minimal disruption to your existing infrastructure, ensuring that your marketing efforts continue to evolve with the market.
4. Cost efficiency: Curating the data sent to analytics tools like Mixpanel can help you reduce event volumes and data retention periods, leading to lower costs. By focusing on high-quality data and eliminating unnecessary events, you can optimize spend for your tech stack while still benefiting from powerful analytics.

Use Case

Imagine that you are the CMO of an e-commerce company looking to improve its marketing strategy through data-driven insights. You decide to build a robust data infrastructure to collect, store, analyze, and activate your customer data, so you need to unbundle your event collection and event routing. Your journey unfolds as follows:

1. Choose an event collection tool: After researching various event collection tools, you select Snowplow for its scalability, flexibility, and compatibility with your existing data infrastructure. Snowplow allows you to capture granular customer behavior data across your website and mobile app, providing a rich dataset for analysis.
2. Implement an ETL tool: To consolidate transactional data from multiple sources such as your CRM, payment gateways, and inventory management systems, you choose Fivetran as your ETL tool. Fivetran extracts, transforms, and loads data from various sources into your data warehouse, ensuring that all data is available in a unified format for analysis.
3. Set up a data activation platform: To leverage the power of your data warehouse, you implement Census as your data activation tool. Census enables you to route customer data from your warehouse to downstream marketing tools such as email marketing platforms, ad networks, and personalization engines. This seamless data flow ensures that your marketing stack is fueled by accurate, up-to-date data.
4. Integrate analytics: To gain valuable insights from your collected data, you decide to incorporate Mixpanel as your analytics tool. Mixpanel allows you to analyze customer behavior data, segment users, and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With these insights, you can optimize your marketing strategies and drive better results.
5. Monitor and optimize: As data flows through your pipeline, you continuously monitor its quality and the performance of your data routing rules. Using monitoring tools and dashboards, you identify areas for improvement and fine-tune your data pipeline to ensure that only relevant, high-quality data reaches the appropriate destinations. This ongoing optimization process helps you maintain data quality and maximize the impact of your data-driven marketing efforts.

With these tools in your toolbox, you know you have a robust data infrastructure that empowers your e-commerce company to make informed marketing decisions and improve customer experiences. 🤝

What's Next?

Now that you've unbundled event collection and event routing, explore some other ways to leverage this data for additional use cases:

1. Personalization: Enrich your data to create highly personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience, driving engagement and conversions.
2. Cross-channel marketing: With a unified view of your data, you can develop more effective cross-channel marketing strategies that provide a seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints.
3. Informed decision-making: Leverage fresh, accurate data to make quicker, more informed decisions and respond to customer needs, market changes, and emerging trends as they happen.

By unbundling event collection and event routing, you're not only improving data governance, quality, and trust but also opening up a world of possibilities for your marketing team. Continue to experiment and iterate with your data to uncover new insights and drive your marketing efforts even further.

🚀  Want to start activating your data to power all these use cases? 👆 Book a demo with a Census product specialist.