If you’re like many marketers,
you’re probably running campaigns using a variety of digital marketing channels
— including not only Google Ads but also Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and many more. With no money to waste, you aim to get the most out of
each marketing investment. And to do that, you need a clear, holistic view of
your customers’ journeys across all channels and devices.
In this article, we’ll examine
how you can get everything together and upload all marketing data into one data
storage (e. g. Google BigQuery) to paint a good picture of campaign performance
and improve the ROI across all your multiple ad channels.
Omnichannel marketing analytics
has become the key tool for organizations of any size and industry. Yet, most
marketers are wasting time on routine activities such as organizing data
manually. OWOX BI provides a solution to your time-consuming marketing
routines. With OWOX BI, the advertising data from your paid campaigns will be
automatically pulled into Google BigQuery. You’ll be able to store it for as
long as you want, create detailed reports for what you need, understand the
true value of your paid marketing initiatives, and make better use of your
advertising spend.
The challenge of today’s digital marketing
Today’s customer journeys are
more complex than ever. The numbers speak for themselves: according to the
Salesforce’s 2020 State of the Connected Customer report, 72% of consumers have
used multiple methods of communication to start and complete a single
transaction. 63% of consumers across generations — from Gen Z to the Silent
Generation — have used multiple devices to start and complete a single
transaction. And on top of that, 62% of consumers have said that they prefer
personalized products or services over standard, ’one-size-fits-all’ offers.
A single customer journey can
take anywhere from a few minutes to several months. It may occur in one channel
or span multiple touchpoints and devices. Take for example: a user can first
visit your website via your Facebook ad on their smartphone, only to sign up
and make a purchase via a search ad on their laptop, days later after the
initial interaction. In today’s multi-channel, multi-device landscape, the
consumer is one click or tap away from leaving your brand for a competitor.
If you’re like most marketers,
you’re probably struggling to stay connected with your customers and keep them
engaged across the internet. You need data — that goes without saying. Like
most marketers, you’re probably already sifting through countless campaign
reports in an effort to spot trends and patterns in customer behavior, identify
winning tactics, and optimize your marketing strategy. You keep an eye out for
some chosen metrics and the rest is just piling up in the ad platform, never
really being analyzed or used.
But here’s the caveat: If
you’re not focused on value, you’re falling behind.
According to Gartner, most
marketing analytics teams are still spending most of their time organizing
data, running ad-hoc queries, and generating reports rather than actually using
their data to inform their marketing decisions. The result? Gartner reports
that more than half of senior marketing leaders are disappointed in the results
of their analytics investments.
Automating routine activities
will enable you to focus on what really matters for your organization, such as
extracting hidden insights and using them to make better, smarter marketing
decisions.
Still, before looking for
insights in your data, you have to collect and merge it in one place. The most
widely used solution for this is Google BigQuery — a fully managed serverless
data warehouse that’s part of Google’s infrastructure.
What’s so special about
BigQuery?
One of the major stumbling
blocks to omnichannel marketing is that data is stored in silos that don’t
readily communicate with each other. If you run paid marketing campaigns using
many different platforms, you already know the struggle of keeping a close eye
on each campaign and trying to piece the data together across all your
marketing initiatives.
Here’s where Google BigQuery
comes to help.
Google BigQuery is a
serverless, scalable data warehouse with a built-in query service. It provides
marketers with a single centralized location for advanced data-driven
marketing, without the need for extensive technical skills, reliance on IT, or
significant money investments.
There is, however, one big
problem with BigQuery — it doesn’t natively integrate with non-Google services.
You need third-party connectors
to incorporate touchpoints from non-Google data sources. That is, if you want
to pull data from your website, CRM, ESP, or ad platforms such as Facebook Ads
to BigQuery, you need a service like OWOX BI to do the heavy lifting for you.
Challenge accepted: 6 ways to automate routine data uploads
You can upload your ad data to
Google BigQuery in a number of ways. The main task is to find a way that will
fit your business, requiring minimum effort, saving maximum time, and providing
reliable and accurate results.
Let’s take a look at the
methods you can use to upload your data to Google BigQuery:
Upload data from CSV or JSON
files. You can manually upload a CSV or JSON file with ad data directly to
Google BigQuery from Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, or your computer.
Upload data with Google Sheets
(OWOX BI BigQuery Reports Add-on). You can use the free OWOX BI BigQuery
Reports Add-on to upload data from Google Sheets. You can install this add-on
directly from Google Sheets or from the Chrome Web Store.
Upload data from Google Cloud
Storage. Google Cloud Storage allows you to securely store and transfer data
online. You can find out about data download limits and Cloud Storage
permissions in the Google Cloud help center.
Upload data from other Google
services such as Google Ads and Google Ad Manager. To upload data from various
Google services, you first need to configure the BigQuery Data Transfer
Service. Before you can use it, you must select or create a data project and,
in most cases, enable billing for it.
