As a fellow marketer, I’m sure you’re well aware that data is essential for any successful company. However, sorting through heaps of data because you lack the right tools can be tough and might even slow you down. Been there, done that a few times, and would not recommend.
Wild guess: if you’re reading this, it’s because your current data management tool is actually a bunch of spreadsheets.
While that has probably worked fine thus far, there are plenty of good reasons to say goodbye to spreadsheets and embrace a more efficient way of managing marketing data – especially if you want to keep growing your business and keep your peace of mind.
While good old spreadsheets have their uses, they fall short when managing large datasets effectively. They lack the capacity for mass transformation and struggle to integrate data from various sources seamlessly.
Enter data warehouses.
Read along to find out why switching to these tools (and ditching your spreadsheets) can transform your approach to marketing data.
Spreadsheets limit your data’s outcome
As a marketer, visualising data is crucial for spotting trends and making informed decisions. This, in turn, allows you to anticipate customer behaviour, identify opportunities for optimisation, and make data-driven decisions that drive business growth.
Unfortunately, spreadsheets often lag behind in this department, limiting your ability to get those valuable insights. Spreadsheets lack the speed and flexibility required to tap into your data’s full potential. In other words, their static nature and limited functionality can impact your marketing strategies’ effectiveness.
So how do we solve this?
With data warehouses. Storing your data in a data warehouse opens up plenty of opportunities to automate time- and cost-consuming tasks, visualise data, and make better, more informed strategic decisions. Keep reading!
Advantages of data warehouses
Have you ever heard of Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift? They’re powerful data warehouses designed to streamline your workflow and empower you to make data-driven decisions with ease.
2.1. Need for speed 🏁
If you have to deal with thousands of rows of data, then you know speed is paramount. And no matter how nerdy some of your colleagues might seem, no one wants to stay stuck in an Excel sheet.
When facing tight deadlines, analysing large datasets quickly to make timely decisions and adjustments to our campaigns – especially during peak season moments, like Black Friday – becomes crucial. With tools like Google BigQuery, speed (or the lack thereof) is no longer an issue.
Data warehouses have auto-scaling capabilities, using cloud infrastructure for lightning-fast calculations that can be scheduled for optimal efficiency. This means that you can conduct complex analyses and generate insights in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional methods. Which means you can still make it to that gym class you signed up for last week.
In short: data warehouses allow you to be more agile and responsive with tasks like optimising ad performance, tracking campaign metrics in real-time, or uncovering hidden trends 🏴☠️
Data visualisation made easy 🧩
As marketers, timely access to visualised data is crucial for monitoring campaign performance, identifying trends, and communicating insights effectively with stakeholders – namely, your boss.
If you store your data in a data warehouse, you get seamless access to a dashboard tool. Google BigQuery, for example, integrates directly with Looker Studio where you can create dynamic dashboards that load instantly, even when handling vast amounts of data.
This means that you can spend less time waiting for data to load and more time extracting actionable insights to drive decision-making. In other words, less time doing manual work, and more time using that beautiful brain of yours.
Automation 🤖
Scaling performance in large Google Ads accounts requires automation to manage and optimise campaigns effectively. If it wasn’t for automation, we marketers would be spending most of our evenings and weekends manually adjusting bids for keywords and other previously time-consuming tasks.
Today, data warehouses bring us even more possibilities.
Through our connectors, we can extract data from ad platforms directly to Google BigQuery and then output directly to Google Sheets, which can then be scheduled to update Google Ads campaigns automatically. This automation not only saves us a ton of valuable time but also enables greater scalability in our campaign management. For example, headline customisers can be applied to thousands of ad groups with very minimal intervention.
By automating repetitive tasks, we can focus our efforts on strategy development, analysis and optimisation – which make us happier and drive better results for our advertising campaigns.
TL;DR
Ditching spreadsheets in favour of data warehouses can revolutionise your marketing efforts. From faster calculations and seamless visualisation to enhanced automation, these tools offer a myriad of benefits for marketers across industries.
By using a data warehouse, marketers can analyse large datasets quickly, visualise data in real-time with dynamic dashboards, and automate repetitive tasks to streamline campaign management. This way, you can stay agile in your work, make data-driven decisions faster, and achieve greater success in your work.
