Media analytics and attribution are difficult to execute even when conditions are optimal. For most marketers, they’re typically a long way away from ‘optimal’: data volumes are enormous, data sits in multiple locations, and much of the data is redundant as well as disorganized.

Aqfer’s Marketing Data Platform-as-a-Service (MDPaaS) was built to work within – and correct – the situation as it exists for most marketers. MDPaaS was specifically designed to help those who serve marketers (and marketers themselves) more quickly and efficiently organize their marketing data in order to more effectively carry out analytics and attribution processes.
MDPaaS’ proprietary data format allows users to store data for longer periods of time compared to “similar” marketing data storage solutions.

MDPaaS can also run queries up to 98% faster than these similar solutions. This means that more of a marketer’s data is usable, connecting events over months becomes easier, and critical decisions get made faster and with more precision. With Aqfer, analytics become more insightful, and attributing credit becomes easier and more reliable.

Making Analytics With Aqfer Even Better

The marketing data management world is constantly evolving and adapting to new regulations and policies. Aqfer’s solutions and services are also constantly evolving in tandem with them as part of our commitment to helping our clients and their customers improve not just their analytics and attribution efforts, but also overall data efficiency and their bottom lines.

As part of Aqfer’s commitment to continuous innovation and improvement, we constantly engage our clients in ways that we can further enhance our solutions to address the challenges and inefficiencies they face in their day-to-day operations. So when one of our clients, a digital media operations platform, approached us about helping them to find a way to further reduce their query-related costs when using Google Campaign Manager 360, we jumped at the opportunity to make it happen.

The net result of this inquiry was a brand new commercial integration that drastically reduces GCM 360-related query costs for Aqfer MDPaaS users that utilize the platform as part of their analytics efforts.

Read on to learn the exact challenge that Aqfer helped the client to overcome, how and why Aqfer developed the commercial integration to solve that challenge, and why the commercial integration is so beneficial to current and future Aqfer clients.

The Challenge That Needed to Be Solved

Many companies use Google Campaign Manager 360 for their web-based ad campaign management and tracking. By default, companies that utilize GCM 360 also use Google BigQuery for the data analysis, data segmentation, reporting (i.e., querying), and dashboards of these campaigns. 

The issue with this is that Google BigQuery is significantly more expensive than most other data query services, even for simple queries. BigQuery’s pricing model is more challenging to predict and control because costs are based on both query usage and data storage, not just query usage.

How the MDPaaS-GCM 360 Commercial Integration Came To Be

In comparison to Google BigQuery, Amazon Athena – the query service native to Amazon S3 – provides lower and more predictable query costs because they factor in only query usage (and not data storage).

Why is this important? Amazon S3 is the underlying data storage technology found in MDPaaS that provides all Aqfer clients with their own unique, secure, virtual private cloud to perform data queries for analysis, reporting, and more. Because MDPaaS utilizes Amazon S3, this means that MDPaaS users could forgo using Google BigQuery and instead take advantage of Athena’s lower and more predictable query costs. 

Simple solution, right? Well, not exactly. The data structures found in BigQuery (taken from the GCM 360 data) and Athena differ from one another, making it impossible to query GCM 360 data with Athena in a 1:1 manner. So the Product and CX Engineering teams at Aqfer got to work to develop a way to ingest and query GCM 360 data within MDPaaS (i.e., Amazon S3) with no hiccups or issues.

The end result of this work was an Aqfer-developed commercial integration that automatically and seamlessly ingests GCM 360 data and writes it to Amazon Athena for the same analysis, segmentation, reporting, dashboards, etc. available in Google BigQuery. This integration provides a data structure within Amazon S3 and Athena that was optimized to handle the data structure found in GCM and Google BigQuery. Views were also developed to mimic the GCM 360 data formats for minimal training.

This commercial GCM 360 integration for MDPaaS helps Aqfer clients avoid the high costs of using BigQuery to perform any type of data processing associated with their GCM 360 data. This ultimately provides Aqfer clients with significant savings in regard to their query costs. Costs using our GCM 360 integration for/with Amazon Athena can range from 1/5 to 1/10 of what they would be if they used BigQuery – while providing the same exact capabilities within Athena. 

Ultimately, this integration provides Aqfer clients with an alternative to the higher and more unpredictable query costs associated with BigQuery and its proprietary storage system. It allows Aqfer clients to experience all the benefits of the GCM 360/BigQuery pairing while providing them with the lower and more predictable costs of Athena/S3.

The Major Benefits of the MDPaaS-GCM 360 Commercial Integration

In general, database querying and cloud computing storage are both quite expensive processes. As noted, BigQuery is natively more expensive than Athena because BigQuery users also incur a data storage cost when performing queries. Given the large amounts of data (billions of records in some cases), Aqfer’s clients are typically ingesting and processing, it’s easy to see why using MDPaaS (and its native S3 and Athena technology) over Google Cloud Infrastructure is the right move. 

To the best of our knowledge, Aqfer is the only company that has a commercial integration (implementation) for GCM 360 data ingestion within Amazon Athena/S3. There are very few companies whose products can ingest and host the amount of data that MDPaaS is seamlessly able to do. MDPaaS can do this at a fraction of the cost that any other system can while at the same time servicing queries quickly and cost-effectively. 

This commercial GCM 360 integration for MDPaaS helps Aqfer clients avoid the high costs of using BigQuery to perform any type of data processing associated with their GCM 360 data. This ultimately provides Aqfer clients with significant savings in regard to their query costs. Costs using our GCM 360 integration for/with Amazon Athena can range from 1/5 to 1/10 of what they would be if they used BigQuery – while providing the same exact capabilities within Athena. 

Ultimately, this integration provides Aqfer clients with an alternative to the higher and more unpredictable query costs associated with BigQuery and its proprietary storage system. It allows Aqfer clients to experience all the benefits of the GCM 360/BigQuery pairing while providing them with the lower and more predictable costs of Athena/S3.

How Using Athena Over BigQuery Results in Substantial Cost Savings 

Aqfer’s GCM 360 integration for use with Amazon Athena offers extremely similar query and analysis performance to that of Google BigQuery but at a fraction of the cost. The reasons for this come down to several key differences between BigQuery and Athena.

Do More With Aqfer

Aqfer continues to revolutionize how MSPs support today’s data-driven marketers and advertisers. Our MDPaaS makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to overcome today’s most pressing marketing data collection and management challenges. As demonstrated by such Innovations as the MDPaaS-Google Ad Manager integration outlined here, Aqfer is committed to constantly improving our products to ensure our clients have the tools they need to help their customers overcome these challenges both now and in the future. 

Interested in learning more about how Aqfer’s solutions have supported our clients? Visit our Practical Applications resource page for more detailed insight into how our clients have used the Aqfer MDPaaS to enhance identity resolution, universal tag management, analytics and attribution, and more.