Marketing Analytics Using Azure Synapse – Part 1

In an ever-expanding landscape of Data Driven Digital Advertising, Marketing Analytics solutions are increasingly expected to help Advertisers do more than just measure campaign performance. They should help deliver Advanced Analytics and Predictive Solutions to generate timely and valuable insights on Ad Campaigns, helping drive ROI.

Traditional data platforms that automate campaign performance analytics are rigid and require lengthy change processes to derive new insights, as the solutions are technology centric and depend heavily on IT for support.

Some of the common challenges that we have seen with the current solutions for Marketing Analytics are…

• Data Silos preventing Analysts from getting a holistic view on data
• Separate platforms/tools/investments to execute data science workloads and Campaign Performance measurement workloads
• Reporting First approach that prioritizes narrow set of use cases limiting Data Analysts to derive new insights
• Lack of Data Governance due to decentralized nature of data
• Analysts’ time spent mostly on data issues and meeting SLA for reporting

The above challenges are compounded when enabling multi-market campaigns. However, an efficient Marketing Analytics solution should deliver intelligent data, drive actionable Insights, and allow Data Analysts to focus on insights and optimization based on measurement. This requires the solution to have the following traits:

• A Data Lake with curated clean Raw data that will serve as the source for all downstream data stores:
  • Enterprise Data Store
  • Reporting Data Store
  • Data Science Workflows
  • Data Exploration Workflows
• Offer Single Source of Truth to deliver quality and consistent Enterprise Data
• A unified environment that will allow Data Engineers, Data Analysts and Data Scientists to work on same data foundation
• A Solution that provides flexibility to Data Analysts and Data Scientists to experiment without relying on IT for everything

Introducing Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse is simply Azure SQL Datawarehouse evolved with integrated capabilities to implement an end-to-end data platform; starting from data ingestion and continuing through delivering Advanced Analytics and ML solutions, all delivered as a managed service with scale of the cloud.

Azure Synapse Analytics can help build a robust data and analytics platform providing unified/centralized service to:

• Ingest Data: Streaming Ingestion & Batch Data Ingestion
• Curate Data: Data Cleaning and Data Quality Management
• Transform and Setup Enterprise Data Model
• Data Exploration Capabilities
• Storage and Reporting

With Synapse we can now have Data Engineers, Data Analysts and Data Scientists come together and work within the same environment.

Using the same environment…

• Data Engineers can build enterprise scale data pipelines capable of processing large volumes of data
• Data Analysts can develop their own custom pipelines using low code data pipeline experience with reduced dependency on IT
• Data Scientists can benefit from access to both Enterprise Data Model and Clean Granular data to build their machine learning models using the same toolset

Synapse also provides out of the box security, monitoring and privacy features making it easy to rollout security compliances such as GDPR, CCPA, etc…

Some of the benefits of using Synapse to implement Marketing Analytics Reporting include:

• Ability to easily collect all marketing data with out of the box data connectors
• Download Publisher data with custom connectors that can be developed quickly
• Manage both impression level data and summary data in the same environment
• Standardize Campaign Performance KPIs with user friendly pipeline development interface
• Enable analysts to execute and automate ad hoc workloads to answer business questions without engineering intervention using low code/no code data wrangling tools
• Explore campaign performance data from a Single Source of Truth to derive deeper insights (Performance Summary, MTA Analysis)
• Collaborate and share learnings on data across teams with streamlined code repository management
• Deliver consistent data stories across all levels of reporting from single source of truth

The above diagram represents an ideal Synapse based implementation of a Marketing Analytics solution which will collect media data, park it in an enterprise data lake, build an enterprise data model and finally expose the data using tools to execute Data Science, BI, Operational Intelligence, and other data Ad-Hoc Workloads. It’s quick and easy to configure, allows for fast exploration, while ensuring enterprise-level security and privacy with the performance necessary to meet any scale of demand.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog series where we will dive into how specific Azure Synapse capabilities can address some of the common challenges with Marketing Analytics.