3 Important Factors in Choosing a Great Marketing ETL Tool

ETL, which stands for Extract, Transform, and Load, refers to tools that extract data from multiple sources, transform the data so it's uniform, and then load it to another location, typically a data warehouse.

Marketing ETL tools, in particular, are popular because marketers deal with many disparate sources of data that need to be analyzed, visualized, and distributed to stakeholders and clients.

So, what should you look for in a marketing ETL tool?

There are many tools to choose from, including coding your own. We've been in the marketing data management space for decades and we think these 3 factors are important in a good marketing ETL tool:

• Connectivity to All Your Marketing Data: Many ETL tools connect only to some of your marketing platforms meaning you need to fetch the additional data manually or via another tool. This is tedious and time-consuming, especially if you have multiple clients or brands. So, it's essential that your ETL tool connects to all your marketing data sources automatically and at scale.

• Advanced Calculations as Well as Data Transformation: ETL tools transform your data by cleaning and normalizing it so it's uniform. But marketers analyze and report on their campaigns. They need ETL tools to handle advanced calculations and custom metrics to enable the analytics required to discover the insights you need as well.

• Data Warehouse Facility: Most ETL tools are only data pipelines that connect to other platforms that store your data. This makes the process unnecessarily complex. A really good marketing ETL tool should also be your data warehouse, providing a central hub for your data so it can be pushed to any destination for visualizations and reports.

The new TapClicks ETL platform for marketing, TapData, handles the entire data management lifecycle for you in one place, and in the process provides an automated central hub for all your data that is highly scalable and requires, in most cases, absolutely no coding.

In this post, we'll define what an ETL tool is and why they are helpful for marketers. Then we'll explain how TapData fulfills the three factors above.

What is an ETL Tool?

ETL tools have been a key component of data management for decades, especially for finance and business operations teams. These tools function as essential connectors or data pipelines so companies can efficiently move and process data. For example,by transferring customer data from a CRM to a business intelligence (BI) tool, ETL tools ensure that disparate data sources are transformed into a uniform format. This uniformity allows data to be stored  in a single database, making comprehensive analysis possible.

As mentioned above, the ETL process starts with extracting large volumes of often inconsistent and unstructured raw data from various different sources. After extraction, the data undergoes a critical transformation phase, which can involve “data cleansing” items such as deleting redundant columns, renaming titles for consistency across datasets, and other normalization tasks.  Finally, the transformed data is loaded to another platform, typically a data warehouse or BI tool where it can be stored and analyzed more comprehensively.

Why an ETL Tool is Helpful for Marketers

ETL tools are particularly useful for marketing teams because marketers need to aggregate large amounts of data from many disparate sources (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, eCommerce platforms etc.).

Without ETL tools, manual data extraction, i.e accessing each individual platform, one-by-one, and downloading each needed dataset into mulitple Excel spreadsheets, for example, is a hugely time-consuming endeavor and certainly not the best use of a marketer's time.

A survey by CrowdFlower showed that nearly 80% of data scientists' time is spent in data extraction and cleansing – and that's before they even get to analyzing or visually reporting on the data.   And when there are many clients or brands, each with data on multiple platforms, the efficient extraction, transformation, and warehousing of the data becomes even more essential.

But most marketing ETL tools in fact provide only pieces of this value chain.  Lack of availability of APIs for extraction, simplistic transformation capabilities, and limited access to the necessary connectors for loading the data into a wide number of popular data stores limits their effectiveness. Very few marketing ETL tools help with the other essential components of a marketing team's data management workflow, namely: advanced calculation features that can extract key insights from the data, along with visualization and report-building technologies for reporting those data insights to clients or executives.

Let’sfocus  on three critical success factors that all good marketing ETL tools should deliver, and explain how the new TapData platform from TapClicks fulfills these requirements.

Factor #1: A Marketing ETL Tool Should Be Able to Connect to All Your Marketing Data Sources

Not all ETL tools are made equal. Many tools connect only to a limited number of data sources. So, if you're using a tool that connects to Google Ads and Facebook Ads but not to your CRM or eCommerce data, there's little benefit in using it.

Having to use multiple tools to bring all the data together for multiple clients or brands significantly wastes time and restricts your ability to scale. 

TapClicks’ TapData Connects to Thousands of Data Sources

TapData connects to all your marketing data sources and all your other data sources, too. TapData has hundreds of direct data integrations, including all the marketing platforms you would expect (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.), and lesser-known ones as well (e.g. Genius Monkey and Tiger Pistol). 

In addition to direct integrations, the TapClicks Smart ConnectorTM gives flexibility to connect data from other storage locations such as On-Prem databases, offline data sources, even Excel spreadsheets. In fact, Smart Connector has been used to connect over 10,000 – and counting – different sources to the TapClicks platform.

Once you've set up the data connections you want, your data will be extracted immediately and automatically. In many cases, historical data can be pulled for 12 months, or even longer periods. 

Once everything is connected, all your data is pulled automatically on a daily basis, and can also be fetched on-demand if the need arises. Not only is this a massive time-saver, but it means that the process is scalable for multiple brands or clients.