Download data with the BigQuery
API. With Cloud Client Libraries, you can use your favorite programming
language to work with the Google BigQuery API.
Upload data using third-party
tools. For example, with OWOX BI Pipeline, you can automatically collect data
from advertising services as well as call tracking and CRM systems. This allows
you to quickly and easily get ready-made sets of complete data from the sources
you select.
Each of these methods has pros
and cons, as well as business challenges where they work best. Still, to keep
up with the pace of the modern world, it is preferable to save your time and
effort for tasks you cannot delegate, by automating and simplifying processes
as much as possible.
For most businesses, the most
optimal decision is to choose a single service that satisfies their needs in
the fastest and easiest way. So, let’s take a look at one of the most optimal
ways to upload your ads data to Google BigQuery.
BigQuery and OWOX BI: The right
combination to unlock data value
OWOX BI is a comprehensive
Business Intelligence system designed to facilitate marketing analytics and
decision-making. With OWOX BI, marketers can automatically centralize disparate
data from various sources and use this consolidated data to:
analyze their marketing efforts
create automated reports
reveal new insights into
customer interactions with the organization
optimize your marketing
investments for better ROI.
You won’t have to write a
single line of code, look around for connectors, or prepare the data manually.
OWOX BI will handle it all.
Now, what exactly can OWOX BI
and Google BigQuery help you do?
Bring together data from
multiple systems
It’s only after that data is
consolidated in one centralized location that it becomes actionable. The first
thing you need to do is to consolidate your data effectively so you can easily
process, analyze, and extract insights from all those numerous customer
touch-points. You need to know that you trust your data, and that you’re
comparing apples to apples.
OWOX BI provides a set of
connectors to automatically pull raw data from all your marketing platforms,
including LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, to BigQuery. The result is
one ready-to-use dataset with automated daily updates. Moreover, you’ll be able
to connect this data with the data from other touchpoints, including raw
real-time data from your website and the data from your CRM, call tracking, and
email marketing systems. The only thing left for you to do is to buckle down
and focus on putting the data to action.
Crunch mountains of data
BigQuery is part of the Google
Cloud Platform, which means you get access to Google’s cloud computing and
storage capabilities. You can have terabytes of data stored here, including all
your historical data, and run queries against billions of rows in a matter of
seconds.
Cut down on repetitive tasks
In traditional scenarios,
marketers have to manually switch back and forth between advertising services
to extract data snapshots and organize them into reports and dashboards.
Automating these processes with OWOX BI and BigQuery removes the headaches of
performing regular data updates and ensures that you’ll have the most recent
data at your fingertips. OWOX BI will also retrospectively refresh cost data in
Google BigQuery if it changes in your ad account.
Never lose control over your historical data
Most marketing platforms have
limits on how much data you can store or how long you can access the data. With
Google BigQuery, you can preserve data from all your marketing platforms for as
long as you want, and analyze it to capture not-so-obvious trends that only become
visible over extended periods of time. OWOX BI can backfill your BigQuery
dataset with historical data from your ad account so you can start working
right away.
Conduct comprehensive data analysis
With data in BigQuery, you’ll
be able to create custom metrics and dimensions that are unavailable in the
original data, create arbitrary parameter combinations, apply custom filters to
your reports.
And if you’re not into writing
SQL queries, OWOX BI has got you covered. You can use the Report Builder in OWOX
BI Smart Data to ask questions of your data in natural English and get answers
in the form of neatly organized reports with specific metrics you need based on
your data.
Visualize data
Create actionable data visualizations by connecting BigQuery
to your favorite visualization tools, or exporting your reports to data
visualization services such as Google Data Studio. To do this, you won’t have
to use multiple data sources: a single BigQuery connector is enough.
How to upload ad data to Google BigQuery with OWOX BI Pipeline
To set up data collection, you must have BigQuery Data
Editor and BigQuery User roles in the project in which you want to collect
data. Once these roles are present in your project, follow the steps below to
upload your ad data to Google BigQuery:
1 In your OWOX BI dashboard, click Create
2. Select the data source you want to connect.
4. Provide access to your advertising account.
5. Provide access to the Google BigQuery account where you
want to store the exported data.
6. Select a Google BigQuery project and create a dataset you
want to upload your data to (or choose an existing dataset).
7. Specify the date that marks the beginning of the period
for which you want to upload cost data and select the currency you want your
cost data to be converted to.
8. Click Create pipeline.
Done! Data will be collected automatically in Google
BigQuery, and you’ll get ready-made sets of complete data from your selected
sources.
Final thoughts
Data needs to be collected, processed, analyzed, and put to
action before it brings value. With Google BigQuery and OWOX BI, marketers can
easily step up away from manual tasks and disparate spreadsheets towards a
fully-fledged business intelligence system, the one where you can automatically
aggregate data from multiple touch-points and transform it into valuable
insights.
After all, the value of the data you collect depends
entirely on your ability to harness this data and make decisions from it.
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