Data can be a valuable asset for any business, and it can have a big impact on long-term success. It can inform day-to-day decision making, drive strategic analyses, and improve customer relationships. However, it's crucial to ensure that your data pipelines are of the highest quality and are properly managed.
Unfortunately, in marketing, several "hacky" data practices have become quite common. Many marketers use csv exports and manual connectors that store data in Google Sheets, but this can lead to broken reports and unreliable data. In this blog, we'll explore how to create and manage high-quality pipelines to ensure that your data is reliable and valuable.
Start with looking at the tools and channels you work with on a daily base. As you run your ads, automate your emails and improve your SEO ranking, you are logging data in many different tools and you should pay attention to the ability to extract this data to store it in a database as a company asset. Check for high quality, freely available API’s with proper documentation when choosing your next automation tool or advertising channel.
Next up is data storage. It's essential to avoid "occasional solutions" that are not built for data warehousing but can "do the trick." Instead, opt for purpose-built data warehousing technology like Google's Bigquery, Amazon's Redshift, or Snowflake. Adopt a data platform that allows you to automate data replications and manage settings like historic dates, refresh rates, and schema choices.You should store your data in a platform that allows you to see and use the data whenever and however you want. Own your data and don't rely on black boxes.
Once your data is stored, it has to be structured and prepared for insights. Data that comes through an API is not yet usable with dashboarding tools like Lookers Studio, Tableau, or PowerBI. Furthermore, data that comes through APIs is often incomplete, wrongfully labeled, or includes a lot of data that is simply not useful. You'll need the resources or skills to manually clean and transform the data into usable tables, or a platform that can do this for you. Ideally, your marketing data platform will allow you to make choices in sources, destinations and transformations without having to use code and automate your pipelines for you.
Once you have your pipelines set up in a solid, automated way, you'll want to be able to monitor if everything is going as planned. Data freshness refers to knowing how "fresh" the data in your pipelines is, which directly relates to the conclusions you'll be able to pull from it. Data quality is all about making sure the data in the pipeline is accurate. Using data that is manually put in? Better check twice, because human errors at data input can make your analyses lose value real quick. Data exploration allows you to look at the data in table format before using it for dashboards, reports, or other applications. Not only will this allow you to check freshness and quality, but it will also spike your creativity as to what type of valuable analyses you will be able to drive from this specific data pipeline.
Once you have your data pipelines running and monitored and feel confident with what comes out, it's time to put that data into action! Dashboards and other reports allow you to drive valuable insights and share them in a visual way with team members, customers, or investors. Insights, whether displayed in a dashboard, table, or otherwise, might be input for your next actions. Data products are insights (often dashboards) wrapped up into products that you can sell. These require unique knowledge or insights, paired with high-quality data pipelines. If you are a marketing agency, for example, this is a beautiful way to turn your company’s unique knowledge into recurring revenue.
Whether you're making dashboards for internal use or full-on data products, if reliability falls, usage falls. In addition, high quality, automated data pipelines mean you have more time to spend on your next strategic analysis or experimenting with more advanced models.
Eyk is a powerful solution that can help you take control of your data pipelines and ensure that they are reliable and of high-quality. With Eyk, performance marketers can automate the process of pushing data from marketing tools to dashboards, deploy pre-built models to join data across sources, and get analysis inspiration through the data model library.
One of the most valuable features of Eyk is its ability to monitor data pipelines for freshness and quality. By doing this, marketing teams can create one version of the truth for their company, improve data quality, and build trust in analyses. With Eyk, you can take control over your data warehouse by adding source connectors and data models, and productize your standard reports for customers.
Agencies can benefit greatly from using Eyk. They can create workspaces per customer, benchmark across all their data, do more innovative and strategic analyses, and explore new, data-driven business models.
With Eyk, you can automate your reports through easily generated data pipelines and get inspired to perform more innovative analyses, all while keeping control and ownership over your data. If you want to improve the quality of your data pipelines and make data analysis easy, valuable, and fun, contact us today.
Get all your e-commerce metrics together in one overview today.
