The adage “data is the new gold” resonates so well because of data’s virtually invaluable wealth to modern business. But like gold, data is not particularly precious in its intrinsic form. It must be mined, processed, analyzed, and shaped to extract its riches and maximize its potential worth. In marketing, gathering data is the easy part – it’s making sense of it and making it actionable, which is where many organizations struggle.
This is particularly true in the world of cross-channel media measurement. With a seemingly always-increasing number of channels, each with its own disparate streams of data, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve a true “apples to apples” comparison on performance. Most teams, instead, find themselves with a veritable fruit buffet, with plenty of data at hand but no way to truly reconcile and report across all of their initiatives.
That’s where a strong data foundation comes in. Having a strong data foundation enables teams to see the forest through the trees. It provides a trustworthy, reliable, calibrated bedrock on which to make informed decisions that inspire targeted action. But it’s also not easy to accomplish, and for many companies, the cost of building a strong data infrastructure can be prohibitive.
Let’s take a closer look at what it means to have a strong data foundation and how partnering with Measured can benefit data-centric marketing teams.
Benefits of a Strong Data Foundation for Media Measurement and Optimization
While there may be specific criteria unique to your organization’s needs, the minimum qualifications you should look for in a partner include:
- Their data must be accurate (this should go without saying, really). A proven methodology and content customers are a testament to this.
- They should offer enterprise-grade infrastructure. It can take brands years to develop this type of data infrastructure and assets in-house, which is essential to ingesting performance data on an always-on basis.
- The data infrastructure should be scalable and easy to both access and build on top of.
- Its infrastructure must be portable and secure so the data is ready to connect and inform other business processes and partners.
- They should offer you complete control over your data, whether that is access to data or storage of it.
- It should be automated, including the tasks of cleaning, organizing, and running quality checks on your data daily.
What Does it Cost to Build a Robust Data Infrastructure In-House?
Creating this infrastructure, clearly, is no simple task. It takes significant time, money, and expertise to construct a foundation robust enough to deliver the level of insight and analysis that today’s brands require. In fact, building an enterprise-grade data infrastructure in-house would cost an average DTC business almost $500,000 in the first year.
Why Partner with Measured for Data Management?
What’s the alternative? Partner with Measured to leverage the most sophisticated data management infrastructure on the market. Here’s how it works.
- Integrations. Measured manages over 300 API and non-API data integrations. Our data ingestion framework system ensures that connections are stable, leak-free, and that data is delivered on-schedule.
- Harmonization. Measured automatically harmonizes all marketing, ecommerce, and customer data with incremental measurement to provide an apples-to-apples view of your entire marketing portfolio. Your platform-reported conversion data is taxonomized into objective-based campaign groups, then calibrated with incrementality from thousands of in-market tests for accurate reporting and insights.
- Application. After harmonization, your data is made available for all sorts of business applications. With five different access methods, you can report inside the Measured platform, or take your data into other systems for additional use cases. Whether building an MMM model, a forecast, or a custom executive report, Measured has your marketing data ready-to-consume.
With Measured, your data is always organized in the best way for your team and structured into a fully automated data pipeline. It’s ingested daily, organized into tactics to see which media is driving performance, and analyzed using incrementality and media mix modeling to reveal the true contribution of media to sales. It’s easy to connect marketing data to outside tools or databases, and it takes just four weeks to get access to your brand’s full portfolio measurement dashboard.
Why Leading DTC Brands Trust Measured to Operationalize their Data
Because Measured offers five different ways to access your data, it’s easy for every person on your team to find and take action on your marketing metrics beyond the Measured Platform itself. For example, with Measured you can:
- Quickly export cross-channel performance data from a specific table by exporting a CSV directly from the platform.
- Build an executive finance report in the BI tool of your choice by connecting your BI tool directly to the Measured database to see Measured data alongside existing reporting processes.
- Develop a custom spend forecast model by building a custom pacing optimization report in Google Sheets, leveraging Measured’s cross-channel data table.
Measured completes over 25,000 data jobs every day – all calibrated to each client’s specific requirements. The process is 100% managed, including cleaning, organizing, and quality-checking the data, and always 100% owned by the customer, with complete control over access and storage.
Achieve Enterprise-Grade Data Management with Measured
If data is the new gold, Measured is your proven partner for transforming raw materials into real value. A strong data foundation with Measured gives you the information and insights you need to optimize your media portfolio, advance your marketing objectives, and accelerate growth at your organization.