Deeper Data Integration with an advertiser leveraging Google’s Ads Data Hub
If you are from the programmatic media industry, you would definitely value the usage of data from various sources to understand user behaviors and reach them at the right time with the right messages to drive the best marketing effectiveness. The closer the data source is to the user and the more relevant is the context when the data is collected, the better.
So one natural choice is to understand the user when the user is in the right place (the place where the advertiser is trying to get them to) i.e. the advertiser’s real estate (website or app) itself.
We at MiQ have a data collection mechanism by way of injecting pixels onto the advertiser’s website. It helps us to collect purchase behaviors that are more relevant and actionable. We call it MiQ Capture. However, this technology works best with open DSPs like Appnexus. With closed DSPs like DV 360, we traditionally were left with a challenge of capturing the same onsite behavior until Google released Ads Data Hub. The challenge was primarily because of the restrictiveness of the Google Marketing Platform’s products like DCM as they are part of the Walled Garden. Ads Data Hub changed the scenario to our advantage. We will restrict ourselves to the integration of DCM (Google’s ad server) for the sake of set context.
Overview of ADH(Ads Data Hub)
Ads Data Hub is a privacy-first analytics platform that allows you to connect with any Google Marketing Platform’s products and onboard Log Level Data from these platforms. It also enables you to perform analytics on top of these datasets.
ADH acts as a bridge between data sets such as dv360, youtube, AdWords, DCM and googles cloud platforms such as Bigquery and AI platform. It is a privacy-compliant solution that enables us to use the above-mentioned data sources for analysis and activation. The diagram below represents the data flow.
How does Data Integration work?
DCM allows you as a marketer to place pixel-like floodlight activities on the advertiser’s website to track conversions for any marketing activity. And these floodlight fires are recorded in the Log Level Data for DCM which is then onboarded onto Ads Data Hub if the linkage is done. The recorded fires contain information about the parameters(called floodlight variables or u-variables) configured along with the floodlight e.g. product code, category, transaction value, etc. These u-variables and their values represent the purchase behavior of the user which can then be analyzed for better marketing effectiveness in the future. We can also collect this information provided we link DCM floodlights to the campaigns run in DV 360 for the advertiser, typically done to track conversions. We can capture onsite variables such as revenue, products purchased, quantity, etc. by linking the client’s DCM account to the dv360 account. These variables once collected can be used to do advanced analytics such as market basket analysis, customer segmentation, product recommendations, etc.
Why is this important?
Historically, we have never leveraged such strategies/analysis for campaigns on dv360 because of the unavailability of onsite data. ADH allows us to develop capabilities similar to those we have developed for other DSPs.The data collected by linking DCM is not clean and readily usable. We need to pre-process the data and store it in the columnar structure within ADH. The diagram below shows how the pre-processing API works.
Limitations: There are a few limitations on exporting and analyzing data within ADH that may restrict the usage
- Any sensitive identifiers such as User ids can not be exported from ADH to Big-Query.
- A maximum of 1 M records can be processed in one query
- Any computation that has less than 50 users won’t be exported to Big-query.
- Only sufficiently aggregated data can be exported to Big-query for further analysis.
