How to get in control of your marketing data without involving IT
How long does it take you to get your data from IT? When was the last time you went past standard reporting dashboards and gave your data a serious review? Are you able to easily access all the data you need?
BI and data preparation tools are typically thought of as “heavy”, “hard”, and “technical” by most marketers. Yet, the field of business intelligence has undergone some serious changes over the past few years. New tools offer simple, easy and beautiful workflows. People simply get more from BI applications these days. If your company doesn’t provide you with a decent BI tool, don’t give up. Demand one of these tools as part of your toolkit!
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Analytics Canvas
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Datawatch
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Looker
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Aleryx
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Informatica
If you think that a marketer doesn’t need a data preparation tool, think again! Data is a must-have skill for any marketer these days. You have to be able to integrate data from various platforms in your analysis to prove ROI and justify expenses. Here are some reasons why you will find a data preparation tool to be very helpful:
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Access to information locked in APIs like Google Analytics, Facebook, AdWords, etc.
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Connecting to files in Excel, Google Sheets and other files.
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Being able to work directly with your data to get to the granularity you want, instead of working with totals provided in the web interfaces of marketing tools like AdWords. So instead of looking at Ad 1 300 clicks and Ad 3 000 clicks, you can ask questions like, “How much did we spend on clicks from people who searched ‘shoes’ who clicked Ad 1 and looked past the landing page and bought ‘red velvet shoes’ on the first day of the campaign?”.
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Utilization of pre-built functions to quickly get the data in the right format, instead of messing with vlookups and pivot tables in Excel.
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Being able to export to native formats to visualize in tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Google Data Studio, to create the charts you want without having to apply tonnes of filters and create custom fields and calculations in each report individually.
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The ability to fully automate the process and update all your recurring reports using templates.
You don’t have to be a data scientist or work in IT to be able to connect to APIs and access any data you need. The relative user-friendliness of these tools, as well as their powerful capabilities, and the serious time-savings they generate, are among the many good reasons to have one of them on your desktop.