Supercharge your e-commerce with data you control

One of the main goals of any e-commerce business is to target the right audiences with their messaging. And with the proper data infrastructure combined with Meta’s introduction of CAPI, you no longer have to shoot blindly to find your targets. You can create strikingly precise advertising once again. I will tell you more about that later, but let’s first talk about supercharging your e-commerce with data you control.

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Better data infrastructure with a data warehouse

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Data analytics have become an essential part of maintaining e-commerce business growth and competitiveness against other brands. Some of the world’s biggest companies are understanding how powerful their data can be and can help influence their overall business strategy. At the same time, the smaller players struggle to keep up, and it hurts them.

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One way of keeping up with the best is with a data warehouse.

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Data warehouses help utilize analytics tools by storing and managing large amounts of data. This includes everything in data from your marketing, products, and customers.

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Data warehouses make it possible to store data efficiently and at the same time, allow for multiple users to be able to use it without having to worry about any hassle.

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So let’s dive into why a data warehouse is essential for the best e-commerce stores as well as:

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• What a data warehouse is
• How does a data warehouse work
• The best tools for a data warehouse for e-commerce
• Benefits of using data warehouses

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What is a data warehouse?

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A data warehouse is a centralized system that is used to efficiently manage and store all your e-commerce data. This includes a combination of historical data as well as current and real-time data. The warehouse collects the data from multiple sources and “translates” into a language where it can be used in other systems.
The goal of having a data warehouse is to collect, consolidate, and analyze all your marketing, product, and customer data so you can have better insights and make data-driven decisions for your business

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The biggest e-commerce companies are investing millions and millions of dollars in their data infrastructure to build data warehouses, because of how powerful it is.

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How do data warehouses work?

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Talking about data can be a scary topic for many. It can get very complex and hard to follow. So for everyone’s sake, I will keep easier here.

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As data enters the warehouse it is evaluated based on how structured it is. The data warehouse takes data and processes it, organizes, and transforms it, so it is ready for analysis. The warehouse makes it available to use both in the warehouse and all other systems.

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The process looks like this:

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Think of the data warehouse as a 3 layered building:

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• The bottom layer is where the data is being stored and loaded
• The middle layer is for accessing and analyzing the data
• The top layer is for reporting, presenting results, and taking action on the data insights

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A typical data warehouse is built around 4 key components

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‍‍Central database: A place to store and manage data – it serves as the foundation of your data warehouse

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ETL tools: ETL stands for extraction, transformation, and loading. It pulls data from the database. Here it gets transformed so it aligns with other information and systems. And it gets prepared for analysis in a much more efficient way.

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Access tools: These are tools that interact with your data. It can be for analysis, reporting, presenting, exporting, or tools visualizing the data. It is also possible to integrate more advanced and complex tools that use machine learning, algorithms, and AI to analyze the data for you.

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Metadata: It’s data that adds context to your data. This can be about the source, the locations, the values, or other attributes connected to your data.

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All these parts play a key role in ensuring that a data warehouse allows for quick and easy access to any data insights and efficient high-quality analysis.

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A data warehouse can have multiple databases, that each organize the data optimally for analysis. Together they provide a full, holistic view of your business with everything about your customer, product, and marketing data. All data you control.

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What type of data goes into a data warehouse?

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There are many various types of data that enter a data warehouse. Data comes in from a wide range of sources, and all get stored in your central database.

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The data that your data warehouse manages is coming in many different shapes and forms. It flows from multiple sources like customer-facing or internal applications to external systems, your ad campaigns, your Facebook Business Manager, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and much more.

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Here are a few examples of what sources your data warehouse can store and manage for you:

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• Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI) (customer behavior, campaign performance, etc)
• Google Analytics (raw, unsampled data)
• Ads platforms (campaign performance, costs, CTR, etc)
• Marketing data (Mailchimp, Klayivo, Hubspot, and all other platforms)
• Your backend data (product data, customer data, order data, etc)
• Your shop’s physical warehouse data (stock, shipping information, etc)

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The best tools for data warehouses in e-commerce

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Just a few years ago, businesses had to build complex infrastructures to have a data warehouse. However, with a lot of progress in especially cloud technologies and automated tools, the effort and cost of having a data warehouse as an e-commerce store are just a mere fraction of what they used to be.

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The cloud-based infrastructures that allow for a data warehouse are now fast, flexible and cost-effective. Everyone can use them, and they really should!  They give you data you control to accelerate growth.

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Supercharging e-commerce with CAPI x CDP with data you control

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You can increase your marketing performance with a data warehouse with a CDP combined with Meta’s Conversions API.
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We reached out to Meta and asked about their take on it. They said:

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“The importance of having a data infrastructure is enhanced when working with CAPI. If you have unified data, that you can feed into our algorithms, it is possible to greatly improve campaign performance for your marketing.

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This is because of the high-quality first-party data a CDP can provide to Meta that gives us a better, holistic view of a customer’s conversion journey, that we can then use to optimize campaigns to achieve the best results possible.”

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- Meta – on Customer Data Platforms with CAPI.

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Using a Customer data platform (CDP) for data you control

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One of those tools that give you all the features of a data warehouse in an easy, accessible, and cost-efficient way is an e-commerce customer data platform.

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This tool can collect, consolidate, and analyze the data for you. All automatically, and ready for you to take action on it.

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A CDP connects your data across all your platforms and sources so you can connect better with your customers through data. The difference between a CDP and a data warehouse is that a CDP is actionable.

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The CDP ensures that the right data from your data warehouse can get transferred to the right systems and channels so you can take action on your insights and analysis.

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Tired of shooting blindly since the introduction of iOS14?

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Then you wanna use a customer data platform like the one from Custimy.

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You want to enrich your Facebook lookalike audiences. To do that, you need to feed Meta’s algorithms with valuable knowledge. A CDP can pull the exact data you want from a pre-defined segment (let’s say “best customers” and share it with Meta.

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With this, you will give Meta the right insights into understanding what your best customers have in common and tell their algorithm to find more people like them for your advertising.

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A CDP can do this across many different systems and platforms including other Meta channels, your email marketing tools, your Google Ads, and your internal website. It further allows you to personalize the experience for every customer, by using automated data activation so every customer gets the best, personalized experience for them. All at scale with data you control.

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Supercharge growth with CAPI and data you control

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One of the biggest challenges with marketing in e-commerce over the last few years has been the loss of ability to track data, because of changes and regulations like iOS14.5 and GDPR. People are shooting blindly, and the cost of advertising has gone up because of bad tracking abilities and lack of insights.

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However, one way to solve the privacy concerns while still maintaining key information is with Meta’s introduction of CAPI.

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Conversions API (CAPI) allows advertisers to share knowledge and data on how customers act on their websites directly with Meta. This means that you will still be able to use data to understand how you can improve your performance for your advertisement on Meta’s channels, and especially on Facebook.

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However, with a CDP you will be able to provide the highest quality of first-party data to feed into Meta’s algorithms so they can increase their performance and use the data to make your advertisement better on your platform. It enables the opportunity to once again create strikingly precise advertisements with data you control. That is how you supercharge e-commerce growth today.

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