The Why:
When you look at each silo of data individually you do not get a complete picture of what a visitor or prospect is interested in, you only see what that one piece of the puzzle is showing you. You can get good information from your Google Analytics data (silo) when you look at it by itself and you can get good information from your marketing data (silo) when you look at that data by itself. What I am writing about in this blog is bringing those silos of data together to give you more insight into a potential customers journey, like when you put pieces of a puzzle together you see the picture clearer. Lets say that your business is utilizing Pardot as its marketing tool to not only manage email campaigns that are guiding potential customers to landing pages that are hosted on your web site but you are also gather customer information from forms that are being embedded within your business’s website. Wouldn’t it be great to see what content that prospect was looking at prior to and after they filled out a form on your website or where did they navigate to after getting to that landing page from one of your email campaigns? You have all the information in Pardot first name, last name, email address, etc and now you would be able to gather additional intelligence about them by what they are viewing within your business’s web site. You could even use that information to send out more direct campaigns based on the new knowledge that you have obtained from joining the data. For instance the prospect was on your website for 5 minutes and they visited the integration, business analytics, and warehouse pages. I know what I want to send to that prospect now.
The How:
You have to join that data somewhere so lets bring that data into a warehouse. I used the CopperHill AIR Platform to run all the jobs that I created with Talend to move the data from Google and Pardot into the AIR Warehouse. Lets start with the steps I took with Google first. I opened Google Query Explorer which is a tool that allows you to play with the Core Reporting API by building queries to get data from your Google Analytics views. This tool allows you to set different metrics, dimensions, sorts, filters and segments so that you can see the end results before applying them into your data integration tool. Once I got the queries working just as I wanted them to and the data looked good, I move those exact settings inside my Talend tool. With Talend I had to install the Google Analytics Component as it is not part of the base install. The component is free and very easy to install. Once I setup the component and deployed it to the AIR Platform I was immediately streaming data. Below is just an example of one call to Google’s Core Reporting API within the job. I repeated the same steps for each call I wanted to make to Google Analytics API and all the data transfers were handled inside that one job.
The next step was to get Pardot data flowing. Pardot does have a great API that you can access and read your marketing data from. Again I used the AIR Platform to run the job that I created in Talend to move this data out of Pardot and into the AIR warehouse. Let me say this, you do have to have knowledge of the Pardot API or creating this job can be a little tricky. What I did was setup a REST call to each of the Pardot objects that I wanted to receive data from and store within the AIR warehouse. I have attached a portion of the job I configured to retrieve data from the Pardot campaign object. As you can see the setup and configuration is a little more complex then the call to the Google API but the data is flowing just as fast.
Now that all the data from the two sources Google and Pardot are streaming into the AIR warehouse we can create the reports showing exactly what we stated in The Why section. This thought process and build out can be applied to really any marketing tool that a business is using and join that to your Google Analytics data. If you want to gather great actionable information around your prospects then joining google and marketing data is definitely a great idea for you and your business. Finish the data puzzle so you can see the big picture and just do not look at the pieces by themselves.