Marketing Data Warehouse: The Single Source of Truth for Your Team

Companies use various platforms and tools for different marketing activities. When combined, these tools generate lots of data that can help you get a complete overview of your marketing efforts. 

However, dealing with a lot of data from various sources can quickly turn messy. You can easily get the wrong picture of your marketing performance, leading to incorrect conclusions and, eventually, decisions that could hurt your business. 

To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need to establish a single source of truth for your team and see to it that you’re properly tracking all your marketing data. The best way to do that is to build a repository of dashboards that support your decision-making process. These dashboards use a data warehouse as the foundation.

In this post, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about data warehouses.

Key Takeaways

• A marketing data warehouse is used for storing and analyzing marketing and related data with the goal of gaining valuable insights about customers.
• Marketing data warehouses have many benefits, including keeping all historical data, being the single source of truth for all marketing efforts, and providing faster insights about customers.
• Setting up a marketing data warehouse can take a toll on time, cash, and other company resources.
• Partnering up with Improvado allows companies to enjoy all the benefits of a marketing data warehouse without dealing with any drawbacks.

Foster data culture in your company to improve marketing analytics workflow [Free Guide]

What Is a Marketing Data Warehouse?

A marketing data warehouse is a data warehouse companies use to store and analyze marketing data. Usually, that data comes from multiple sources including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics 4, Amazon DSP, Twitter, Yahoo Gemini, and many more.

Marketing data warehouses help marketing teams consolidate data from those multiple platforms into one place so it can later be analyzed. In practice, many companies use their regular data warehouse for storing their marketing data.

Data Warehouse Compared to Other Storage Options 

In addition to a data warehouse, companies keep their marketing data in various other storage solutions, including databases, data lakes, and data marts.

A database typically only contains related structured data. It’s usually easy to access, manage, and maintain. A data lake serves as the central data repository, and you can use it to store data in raw format, both unstructured and structured.

A data mart is a part of a data warehouse that usually only stores data from one specific business line. If you’re storing other departments' data in your marketing data warehouse—your data warehouse is actually a data mart.

You have two options if you’re looking for a way to store your marketing data long-term. If you’re collecting structured data, you can go with a data mart (or a data warehouse). You can use a data lake if you’re collecting both structured and unstructured data.

Marketing Data Warehouse Architecture

Like all data warehouses, marketing-specific ones have their own architecture. It consists of three main parts:

1. Marketing data warehouse: Serves as the central repository for all marketing data. 
2. Analytical framework: Processes and organizes that data into tables.
3. Integration layer: Connects the databases in the warehouse together and helps make them accessible to other software.

Sometimes, marketing data from various sources is collected and pushed to the ETL tool (such as Improvado), which prepares the data for the data warehouse. The marketing data is then stored in the data warehouse and analyzed and presented using various analysis and visualization tools.

Why Do Businesses Need A Marketing Data Warehouse?

Marketing data warehouses can be very beneficial for businesses. Here are some of the ways how. 

Single Source of Truth

Usually, marketers don’t have the time to log onto 20 different platforms to get the data they need to analyze and make decisions based on. A marketing data warehouse helps consolidate all marketing data into one place, thus becoming the single source of truth.

Thanks to a marketing data warehouse and marketing data centralization, revenue, marketing, sales, and analytics teams can get a holistic overview of all the marketing efforts inside the company. That holistic view makes it easy to plan future projects and evaluate past ones.

All Historical Data

Usually, marketers need to look into those same 20 platforms if they want to get any historical data. Often, how (and if) those platforms archive that data will depend on their policies. 

With a data warehouse, marketers can securely store all marketing data in one place. Full ownership and control over their data will make it easy to get specific datasets needed to make better data-driven decisions.

Faster Insights 

A marketing data warehouse can save so much time. Businesses don’t need access to physical data centers. Instead, they can be up and running in just a few clicks.

Thanks to quick access to data, companies can make decisions in an instant—which is often crucial in marketing. 

Possible Drawbacks of a Marketing Data Warehouse

Even though a marketing data warehouse can be significant for businesses—not all companies should get started implementing it immediately. The technology behind marketing data warehouses can hugely affect many aspects of the business.

Implementation and Maintenance

In order for a marketing data warehouse to start storing and analyzing data, somebody needs to build it. Once it has been built and implemented into the company’s tech stack, it needs to be maintained so the company can use it and actually get all the benefits. 

However, this requires the help of an in-house database administrator or even a DevOps person. Hiring someone to implement and manage your marketing data warehouse will take a lot of time and can be costly.

Data Aggregation and Transformation

When the data warehouse is up and running, marketers will still need to figure out a way to aggregate data from the various platforms they use and transform it so it can be analyzed and visualized.

This can all be done manually, but most marketers aren’t versed in writing SQL queries, meaning they can’t get anything useful from the data warehouse. They can learn SQL, but that will probably take even more time, effort, and money—directly from paying for SQL courses and indirectly from not reaping the benefits of the data warehouse.

Solution: Marketing Data Storage in Managed Service

By partnering up with Improvado, companies can still get all the benefits of a marketing data warehouse without dealing with any of the drawbacks.

Improvado is a no-code, enterprise-grade revenue data platform that helps marketing, sales, and revenue teams aggregate, transform, and push data to a data warehouse, analytics, visualization, or a BI tool.

Quick Installation and Painless Maintenance

Instead of relying on costly and slow in-house database admins to set up and maintain your marketing data warehouse, the Improvado team provides data warehouses with deployment and maintenance services. 

The team sets up and configures the data warehouse instance. Improvado supports BigQuery and Amazon S3, with other technologies being available by request. This means that customers don't need to purchase anything else or deal with managing another vendor.

The data warehouse instance is owned by Improvado, but Improvado manages it on the client’s end—ensuring the process is transparent to them. The clients don’t have to fear anything—they’ll always have full control and ownership of their data.

Effortless Aggregation and Transformation

Instead of manually writing SQL queries, marketers can use one of over 500 native data source connectors that Improvado supports. Among them are the likes of Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, TikTok Ads, Amazon Ads & Selling Partners, Shopify, Twitter, and many more. Customers can request custom connectors if Improvado doesn’t support a certain data source.

With Improvado, marketers can enjoy the benefits of AI-powered automatically harmonized transformations across all data sources, which helps them speed up all analytics processes.

How Does It All Work?

The Improvado-powered data warehouse architecture isn’t much different from a regular data warehouse architecture.

First, Improvado aggregates the data from one of 500+ supported data connectors. That raw data is then placed into Improvado storage (fully owned by the client).

Improvado then does its magic and transforms the data. The data is now analysis-ready and can be found in the data warehouse—which can be powered and managed by Improvado. Once it's in the warehouse, it's ready for business intelligence, visualization, or any other tools you want to use.

Additionally, Improvado can support companies even further with the help of its professional services. The services are tailored to each customer, but some of the standouts include pushing data to various BI tools, building visualizations, or even launching full-fledged projects, such as this one— which helped ASUS take full control over their global marketing data.

Conclusion

A marketing data warehouse can be a great way to streamline your marketing data into a single source of truth that can be used for making all sorts of data-driven business decisions. It can provide quick and easy access to data used for independently gauging marketing efforts.

However, setting up your marketing data warehouse can be time- and resource-consuming. Because of this, partnering up with Improvado is the best way to quickly and easily get your marketing data warehouse up and running.

Depending on your preferences, Improvado can only set up a part of your marketing data warehouse or fully manage it—always ensuring that you have full transparency and control over your data.