CDP & Current Technology Stack
Welcome to Part II of the five part series all about CDPs and your technology stack (catch up on part I here!) With numerous different tools in a company’s tech stack, many companies are looking to remove silos and bring the data into a single data warehouse sharing it across the organization. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) plays the role of the middleman so to speak between customer data and company tools. Customer, analytics, and campaign data is ingested into the CDP bringing together a 360 view of the customer. The data is then segmented and activated across and not limited to BI Tools, campaign platforms, and social media destinations. But how does this all fit into the tech stack?
The CDP and How It Fits Into Your Tech Stack
Since every CDP is unique and differs on the capabilities, it is important to understand how they integrate with each tool in the tech stack, what limitations exists, how integrating with the CDP would impact day-to-day operations, what alternatives there are to the limitation and whether that is something doable. It is also important to look at what resources will be needed to support the CDP and what technology needs to be added and transitioned off (i.e., addition of an orchestration layer and the Data Management Platform (DMP) may transition over to the CDP). Last is evaluating when data is available for activation with each of your critical platforms.
The CDP sits in the middle of a tech stack. Data feeds into the CDP from various platforms such as an ESP, a CRM, and a mobile app. Segments are created and the segmented data is sent out of the CDP to an ESP, a Demand-Side Platform (DSP), and Bi-Tools. Let’s dive into a few different areas to consider starting with a DMP.
DMPs
Let’s look at the differences between a DMP and CDP. DMPs are used mainly for anonymous data, where CDPs are customer centric using customer data. When considering a CDP, current use cases need to be evaluated to determine whether the DMP needs to be part of the tech stack.
If the importance of the DMP is activating audiences to various destinations, and the CDP has this functionality, this could be a place to cut some costs by moving the destinations and various segments over to the CDP. In other cases, you may find you need the DMP to support a use case you have. If you need to activate data within the same day, or close to real-time, it may make sense to use the CDP versus having to wait 24 hours which is a typical timeframe a DMP has in activating on customer data. A DMP syncs data to and from an identity graph (e.g., LiveRamp, DV360, TTD), which is something to consider, and evaluate whether the CDP will support it.
DSPs
Having both a CDP and DSP can benefit your company by expanding your audience reach through enriching your data, access to real-time data, and activating across all marketing channels. When using the DSPs identity graph, this should be evaluated whether the CDP integrates with it, and/or if they provide their own identity graph.
Email Service Providers (ESP) and the CDP
As for the ESP, some CDPs will have their own ESP to activate with and may not have a good integration with an ESP like Salesforce Marketing Cloud for instance. Here it is important to know what type of integrations are available and whether it is suitable to support day-to-day business as usual. There needs to be a good understanding of how the audiences will be generated, how the ESP will consume those audiences and deploy campaigns from those audiences. It may be a daily file that is needed, and in other cases a trigger when communications need to be more immediate.
Analytic Platforms and the CDP
I often hear questions surrounding how to integrate the analytics platform with the CDP. It makes sense, the analytics platform already collects data and using an API to stream the data into the CDP seems very logical. The real truth here is, most CDPs will not have a real-time data stream from your analytics to the CDP. They will offer in lieu of that a tag for you to place on your web properties in order to collect real-time data. With that in mind, do obtain information about real-time event tracking and how that is accomplished. How can that data be married to the customer data, and how quickly can the data be activated? Many CDPs may refer to their data as being real-time but can only activate real-time data after 15 minutes depending on what data sources are being used for the audiences.
Journey Orchestration
You have a CDP In place, the data is now unified, you have the data to be able to activate across channels having a 360-degree understanding of the customer. Is there an orchestration layer? The orchestration layer is needed to support omnichannel marketing. It is a mechanism used to customize a user’s journey based on previous campaign data and their behavioral events on digital properties. CDPs don’t always have an orchestration layer, and if they do, it is a mechanism to activate audiences to your platforms. Some may have custom configurations to help fully automate campaigns. The CDP does not send marketing content to users, that is still configured and performed by the tools you are activating on. Basically, you can set up ‘journey’ activations in some CDPs supporting some sort of orchestration layer, and then send those audiences to your tools to activate on. Campaigns still need to be configured in the tools, and still must tell each platform what audience to use, and what to send. In an ideal situation you would have the orchestration layer included where you are able to build scheduled journeys in all your channels. More realistically, you may find a CDP will only be able to populate audiences, run journeys and send audiences to your tools only once per day. If a brand is international, some decisions need to be made on coordinating availability of the data. If the CDP does have the orchestration layer, it is important to evaluate whether it fully supports the use cases or if a journey orchestration tool is needed in addition to the CDP.
In Conclusion
From my experience in evaluating CDPs and how they fit in a Tech Stack, each CDP evaluated will have limitations with a few of the integrations. At the end, I found it is essential to have a Proof of Concept (POC) if possible, to further validate the tool whether it can support normal day-to-day business without any major delays of deficiencies. If you are able to secure a POC before making a long-term commitment with the CDP, I recommend the critical integrations are tested and provide what is needed to continue business as usual.
A few questions to include in your next evaluation questionnaire.
Preview of the next series:
Ingestion & Extraction of Data
The availability of data is just as important as having access to the data. An evaluation of the ingestion and extraction to and from the CDP is important to look at thoroughly to evaluate if the company can continue business as usual. For each integration the CDP should be able to provide whether they are using APIs or batch files to ingest/extract data, the formats they accept, whether it is real-time data transfer, does it support self-service, and what delays are expected.
The Use Cases
Another very important piece with evaluating a CDP, is making sure to have use cases that test a wide breadth of the CDP. Part of this is also having a good understanding of the entire customer journey to make sure the use cases cover the functionality needed. Look for potential use cases for today, and what the company is looking to do in the future. Some areas to include would be ingestion and extraction to critical platforms, basic to complex segmentation, evaluate orchestrated journeys with triggered automations to critical platforms, for probabilistic matches ensure the data is available and can be activated on, just to name a few.
People, Resources & Services
After a CDP is in place, teams across the organization will have access to actionable data and where previously siloes prevented this access to teams. There will be non-technical and technical people who need to extract and send the data to different destinations. Some CDP platforms will require more technical users with the lack of self-service tools that are easy to use. What is the self-service documentation like? Does the CDP have a good track history of great customer support outside of implementation? Is the CDP fully self-service where technical support on the CDPs behalf is needed on rare occasions?
