Built with BigQuery: The new era of CDPs Built on BigQuery

Editor’s note: The post is part of a series showcasing our partners, and their solutions, that are Built with BigQuery.

Across almost every vertical, organizations of all sizes are recognizing the immense value of their first-party data stored in Google BigQuery. From operations to marketing and personalized experiences, this data holds the key to unlocking success in an evolving advertising world that is rapidly moving away from third party cookies.

Historically, marketing and advertising teams have relied on packaged Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to collect, store, and model customer data and then push that data into downstream tools. Thanks to the rise of the AI lakehouse and Google BigQuery however, the separate processes for data collection, modeling, and storage in CDPs have become redundant. This can leave a company operating with multiple sources of truth–with marketing teams looking to their CDP while the rest of the company runs off of a richer store of data residing in BigQuery. 

Enter Hightouch, the data activation platform that empowers organizations to fully leverage their BigQuery data. By integrating Hightouch with BigQuery, companies can create a composable customer data platform, capitalizing on their existing data investments and the robust capabilities of their data warehouse. With Hightouch and BigQuery, businesses can build audiences and synchronize data with over 200 tools and destinations. This convergence empowers organizations to craft a unified and versatile platform that meets all their business use cases, all while maximizing the potential of their data assets.

In this blog post, we will delve deeper into the concept of composable CDPs, explore the benefits they offer, and provide practical guidance on how to unlock the true potential of your data with a composable CDP built with BigQuery and Hightouch.

Use cases for a composable CDP built with BigQuery

Use case 1: Building a Customer 360

Data teams can build Customer 360 directly in BigQuery, allowing a company to understand the full engagement of that customer across all channels, devices, mediums, and engagements (including offline interactions). This 360 profile is the basis for effective analytics, personalization, and good customer experiences. 

Hightouch provides a Customer 360 Toolkit that enables organizations to create multiple identity and entity resolution models directly in BigQuery, without writing any code or complex SQL. 

Use case 2: Activating data with Reverse ETL

Data teams can sync data to downstream business tools like CRMs, ESPs, and ad platforms by using Reverse ETL.

Business operations that use these tools will improve with this data, driving better results and ensuring that everyone operates from the same source-of-truth data in BigQuery. This feature set saves data teams the manual effort of building and maintaining one-off pipelines, integrating with APIs, and delivering ad-hoc CSVs to other business teams.

Use case 3: Driving personalization across channels

Marketers can achieve better results by personalizing the content of their outreach to customers. 

Lifecycle marketing improves when companies serve relevant and personalized experiences via push notifications, SMS, email, mobile, and web. In order to do this, organizations need to first collect and store customer information, model predictions from that data, and then deliver that data and insights to their tools and marketing channels.

Use case 4: Improving Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and increasing ad efficiency

Marketers can improve the efficiency of their campaigns by syncing customer data into advertising platforms. 

Marketers can build suppression audiences of customers who they do not want to target, such as current subscribers, to reduce wasted advertising spend. Marketers can similarly build lookalike audiences from their current customer base to identify new customers to acquire. They can also provide conversion data to these platforms to optimize their automated campaigns. All of these advertising efficiencies depend on the ability to sync data from BigQuery to advertising destinations easily. 

Solution

Hightouch’s Composable CDP, built with BigQuery, allows organizations to store, model, and activate their customer data from the data warehouse. Companies like Gorgias, Prestashop, and Chalhoub have attained substantial revenue and cost savings benefits by activating their BigQuery data using Hightouch. 

Hightouch sits directly on top of BigQuery, giving data teams and marketers a suite of no-code tools to automate data syncs and build and manage audience cohorts for activation in minutes. Notable features and benefits of this architecture include:

1. Reverse ETL - Data and marketing teams can sync data from BigQuery to 200+ downstream tools with visual editors or languages such as SQL and dbt.

2. Customer Studio - Marketers can easily build audiences, add custom traits, run tests, analyze performance, run omnichannel campaigns, and coordinate all of their audience campaigns.

3. Customer 360 Toolkit - Data teams can organize and prepare their BigQuery data using Hightouch’s native identity resolution, schema organization, and warehouse enrichment capabilities.

4. Personalization API - Teams can access data in real-time using a fully managed API to power personalized customer experience.

