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Sumit Sarkar
Guest
Sumit Sarkar, Principal Technical Support Engineer, Progress DataDirect
Sumit Sarkar helps marketers navigate the often confusing world of data preparation when using marketing SaaS applications as a data source.
For the last couple years, I have been working with Tableau developers, marketing data scientists, consultants and ISVs, showing them how to get better data using Progress® Easyl™. In doing so, I’ve seen a lot of interest in marketing data sources like Hubspot, Marketo and Eloqua. This isn’t all that surprising given the glut of articles and surveys describing the rise of data and technology driven marketing organizations. These clouds work very well given the volumes of data I’ve seen across activity and lead objects, but that performance comes at a cost – access to the data.
What does Self-Service Data Prep do for marketing?
During my adventures, I’ve overheard a lot of questions being asked, and marketers have a lot of them. Questions like:
- What happened with our landing pages last month?
- How do we measure leads for campaigns such as webinars, customer support, videos, etc?
- How many e-mails were sent, opened, delivered per campaign?
Even though it seems like these would have simple answers, the data you would find those answers in is often spread across multiple SaaS applications and very hard to access. This is where Progress Easyl comes in, making data available to Tableau either in real-time or as a scheduled native Tableau Data Extract (TDE) file. It all happens within our cloud platform without any additional software or staging database requirement.
Don’t just take my word for it—Dustin Smith, Product Marketing Manager from Tableau endorsed our technology for marketing folks during a joint webinar last year.
How does Easyl uniquely pull SaaS marketing data? (Data Nerd to Tableau Geek translation)
As a data nerd, I like getting down into the weeds and looking at my data directly, but I hear it is much cooler to run reports with Tableau. However you prefer your data be presented, Easyl does the ugly work of data preparation that should not have to care about. Here’s what that means for you whether or not you’re a data nerd like me:
What this data nerd thinks is cool about Easyl: What Tableau users really care about:
“Behind the Hubspot scenes, pulling contacts out of the Hubspot API can be tricky in customized instances with hundreds of long field names since the API has a maximum of 8200 bytes. Easyl can handle all this for you through built in templates that present all the fields to Tableau since it’s not always obvious which fields each analyst wants.” I can actually see all of my Hubspot data in Tableau!
“Pulling LEAD records from Marketo can easily get into the millions of records and fail to return from the API by design based on cloud infrastructure governors. We introduced pseudo-columns (oldestUpdatedAt and latestUpdatedAt) to pull those into batches and automate that in Easyl to make it seamless to the user.” I can create visualizations against large data sets in Marketo which are refreshed daily.
“Eloqua REST API 2.0 (Oracle Marketing Cloud) introduced support for activity types, and this was not available against connectors originally built with REST 1.0. Since Easyl is a cloud service, these changes can be transparently updated behind the scenes to always give you the best view of Eloqua.” I can create really cool visualizations across Eloqua activity types to analyze campaign success.
In summary, our goal is to transparently present the latest data available from marketing application APIs. That way, Tableau users can focus on making awesome visualizations rather than worry about all the nerd talk above that we handle with a team of engineers who don’t sleep well.
Since I’m a techie, I’ll tell you what data is not available through APIs as of today—even if marketing preferred I didn’t:
- Oracle does not expose the Eloqua Insight Data Model, but it is possible to get a lot of the same data through standard APIs exposed by Eloqua.
- Hubspot does not currently expose Call To Actions from Hubspot APIs.
We do work closely with all the Marketing SaaS vendors, and share this feedback so you can get all the data you want.
The Easyl Experience
1. Pick what data you want.
The biggest complaint we hear is about SaaS data models is that they are hard to understand and make it difficult to see what the data actually looks like. Our solution is Easyl Data Blender which lets you visualize the data alongside quality statistics. This is usually the first time shops have seen Hubspot, Marketo, or Eloqua data outside of those applications:
Viewing Hubspot data with Easyl Data Blender
2. Choose how you want it delivered.
Once you have prepared the data you want and decided how often to refresh it, you have two options:
- Generate a Tableau Data Extract (TDE) file to be delivered directly to your desktop or published to Tableau Online.
- Connect live using the Progress Easyl ODBC client which works with tools beyond Tableau such as Qlikview, Sportfire, Microstrategy, or SAP Lumira.
Tableau can utilize Easyl data through ODBC
Get Started with Data Preparation for Marketing SaaS
There’s no way to get around it, working with data like this can be a challenge to the uninitiated, so it’s important to know you’re not alone! We want you to leverage our collective experience, so drop us a line or leave me a comment below. We’re here to help! Then, once you’re eager to jump in, register to get started with Progress Easyl for SaaS Marketing data.
Author information
Senior Principal Systems Engineer, Progress DataDirect at Progress
Data Access Evangelist, Speaker and World's leading consultant on open data standards for cloud data.
Sumit Sarkar has been working in the data connectivity field for 10 years. His interests include performance tuning of the data access layer for which he has developed a patent pending technology for its analysis; business intelligence and data warehousing for SaaS platforms; and data connectivity for aPaaS environments - with a focus on standards such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and ODATA.
He is an IBM Certified Consultant for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and TDWI member.
He has presented sessions on data connectivity at various conferences including IUC34, IUC35, Progress Revolution, Oracle User's Group, Collaborate 12, Dreamforce 2012, Cloud Computing Expo 2012, PRGS13 Exchange, Dreamforce 2013, Oracle OpenWorld 14, PRGS14, DF14
Presented related webinars in collaboration with IOUG, DZone, Progress DataDirect and Progress Communities.
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