January 2024 Summaries

Census has released Live Syncs, enabling real-time Reverse ETL with subsecond latency, allowing brands to activate data and unlock high-speed customer engagement. Census is partnering with Materialize, an Operational Data Warehouse, to provide a source for Live Syncs, empowering businesses to take action on the freshest data available. The partnership enables the activation of real-time insights on a zero-latency data infrastructure without complex engineering work. This collaboration helps modern marketing teams leverage the data warehouse to power their operations and unleash the full potential of the Composable CDP without custom engineering work. With Live Syncs, businesses can now easily integrate with Customer 360 profiles for real-time personalization and recommendations, cart abandonment campaigns, live geotargeting, and more, at any speed subsecond latency makes any use case possible in real time.

In the era of big data and digital transformation, Master Data Management (MDM) is pivotal in helping businesses extract maximum value from their data. Data onboarding, a crucial aspect of MDM, involves integrating offline or external data into a digital format, matching it to online identifiers, and using it for purposes like Entity Resolution, advertising, marketing, and analytics. This process enables businesses to centralize data, clean it, transform it, and merge it to create a single, accurate view of their customers, ultimately enhancing their marketing strategies with better ad targeting, personalized emails, and more. Integrating offline and online data offers a more holistic view of customer behavior, improving advertising targeting and optimizing customer experiences. By doing so, businesses can benefit from improved data quality, increased efficiency for marketing teams, better understanding and visibility for sales teams, and more informed decision-making for leadership teams. The process typically involves multiple steps such as data collection, identity resolution, data transformation, and data activation, with security and compliance being paramount to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of the data utilized by organizations.

In the advertising industry, match rates have long been crucial for measuring the success of ad campaigns in reaching target audiences. Companies like Canva and Crocs leverage Census to enhance their match rates by providing ad platforms with high-quality data from their cloud data warehouse. This enables them to create and activate audiences more efficiently, analyze their performance, and make informed decisions about their advertising strategies. The new features in Audience Hub allow users to view both matched audience size and match rate across every ad platform, making it easier to manage and measure audiences without relying on engineering teams. By analyzing these metrics, advertisers can gain a better understanding of the reach and quality of their customer data, ultimately improving the effectiveness of their ads.

Census has released Live Syncs, a real-time Reverse ETL platform that enables businesses to sync customer data in real-time with downstream tools like CRMs and marketing platforms. The platform supports Confluent and Kafka as native sources, allowing for sub-second latency and unlocking new high-speed use cases such as geotargeted campaigns and abandoned cart notifications. With Live Syncs, Census aims to enable real-time speed for every single customer use case, pushing the limits of what's possible in data activation. The platform is designed to be fully composable with no vendor lock-in, working seamlessly with any data stack and business tool. It also works with existing event tracking infrastructure, allowing customers to leverage their own event collection solutions.

Multi-tenancy is a key concept in modern SaaS products where multiple customers share a single instance of an app, with each customer seeing only their own data and workflows. Architecting data integrations for multi-tenancy requires careful consideration of how to split and merge data across different repositories and models. Census Embedded provides complementary approaches to ensuring multi-tenancy guarantees, including activation and ingestion patterns, where the goal is to take data from customers and send it back to them or load it into their app. These integrations require multiple layers of enforcement to maintain isolation, including separate tables/views for each customer, row-level security, and per-customer models. To ensure multi-tenancy guarantees, Census Workspaces provide an isolated space for each customer, allowing for simple customization and management, and are recommended for use in both activation and ingestion integrations.

At Census, we've introduced Warehouse-Managed Audiences, a feature that enables data teams to manage audiences programmatically from their warehouse while leveraging Audience Hub's features. This approach allows data teams to maintain control over high-quality, vetted audiences in the warehouse while giving marketers the freedom to experiment with new audiences. The feature is designed to support importing audiences directly from the warehouse and requires defining three distinct tables: people, audiences, and audience membership. With Warehouse-Managed Audiences, data teams can mirror their existing audiences into Census and keep them fresh as their source data changes over time. Marketers can still use Audience Hub to build new audiences, which may be built on top of those imported from the warehouse or represent entirely new audiences. The feature is now available in private preview for Enterprise plan customers.

Entity Resolution is a critical concept in enhancing data quality for marketing purposes. It helps to identify and merge duplicate or similar records, allowing for a more accurate and consolidated view of customer data. By implementing Entity Resolution, marketers can improve the effectiveness of their campaigns, reduce waste resources, and increase efficiency. The process involves comparing and matching data attributes to determine if two or more records refer to the same real-world entity, and it can be achieved through various techniques such as deterministic matching, probabilistic matching, and machine learning-based approaches. By leveraging Entity Resolution, marketers can create a customer 360 or Golden Records, which is particularly valuable in marketing for accurate customer profiling, segmentation, and targeting. With its numerous benefits, including improved customer data accuracy, enhanced customer segmentation, cost and resource savings, and improved campaign effectiveness, Entity Resolution is an essential tool for improving data quality in marketing.

The most advanced organizations rely on data from multiple sources and hundreds of data transformations to serve business stakeholders in every department. To manage complex, mission-critical data workflows and ensure trustworthy data, features such as Reverse ETL Observability, CI checks for dbt model updates, and version control with GitLink have been introduced. However, even with these features, unexpected changes can occur due to asynchronous teams working on different projects. This is where the Metaplane Integration with Census comes in, enabling data teams to quickly understand the impact of upstream data changes and leveraging machine learning to identify data quality issues unique to a warehouse and integrated data stack. The integration aims to support customers moving to Real-Time Activation with Census, ensuring end-customer experiences are driven by accurate data and driving revenue through data-driven insights.