5. Match Booster - Marketers can enrich audience syncs to ad destinations like Facebook and Google Ads with third-party data to improve match rates. This leads to larger audience reach in each platform for use cases like suppressing existing customers or building lookalike audiences, ultimately improving ROAS.

Solution architecture

Collect data into BigQuery from any source

Wherever you collect customer data, you can add it directly into BigQuery. Event collection solutions like Google Analytics can stream data into BigQuery, while ETL and ELT solutions like Fivetran can load in all other data your organization relies on. 

A single source of truth across the entire organization

Google Cloud provides a variety of tools to centralize all customer data in one place. Google Cloud Storage delivers a scalable and durable object storage solution, enabling businesses to store and manage their data in a centralized location. Additionally, BigQuery allows businesses to analyze large amounts of data quickly and easily, providing a unified platform to analyze data with SQL queries, built-in machine learning models, and data visualization tools. This provides a single source of truth across the entire organization, enabling all teams to have access to the same data, regardless of their function or location. Hightouch never stores this data separately, and syncs directly from BigQuery to other tools the organization uses. 

Easily and quickly modeling data and compute

Google Cloud provides several compute options, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and App Engine, allowing businesses to run their applications and workloads in a scalable and efficient manner. Google Cloud's AI and machine learning tools, such as AutoML and TensorFlow, allow businesses to build and deploy custom models without the need for specialized expertise, making modeling and compute easier and faster than ever before.

Monitor infrastructure with unified dashboards

Google Cloud's operations suite provides a unified dashboard for monitoring and managing cloud services. It allows businesses to monitor their applications and infrastructure in real-time, set up alerts, and troubleshoot issues. This unified dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the entire organization, making it easier to identify and address any issues.

Customer privacy

Google Cloud provides a flexible data platform, enabling businesses to adopt a first-party customer data approach. Products like Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Data Catalog help businesses protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Google Cloud also provides tools for identity and access management, ensuring that customer data is accessed only by authorized personnel. Hightouch never stores data outside of BigQuery, maintaining all governance rules and regulations. 

Hightouch Composable CDP vs. packaged CDPs

The Hightouch Composable Customer Data Platform, built with BigQuery, enables anyone in any organization to fully leverage their customer data in all of their tools. Marketing teams have access to unified customer profiles for personalization and can leverage any data models built in BigQuery. Data teams can perform all of their work within the secure BigQuery environment, knowing that Hightouch will then pass those data investments downstream to all other organization tools. 

Packaged CDPs offer all-in-one solutions for data collection, modeling, storage, and activation. A company that may choose to pursue a CDP because of the completeness of this implementation and the built-in data schemas and modeling it institutes. Ultimately, however, the separate data storage of packaged CDPs is a critical weakness: CDPs operate as their own separate entities, and don’t benefit from data investments made across the organization. 

Assembling the Hightouch Composable CDP is a better option for companies than buying a separate packaged CDP because this approach offers several benefits:

• Data completeness: Packaged CDPs only capture and/or copy a portion of a company’s data, such as clickstream data. BigQuery can instead be the source of truth for all company data, from all customer interactions. BigQuery lets organizations use data from disparate sources like POS systems, data science models, and offline data to build Customer 360s and activate that customer data to downstream tools. 

• Data flexibility: Data teams have flexibility in how they can model data within BigQuery. All of these models and data investments then flow downstream into the tools Hightouch syncs to. The Hightouch CDP easily keeps up with an organization’s ever-evolving needs and requests. Packaged CDPs, on the other hand, provide rigid solutions that require significant effort to modify or re-implement. 

• Accessibility: Data teams can configure BigQuery and Hightouch easily with their existing tools and workflows like SQL and dbt. Less technical teams can use Hightouch’s no-code features to perform Identity Resolution, build audiences, coordinate multichannel campaigns, sync data to their downstream tools, and more. Packaged CDPs don’t offer the same level of control and access across technical skill sets.

• Security: BigQuery’s many features allow companies to build a data warehouse that is secure and compliant with their privacy needs. Hightouch never stores data, relying on the data governance and management in BigQuery. Packaged CDPs store data within their own separate cloud environments, intoducing security risks.

Better together

A composable CDP with Hightouch and built on BigQuery offers organizations a best-in-class customer data architecture that capitalizes on existing data investments, empowers marketing teams, and brings customer data to the places you need it. Write your data to BigQuery once, and then use it anywhere with Hightouch.