For Mad Men’s Don Draper, gut instinct was always enough. If he said it would work, it would. But in today’s data-driven world, gut instinct is no longer enough. Over half of marketing decisions are influenced by analytics — and even more marketing leaders say their decisions would rely on analytics if poor data quality and actionable results weren’t issues.

To understand what tools and technologies are enabling companies to have more marketing analytics success, Snowflake analyzed the usage patterns of nearly 6,000 of its customers in its latest research: The Modern Marketing Data Stack Report.

Snowflake’s analysis revealed the most sophisticated marketers power their marketing data stacks by employing a best-of-breed approach instead of building their own solutions from scratch.

In fact, Snowflake’s analysis cited Fivetran as a leading technology in the “Integration and Modeling” category of its report. As economic uncertainty weighs on businesses, marketing leaders need the ability to do more with their data – and deliver more impactful business insights – with fewer resources, in less time. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of improving the quality of marketing analytics – all by adopting the modern data stack. 

1. Build a 360-customer view 

As a leading data cloud company in the growing modern data stack ecosystem, Snowflake’s growth has been driven by best-in-class data practices. This includes using Fivetran as its ELT solution to centralize marketing data within the organization’s own Snowflake instance, ‘Snowhouse.’ 

Fivetran is a critical part of the modern data stack for Snowflake and its data centralization efforts. To date, the company has deployed more than 900 Fivetran connectors. 

The company moves more 400 million monthly active rows of data from Google, Bing and Facebook Ads, Marketo, Salesforce and Jira into Snowflake for analysis.

“Fivetran makes things easy. With a few clicks, we can authenticate against any of the platforms and then seamlessly and almost instantly, the data appears within Snowflake,” explains Carl-Johan Wehtje, BI & Analytics at Snowflake.

Snowflake now has a 360-degree view of customer behavior, enabling the marketing team to drive massive efficiencies in marketing spend and targeting. Fivetran also allows Snowflake to ingest and transform its data faster and more accurately than its previous process, which involved keeping data modeling and transformation logic within a separate BI tool.

“Fivetran’s data models automatically clean up our raw data sources and output them into one model,” adds Carl-Johan. “We immediately get a clean and normalized reporting set, enabling us to focus on more complex calculations and joining work. It means we can expose this data to our end users faster so that they can start drawing insights from it.”

2. Drive greater efficiencies in marketing spend 

When Canva, an online design and publishing tool, sought to give employees the ability to compare marketing analytics from different data sources, Greg Roodt, Head of Data Platforms at Canva, decided to build a hub-and-spoke data pipeline. However, it took a team of engineers three months to create, test and roll out three initial connectors. 

While the custom-built solution worked as intended, when the marketing team requested connectors to 25 other data sources, Greg knew he needed to find a purpose-built solution that could scale with Canva’s growing data and analytics needs.

“It was obvious Fivetran was the right choice based on ease of implementation and the diversity of connectors that people said just worked,” Greg says. “I think we had our first connector working by the end of the week.”

Fivetran saves Canva over $200,000 in engineering costs while enabling a true 360-degree view of the customer and the business. 

The combination of Fivetran and Snowflake has made the company more efficient with customer acquisition and retention by optimizing its marketing and advertising spend.

“Ultimately, Fivetran allows us to make better business decisions,” Greg says. “It helps us recognize what’s working and influences how we optimize the opportunities we uncover. It makes us agile and more responsive to customer needs. Most importantly, though, is that we’re able to deliver this agility without requiring engineering resources. Most platform owners can get the data they need through self-service.”

3. Save engineering costs and generate more business value 

PopSockets has sold over 230 million of its iconic phone grips, but as the company expanded its offerings, it found itself struggling with marketing reporting efficiencies and communicating insights cross-functionally.

There were no strict timelines on when data would be refreshed, and the data team was enduring the tedious process of manually aggregating reports. PopSockets needed a scalable solution that would allow its small team of data engineers to build automated data pipelines for faster analytics and reporting. This led to the adoption of the modern data stack consisting of Fivetran and Snowflake. 

As the company experienced explosive growth through various sales channels and increased its paid marketing efforts, Fivetran became a key solution in helping them centralize data and build models to uncover deeper insights — without having to grow its engineering team. 

When coupling Fivetran and Snowflake with their BI tool, PopSockets has been able to: 

• Support and unify data from additional ERP systems as they scale across the world
  
• Automate reports and aggregate data with reliable and up-to-date data for analysis  
  
• Assess the performance of individual ad campaigns on different channels more effectively
  

These capabilities have led to a doubled daily return on ad spending (ROAS) and increased the average order value (AOV) by 25%. 

“With Fivetran, our team of data analysts can now focus on tasks that are more valuable to the business rather than just massaging the data and making sure it’s in the warehouse,” says Kyle Chu, Business Intelligence Analyst at PopSockets.

Get more marketing efficiency in less time and with less cost

Many organizations have a handful of SaaS applications that automate the creation, delivery and ability to track marketing programs across digital channels – which in turn generate massive amounts of data. A modern marketing data stack, powered by Snowflake and Fivetran, takes gut instinct out of the marketing equation. Instead, companies can more efficiently centralize all data at scale, giving marketing teams a 360-degree view of customer behaviors. This allows them to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve a greater return on ad spend – while at the same time also saving on engineering costs to manage their data pipelines.

Watch this webinar to learn how Glossier automates data movement with Fivetran and Snowflake.