GCP as a CDP

Create your own Customer Data Platform leveraging the power of Google Cloud

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is an important utility for analysts and especially marketing analysts to be able to utilize their customer data, create and manage audiences, activate those audiences as well as manage them.

While Google’s media and measurement ecosystem is comprehensive, audience activation is one area the company has gaps to fill. While GA4 is often touted for its ability to deploy audiences using its own measurement system, the capability remains largely limited to the Google ecosystem (the Salesforce connector is a very recent addition). As most companies that use advanced analytics platforms such as GA4 are often invested into a wider media ecosystem, support for non-Google entities is a must have feature for any audience activation platform. Traditionally, companies have relied on DMPs and more recently, CDPs to fill in this role. However, the capabilities available often rely on investing in a particular ecosystem and/or customizing endpoints despite the promise of out-of-the-box integrations. This is where having a custom solution just for yourself becomes a lucrative choice. Fortunately, Google Cloud offers all the tools you would need to create such a solution.

Stacktics’ GCP as a CDP solution and Audience Activation pipelines automate the sending of raw audience data created from backend analytical processes to your Web Analytics platform, Search, Display, Social and other marketing channels. This enables the modern marketer to automate repetitive tasks from their day-to-day activities and focus on their more creative and analytical impacts.

Stacktics’ GCP as a CDP Solution

Stacktics is an official Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Delivery Partner with GCP certified engineers and architects, accompanied by experts in digital ecosystems. This has helped us create a system of various components on GCP that form a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Google Analytics (GA) is one of those components where Stacktics’ full GA partnership can add substantial value to an organization’s digital marketing capabilities.

This CDP can leverage either a Looker-based application, or another analytics/visualization tool that can enable an analyst to view all their customer and marketing data in one place, and perform the following core functionalities:

1. Audience Creation
1. Explore and Analyze Customer Data
2. Create Rule-based Audiences
3. Create ML-based Audiences
4. Save Audience Lists
2. Audience Activation and Management
1. Update or Delete Audience lists from Platforms/Maintain fresh Audience Membership
2. Schedule Audience Distributions
3. Audience Analysis
1. Analyze Audience Performance Data
2. Analyze changes in Audience Memberships

What’s more? The above functionality can be customized to your needs, unlike other ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions. Our teams can work with your teams to design, develop and test the systems.

The figure below shows a high level overview of the workflow

Stacktics’ Audience Activation pipelines as assets

Stacktics’ Audience Activation pipelines are a core part of the CDP functionality. As a stand-alone system, they allow pre-defined customer groupings to be automatically refreshed and distributed Once deployed, these pipelines run on schedule, uploading their audiences to the various marketing endpoints as often as required.

The pipelines can also be deployed as software applications onto your cloud infrastructure. While they have been built on GCP infrastructure, these can be customized to your infrastructure needs.

The figure below shows a high level overview of the workflow.