A modular and flexible CDP to support data-driven transformation

The Challenge

FD Media Group wanted to become a predictable company for every stakeholder. A data strategy was developed to achieve this goal that combines internal expertise, customer research, and data insights.

The model has to stay transparent, be able to deliver growth and has to generate value. FD Media Group wanted to leverage its first-party data to better target users, become independent from third-party systems, and comply with data privacy regulations.

The Solution

A Customer Data Platform that brings complete control of the data, always using the most recent and high-quality data. 

A single source of truth that can be used for insights and marketing purposes is an essential part of a future-proof data strategy. To realize this, we combined data from multiple relevant sources. At FD Media Group, we focused on the following sources: sales data, marketing interactions, customer consent, web and app interactions, and customer demographics. By combining these sources in a central place, we created a centralized and unified Customer Data Platform (CDP), acting as a single source of truth. 

We introduced persistent server-side logging of events to ensure visibility of ‘need to know’ user behavior in a privacy, safe and secure environment to measure behavior such as article views, logins, and product consumption.

To do all of this in a controlled and efficient way, we focused on setting up strong data governance. Effective data governance ensures that data is consistent, trustworthy, and fully GDPR compliant. When setting up a CDP, we also incorporate the maintainability in our solution so that a support team can quickly take over the monitoring of the solution built. Crystalloids proactively support FD Media Group daily by monitoring the Crystalloids’ DevOps team.

When the single source of truth is in place by creating the CDP, FD could start sharing data for email automation, targeting the website, targeting audiences in paid media platforms, subscription marketing, advertisers, and data visualization.

The Process

At Crystalloids, we work in a structured way to get maximum results in the shortest time.

Preparation phase:

• Information gathering about the existing architecture and high-level goals.
• Writing backlog together with the Product Owner, developers, and Commercial Director.
• Backlog refinement to get all necessary details correct, such as the Definition of Done
• Backlog prioritization by business importance
• Estimation of work for the selected user stories
• Solution architecture

Implementation phase:

• Implement the solution
• Demo working software in two sprints of two weeks
• Handover the code and documentation
• Review customer satisfaction

The Result

Data lake (raw data storage) in Cloud Storage, CDP in BigQuery, real-time and batch ingestion from multiple sources, centralized audience definitions, integrated with relevant marketing channels (owned & paid media channels), dashboarding for insights. The high-level architecture is shown in the image below.

Google Cloud Platform en Google Marketing Platform products used

• Cloud Pub/Sub
• Cloud Dataflow
• Cloud Storage
• BigQuery
• Data Studio
• App Engine
• Compute Engine
• Cloud Endpoints
• Cloud Functions
• Cloud Composer
• Cloud Build
• GTM Server Container
• Error reporting, Cloud Logging, and Monitoring