Factor #2: A Marketing ETL Tool Should Do Advanced Calculations as Well as Simple Transformation

A major part of the ETL value change is data transformation. This includes tasks such as deleting extra columns or duplicates, making sure schemas are consistent, and mapping and organizing datasets so that they are ready for data analysis.

With most ETL tools, this is where the transformation process ends. Transformed data is often pushed out to another tool, usually a data warehouse or another analytics tool (e.g. Looker or Google Data Studio) where more work is required to create visualizations and reports.

This basic ETL function may be fine for general business use cases where the ETL tool's job is simply to get data from different sources (CRMs, ERP systems, etc.) and store it in a database for various departments to analyze if and when they need.

But marketers need a lot more than data cleansing to surface meaningful insights to clients and stakeholders. TapClicks enables the use of advanced calculations to transform data before you visualize and report on the data, or load the data elsewhere. 

Here are two examples:

Example #1: Customize and Combine Metrics

Marketers often work with metrics from different marketing platforms that have unique names or meanings in each platform but are effectively the same in a big picture context. For example: Follows on X (Twitter) and Facebook, and Subscribes on YouTube, have different names, but ultimately paint a very similar picture of engagement. 

Therefore, when reporting or doing analysis, marketers often want to treat these metrics as the same (e.g. reporting on total social shares or total social engagement of a large-scale social media campaign). We can call these ‘umbrella’ terms.

This consolidation of disparate metrics to create high-level reports for clients or management is typically a manual, labor-intensive, spreadsheet-heavy process that wastes hours of employee time.  

But with TapClicks, you can define an umbrella term once in a “Channel” and it will remain available and updated with the latest data for all future reports you want to create. 

For example, you might define total social engagement as the sum of post-reactions on Facebook, views on YouTube, or click-throughs on LinkedIn (see below).

Once that custom metric is defined, it will be available in TapClicks forever, with updated data, so you never have to add those engagement metrics again manually. This can save dozens of hours a week for agencies or marketing teams.

Example #2: Setting Up Advanced Calculations Easily and Quickly

In addition to defining custom metrics, you can also do advanced calculations of all kinds on your data in TapClicks.

For example, if you are a manufacturer and you want to view your data by brand, but you have multiple ad campaigns running for different brands, you can set up advanced calculations that find the specific brand names in the campaign names and aggregate KPIs across all of these into single metrics for that specific brand.

In our example below, we can see that there are 266 Facebook Ad campaigns, all pulling in data from our data sources.

We've decided to name a certain segment of those campaigns HNP Campaigns' (see arrow on the right-hand side).

This means we can now pull data for just those HNP campaigns into any report or dashboard we want to create.

In this example, there are 191 of them and the data is pulled for all of those campaigns into one line (see arrow on the right-hand side).

You can use this function to group and view data by all types of location or by any segment you like – product, campaign type, or group.

And advanced calculations enable, for example, correct weighting of cross-platform calculated metrics. For example, the overall click-through rate (CTR) across all ad platforms can be derived by aggregating clicks and impressions across all your campaigns, and dividing total clicks by total impressions. The ability to do this in-platform, using features such as TapClicks channels, across many data sources, means you can avoid ‘error creep’ that results from ‘averaging averages’ across different data sources. 

A more complex example: calculate ROI or ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) for campaigns across specific product lines, or entire regions, by bringing in Salesforce Closed-Won data using a SmartConnector or a SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) webhook, and dividing that by your aggregated ad spend reported in your “Ad Spend” Channel.  The possibilities are endless and are simply not to achieved using a simple ETL tool that only cleans up or consolidates data fields as part of its transform function.

And, as with everything in the TapClicks solution, just configure these operations once, and the desired metrics are up-to-date and ready to go when needed.  

Factor #3: A Marketing ETL Tool Should Also be Your Data Warehouse

As we've mentioned above, ETL tools generally act as pipelines that collect and load your data in another tool or data warehouse once it's been transformed. These data warehouses are typically just databases and therefore require a database programmer or data analyst to access the data.

The beauty of TapClicks is that not only does it retrieve all your data for you and allow you to create custom metrics and advanced calculations (as described above), but it's your data warehouse too, where you can visualize complex historical trends, produce insightful reports and/or push data out to other locations.

TapClicks is the central hub for all your data, so it can be stored safely in your own fully managed data warehouse forever, and the data can be accessed by any marketer without any database programming skills required.

TapClicks’ TapData Easily Delivers Data to Any Other Platform

If you prefer to analyze and visualize data in a third-party tool, you can load data from TapData to any other destination. With Data Exporter, you can schedule and automate the process to streamline data delivery to other destinations. 

For example, if you use Tableau for analysis and visualization, you can push data to Tableau.  Similarly, if you are a cost-conscious Google Sheets user, you can push your data to Google Sheets.  For more information about TapClicks for Google Sheets, click here.

TapClicks’ TapData is a flexible, all-in-one data solution for marketers that does so much more than a general ETL tool – enabling you to collect, store, analyze, and report on marketing data automatically and at scale.

If you think TapClicks could work as a marketing ETL solution and data warehouse for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.