My Marketing Analytics Tech Stack
By: Dwight Eppinger
Tags: Analytics, Data Science, Tableau, Data Driven, Marketing Analytics

My Marketing Analytics Tech Stack

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I’m in a somewhat interesting space. I have found my role changing during the covid pandemic from using analytics to drive revenue to focus on finding insights within our creative, on our many marketing channels, and doing it by spending little to no money. I’m writing this as a journal and also to share what I’ve found helpful with others along the way.

I am self-taught or more specifically internet taught when it comes to analytics. From my early days as a marketer, I have been lucky to work for companies that have an abundance of data. The sharing of that data across departments has helped me to make the best, most informed decisions to drive the outcomes that we want. Seeing the power of a data-driven marketing department led me to focus on finding more ways to be better at it. It started with the revenue-driving channels, email, paid digital & paid social. With the current lack of spending in advertising, I’ve been focused on driving insights for some of our non-revenue driving initiatives. Being a team of one, I handle all roles in the process, data collection, data cleaning, and visualizations. I need to find ways to automate whatever possible to make sure I can keep what I create updated and continue to build more for the team.

Here I’m going to give you a look into the solutions that we have, the reasons why I chose them, and some examples of how they’re being used.

Data Prep — Tableau Prep

My Tableau Prep flow for building our social media dataset.

Tableau Prep is a very powerful tool and it was a great place for me to start my journey. Truthfully, I would be using it more if I had the upgraded platform that allowed me to set flows to autorun through Tableau Server. But that currently is not in the budget, so I use it daily to run the above flow that normalizes/merges the data from 4 social media platforms, plus appended sentiment data & custom tags that build our social media insights dashboards. It’s a big lift that takes about 30 minutes to process. We will go into that report in a later article.

Data Prep — Google Scripts

Google Scripts is a free tool that I use to move data and clean it at the same time. You will need to have a basic understanding of javascript but once you do there is no limit to what you can do. Not being a server-side programmer one of the issues that I always got stuck on was automating the functions I wrote. Google Scripts solves that by allowing me to create triggers to execute the script automatically.

Data Prep/Source — Zapier

A Zap that looks for an email and auto saves the attachment to Google Drive

Zapier has been a huge help getting data from sources that I have access to pull reports from, but do not live in a warehouse or storage environment that I manage. The most notable being Adobe Analytics. I currently use Zapier to take the reports that I auto email from Adobe Analytics and save the attachments to Google drive.

Data Source — Netbase

Quick Netbase topic analysis

We use Netbase for two purposes. To monitor the conversation around our brands and to append sentiment & passion data to our owned social media posts. This is not an inexpensive tool by any means however, our company goals of tracking the conversation and sentiment allowed us to make the business case for the purchase. By connecting to the API I’ve been able to automate data collection for the reports that update daily.

Data Source — RapidAPI

I’m just scraping the surface on RapidAPI. My use case is collecting insights from TikTok. As there is no official API, I used RapidAPI + Google Scripts to collect data for our channels and our competitor's.

Data Source/Storage — Improvado

Initially, when I built the social media reports I was exporting the data natively from Facebook & Twitter and using Netbase to export the Instagram insights. This became a tedious daily process, but once we were able to demonstrate the value of the reports, I was able to get the spending for Improvado approved to automate the process and free myself up to work on building new insights vs. keeping the previous ones up to date.

Data Storage — Tableau Server

I use Tableau Server for data storage associated with our Tableau Prep flows. When you use Tableau Prep you don’t really have another option.

Data Storage — Google Drive/Sheets

For smaller datasets or when building out proof of concepts, I’ve been using Google Drive and Google Sheets to house the data. A few of the benefits are that I can share access to the files with co-workers, I can also push files here using Zapier and manipulate these files using Google Scripts.

Data Storage — Google Cloud SQL

Once I’ve proved the value of a dataset and made sure it is clean and is in its final form, it makes sense to move it from a Google Sheet to a true database like SQL. There are a bunch of paths to take, I am using Google Cloud SQL as it’s easily accessed and manipulated through Google Scripts. Plus it gave me a $300 credit to show value to the company before being on the hook for any costs. This was a great video that helped me build and update my first Google Cloud SQL database.

Data Source — Google Natural Language API

We’re always looking to provide valuable insights to our content creators. I’m currently using the Google Natural Language API to identify entities within articles on our website. Hopefully, this will replace the manual process of tagging content to create segments. You can also use it to identify sentiment.

Data Visualization Tool — Tableau

Tableau is my endpoint for all of the other work we’re doing. I generally look at creating two types of reports. Executive-level reports that can deliver high-level insights, that can be delivered through email without the need to log in and interactive reports that allow the owners of the data to mine for their own insights.

What’s right for you?

There’s an overwhelming amount of options available. Take your time to identify the right solution for your budget and needs. In addition, if you’re working for a responsible business you’re going to have to prove value before you can expect financial support. Be prepared to build and rebuild multiple times as you grow. It can be an enjoyable and maddening process at the same time, just don’t forget to document it all along the way.