March 2023 Summaries

Google Cloud has announced new BigQuery editions with flexible pricing options, offering three tiers: Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus, which cater to diverse data needs by providing autoscaling pricing that allows customers to only pay for what they use. This approach benefits various users such as retailers experiencing spikes in demand, analysts compiling financial reports, startups managing unpredictable needs, digital natives preparing for variable demand during new product launches, and healthcare organizations scaling usage during seasonal outbreaks. The new pricing options can lead to cost reductions or increases depending on storage-heavy or compute-heavy workloads, but innovations like compressed storage pricing and multi-year commitment discounts can help lower the total cost of ownership. By optimizing data workloads for price-performance, customers can minimize costs and unlock actionable customer insights in BigQuery.

Canva, a user-friendly graphic design app with over 125 million monthly users, sought to better understand its customers beyond traditional marketing attribution. They decided to build their own composable customer data platform (CDP) using best-of-breed tools like Snowflake, Census, Fivetran, and dbt to support targeted lifecycle marketing strategy. Canva's journey highlights the shortcomings of out-of-the-box CDPs, which often duplicate specific customer data in silos, confining marketers to a sandbox. A composable CDP offers a single source of truth, flexibility, and control over data, allowing for more personalized results. By leveraging their first-party customer data, segmenting audiences in the warehouse, and activating data in all marketing tools, Canva can identify power users, target them with ads, and personalize content based on user behavior. The composable CDP approach also improves attribution, visibility, identity resolution, accuracy, and unlocks customer insight by eliminating redundancy and providing a single source of truth.

We're honoring the experts who freely share their knowledge with their peers every day in our first-ever cohort of The OA Club Data Champions program, recognizing those who have stepped up to answer questions, share resources, and act as sounding boards to their peers. These individuals are part of our Slack community and have been actively contributing to topical data channels, bringing different perspectives and career journeys to the table. They've shared insights about their data origin stories, favorite parts of their job, challenges they face, and why community is important in the data industry, highlighting the value of collaboration, learning from each other's experiences, and overcoming obstacles together. The OA Club Data Champions program aims to build a community where mid- to senior-level data professionals can get support from colleagues, mentors, and peers, driving innovation, solving complex problems, and pushing the industry forward in new and exciting ways.

The Census Entity API is a new tool that enables instant access to warehouse data in websites, apps, or internal tools without requiring additional engineering work. With the Entity API, developers can bring infinite personalization from their Customer 360 data model to any destination or context needed, on demand and in milliseconds. The API simplifies pulling data for real-time personalization use cases by providing a standard REST API for accessing customer data, powered by dedicated infrastructure for serving data fast and scalably. This unlocks a wide set of additional uses for the data, including on-demand personalization, app platform, and enrichment, allowing developers to easily integrate their first-party data with third-party sources. The Entity API is available for customers on Census's Platform Plan and offers new API functionality on the roadmap, including listing/paginating full data sets and more control over which subsets of data are accessible via API.

The customer data platform (CDP) has failed to deliver on its promises to marketers, with only 1% reporting that their CDP meets their needs. Most CDPs struggle with data ingestion and transformation, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate customer profiles. These platforms also fall short in providing actionable insights and segments, and fail to activate data effectively for personalized marketing campaigns. In contrast, relying on a data warehouse as the source of truth can provide more accurate and complete customer data, allowing marketers to build effective campaigns without the need for expensive and inefficient CDPs.

Git-backed Models is a new feature in Census that enables data teams to manage their business-critical models using software development best practices, such as version control, peer review, and auditability, similar to production-grade software systems. This feature brings the benefits of Git to Reverse ETL workflows, allowing users to govern their activation flows more seamlessly, with features like commit logs for auditability and rollbacks, approval and review flows, and automated CI testing checks. By leveraging configuration YAML files, users can specify their Census SQL models and make changes using either the UI or code, while maintaining a Git-backed change history that tracks all changes to models directly. The feature is now available in Open Beta for all customers on the Census Platform Plan.

The new Datadog integration with Census enables data teams to monitor and troubleshoot their business-critical pipelines, ensuring the health of their data and operational systems. With this integration, users can create customized alerts and anomaly detection for all reverse ETL syncs, gaining deeper visibility into their data activation flows. This allows them to empower business teams with fresh, reliable data, while also providing a single place to identify anomalies, unify alerting, and triage issues - ultimately activating their data warehouse and sync with confidence at any scale.

A customer data platform (CDP) is a digital memory bank that collects and organizes data on customers' behavior, preferences, and interactions to create targeted marketing campaigns, optimize pricing strategies, and more. However, traditional CDPs have become silos of data, creating multiple data points that are disconnected and have limited activation capabilities. A composable CDP uses a data warehouse as its foundation, leveraging reverse ETL tools like Census to activate customer data, providing flexibility, control, and scalability. By building a composable CDP on top of a data warehouse, businesses can fulfill common use cases such as identity resolution, personalization, segmentation, omnichannel marketing, predictive modeling, and data governance without the need for expensive traditional CDP solutions. This approach provides fast access to customer data, reduces costs, and ensures data quality and governance.

At Census, we're always looking for ways to help our customers extract more value from their data. That's why we're excited to announce the launch of Quick Search, a new feature that enables you to easily search across your entities, segments, datasets, and syncs from anywhere in the app. With Quick Search, you can quickly find what you're looking for in Census, whether it's a particular sync or dataset, or a specific entity or segment by simply typing in your search term and using the arrow keys to navigate between results. The feature also includes shortcuts such as "new sync" or "segment" that take you directly to their respective pages. Now available for all users, Quick Search aims to save time and streamline workflow by making it easier to perform common actions or navigate around Census.