In today’s data-driven world, data sharing is an integral function of every organisation’s data strategy. Do the below questions resonate with you?
- Are you constantly on the lookout for new insights to make more informed decisions about monetising your data assets to generate new revenue streams?
- Are you kept up at night thinking about the technical challenges associated with data exchange?
- Do traditional and expensive data-sharing techniques such as FTP, email and APIs concern you as you contemplate scaling your business?
- Are you worried about security in data exchanges and collaborating in a privacy-centric manner with partners?
Well, if the answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’, then this blog is the right one for you. Introducing Google’s Analytics Hub, Zeotap CDP’s latest integration, which helps businesses solve secure data sharing problems.
About Google’s Analytics Hub
Analytics Hub is a data exchange platform that enables you to share data and insights at scale across organisations with a robust security and privacy framework. The hub acts as a marketplace for data that brings together producers (publishers) and consumers (subscribers) of data, making publishing and consuming data easy, as well as making sharing data secure and efficient across organisational boundaries.
The hub is built on Google’s BigQuery and leverages the publish and subscribe model of BigQuery datasets. The separation of computing and storage in BigQuery’s architecture enables data publishers to share data with as many subscribers as they want without having to make multiple copies of the data. Publishers are only charged for data storage, whereas subscribers only pay for queries that run against the shared data.
The challenges of data sharing
As Gartner’s article ‘Data Sharing Is a Business Necessity to Accelerate Digital Business’ explains, there is a 3X increase in economic growth for data and analytics leaders who shared data externally than those who did not. The cost of not developing a data-sharing culture is significant and many organisations are worried about unreliable data and security threats in relation to adopting the right approach to data sharing. Gartner emphasised in the survey the importance of trusting the quality of the collected data; most importantly, collecting data from reliable sources, using and sharing data that matches the requirements of the business; followed by appropriate re-sharing of data.
Another issue with traditional data techniques like FTP, email and APIs are that they are expensive to maintain and often result in multiple copies of stale data, especially when sharing at scale. Organisations are looking for ways to make data sharing more secure, consistent and fast. When it comes to data— whether it’s coming in or going out, public or private, part of core processes or a small piece of an experiment— how you connect to it is often as important as why you want to connect to it.
What does the integration with Analytics Hub deliver?
With ever-evolving and strict regulations regarding data privacy and compliance, organisations that share data with business partners need a solution that avoids data duplication, unnecessary data transit, and allows for sharing of only certain data elements. Zeotap CDP leverages BigQuery to power its cleanroom solution through the Analytics Hub integration.
Zeotap CDP’s integration with Analytics Hub provides a secure data sharing and enrichment offering, running on Google Cloud, for advertisers, brands and especially marketers. It supports marketing and analytics teams in resolving gaps in their consumer data sets with Zeotap CDP’s unified data.
The integration with Analytics Hub makes Zeotap CDP the ideal CDP for marketers who are looking specifically for capabilities that improve data management and by focusing on obtaining the maximum value out of customer data.
A diagram to show the publisher / subscriber data sharing model of Analytics Hub:
With this integration, you can utilise the capabilities of Analytics Hub on top of Zeotap CDP’s highly enriched, unified profiles, events and ID store to create impactful marketing campaigns in the following ways:
- Collaboration across organisations – You can create exchanges for various business functions or geographies to share data internally within your organisation. For example, it’s important for retailers to share sales data with suppliers, but only data that is required to minimise data sharing costs.
- Seamless process with up-to-date data – The entire process is extremely seamless and does not involve the dynamics of data transfer that would otherwise involve re-ingesting this data at your end. This saves the time consumed in additional data processing or any kind of custom coding enabling faster digital transformation.
- Centralised control for data access – Using Google’s centralised IAM services, there is complete visibility into who has access to what datasets. It is easy to manage data access in a centralised manner and revoke access when no longer needed.
- Monetising data assets – You can monetise data by sharing it with your partner network or within your own organisation in real-time. Listings enable you to share data without replicating it and can limit the specific attributes shared with the subscriber. You can share real-time data at scale without moving the data, leading to significant cost savings for data management.
- Marketing attribution and measurement – Merge datasets of profiles, segments, performance and other non-customer entity data for attribution and measurement of campaigns for marketing optimisation.
- Enable Reverse ETL – Enables real-time data availability of unified data for proprietary in-house applications aiding systems to have access to the most up-to-date customer data, create personalised and seamless customer journeys.
- Secured and privacy-compliant framework – You can easily publish or subscribe to shared datasets in an open, secure and privacy-safe environment. This ensures scaling across organisations within a robust security and privacy framework.
- Share data with the right audience – You can build a catalogue of analytics-ready data sources with granular permissions that let you deliver data to the right audiences. This aids in real-time campaign activation that allows marketers to deliver highly personalised marketing campaigns.
Understanding the integration through a use case
Virgin Media O2, a British mass media and telecommunications company based in London, England, with 100s of petabytes of data was faced with challenges of cost and security to activate data in real-time at scale across multi-vertical channels (for example: real-time personalisation, digital advertising campaigns, email marketing and in-app messaging).
They were looking for a platform that would enable them to create just the right set of audiences, activate them across multiple channels and be able to measure the campaign performance to optimise their marketing budgets.
Although there were many CDPs in the market, not many could provide a platform that would help them not only activate data at scale to multiple channels in real-time but also provide the access to the unified data for further analysis and enrichment, without any data redundancy constraints.
Zeotap CDP, with a seamless integration for Analytics Hub was just the right blend of features that could solve their problems. This is how Zeotap CDP solved their use case:
- Unified their first-party customer data collected from multiple sources and stitched together the rows of data to create unique customer profiles with targetable IDs.
- Enable precise segmentation via an easy-to-use interface with powerful functionality.
- Activate on desired platforms with out-of-the-box integrations of Ad-Tech and Martech channels.
- Share the profiles, events and segment details via Analytics Hub. This was then combined with the campaign and other private datasets for calculating multi-touch attribution and ROAS in near real-time. This eventually led to optimised campaigns, reduced lag in data availability and saved the cost of what would have been involved in ingesting data separately – leading to over $1M in cost savings in a single year.
- With the datasets available on the exchange as listings, the other systems of the telecom company could now subscribe to the datasets and use the customer profiles for their respective use cases.
Thus, using Zeotap’s CDP’s impactful integration with Analytics Hub, the telecom company could spend smarter and free up budget for real-time personalisation, digital advertising campaigns, email marketing and in-app messaging.
What’s next?
If you would like to learn more about how Zeotap CDP helped save Virgin Media O2 £1M and acquire more customers you can read our case study or if you would like to learn more about how you can get the most out of our Analytics Hub integration you can request a demo here.
Please follow the link for more information on Google’s Analytics Hub.
