The month of June brings new exciting features: a new do-it-yourself capability within our Data Catalogue, a new data ingestion method – SFTP, a new real-time estimator of an audience size within a segment and a new platform integration with Marketo.
I know, all that in a month! We hope you enjoy finding out more about these new features below and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for future updates!
Feature spotlight
Introducing a new DIY capability within our Data Catalogue for quicker and more efficient onboarding
At Zeotap, we know that data standardisation and governance are always top of mind, as it’s the foundation for creating a reliable system of reference that powers customer acquisition, growth, retention and service goals.
We also know that time is money for our customers, especially important in today’s turbulent market conditions. Therefore, new features that cut costs and reduce time to value are prioritised.
A data catalogue is at the core of data standardisation and governance. The data catalogue is a collection of attributes associated with users, which when combined, forms a unified view of each customer.
In the context of a CDP, the data catalogue configuration can be a manual and lengthy process that involves multiple stakeholders and is prone to errors. As an offline and manual process, it can take anywhere between days and weeks to complete, which adversely affects the onboarding time.
What is it?
Zeotap’s new feature brings do-it-yourself functionality to our existing Data Catalogue, housed within the Zeotap platform itself – an online process. The new interface gives you the control to prepare, define and onboard your data sources without waiting for catalogue fields to be first added manually into your account.
The previous offline process was pretty cumbersome for the data engineers, data architects and project managers that played a pivotal role in onboarding a source in Zeotap to deploy the CDP. The process that took 3 or more days can now be easily achieved through a very intuitive interface in a matter of hours. This is a capability that supports our vision of a truly self-serve CDP.
Now, Zeotap provides you flexibility to use your own user attributes or create custom attributes. You have the full flexibility to define and bring your data into our platform without any restrictions. You can then use the data very efficiently as per your requirements.
What’s new?
Under the new Catalogue in the Zeotap CDP platform we offer the following:
- A central place to view and look up all attributes in your org’s catalogue
- Ability to create new catalogue fields using a simple UI wherein we provide recommendations (from global catalogue) for matching fields and prompt you if the field is already part of the catalogue
- TTL and No. of Ids are now centralised under the Catalogue – You can easily set these values while creating or editing an ID
- Option to save the source field to catalogue field mappings at one place and reuse for all future sources
- Enhancements in the Consent and Marketing preference field creation process by moving them under the Catalogue section as a category
- Redefined the list of standard fields and only the required fields can be added to the org catalogue based on the source you are using – Unlike today, where we add more than 250 attributes in an orgs catalogue whether you used them or not
See screenshot of the new DIY capability within our Data Catalogue below:
What are the benefits?
- Reduces the data onboarding costs through simple do-it-yourself functionality within the Zeotap CDP platform.
- Reduces time to value of your CDP investment by improving efficiencies within the data onboarding process.
- Option to easily manage data standardisation and governance tasks by directly controlling your data catalogue within the Zeotap CDP platform.
- The new interface of the Data Catalogue, along with Source Ingestion Analytics and the Source Creation flow, has made the onboarding process one of the most easy, flexible and efficient processes in the market.
New feature
Audience Estimator
Within our Connect module, which allows for the segmentation of customers into audiences ready for campaign activation, we have a new feature called … Audience Estimator.
What is it?
Audience Estimator provides a real-time estimate of the number of customers within an audience that lives in a particular segment, based on the filters applied to the first-party data. With this improvement, there is no waiting period to estimate the audience size until the segment run is completed.
What are the benefits?
- Get to know the size of customers while curating the segment real time
- View the updated audience size while editing/viewing the segment
- Get to know the possible change in the number of customers based on ‘What is estimated?’ v/s ‘What was the actual number?’
Based on the estimated size, you can make faster decisions on refining segment definitions and whether or not to leverage Zeotap’s proprietary third-party data to improve reach and coverage of your audiences.
Please note: Audience Estimator only calculates estimates of audience sizes from segments created from first-party data.
New ingestion method
SFTP
Zeotap CDP supports a wide range of data ingestion methods, including Google Tag Manager, web JavaScript, web iframe tag, web or app pixels, server-to-server (HTTP API) and flat files. We have extended our capability to onboard client data into Zeotap CDP through Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
What is it?
The SFTP source enables you to onboard your user data as flat files into Zeotap’s SFTP server in the form of CSV or JSON files.
The SFTP source supports first-party and third-party identifiers, including customer IDs, emails, phone numbers, MAIDS and cookies. To facilitate user matching, we recommend that the data is mapped to your organisation’s first-party user ID and a digital identifier, like a MAID.
Like all the other sources, and for SFTP too, we accept both hashed and Raw PII into the Zeotap account. When converting the hashed IDs, you can either use our hashing guidelines or use this hashing tool. In the case of Raw PII, we use the highly secure RSA encryption algorithm to mask the PII information.
What are the benefits?
- SFTP servers support large and bulk file transfers. Transferring multiple files at once saves time and hence, this is often the preferred option for transferring data by many enterprises.
- SFTP also ensures that the entire process happens within a secured network, providing protection against attacks at any point in the data transfer process.
New integration
We continuously put effort to extend our customer’s reach and Marketo is a brand new addition to our existing list of 150+ integrations.
Marketo is a marketing automation platform that powers email campaigns to drive lead generation, lead nurture, marketing personalisation and campaign efficiency goals.
With this integration, marketers can import email lists containing raw email addresses for campaign activation or update email addresses within an existing list, to match customer behaviour with campaign goals. Here’s how it looks in the platform:
Below is a basic data flow example to show how the integration works:
- Create a segment with raw email addresses on Connect within the Zeotap platform
- Push the segment to Marketo for activation as an Imported List
- Run email campaigns using those segments in the Marketing Activities section
