CaliberMind Analytics Concepts

Nic Zangre Updated by Nic Zangre

In order to socialize CaliberMind within an organization, it's critically important to understand our reporting data model so you can confidently explain it to others on your team.

CDP Reporting Architecture

Under the hood of a Customer Data Platform, there are the following major components:

  1. Data Lake - Raw data replicated from an organization's siloed data sources (CRM, MAP, Ad Platforms, Web Data, etc). Most data streams into a data lake are in the form of JSON (a "semi-structured" format) which are "data blobs" and not formally structured tables with rows and columns.
  2. Data Warehouse - This is a "structured" database. The tables have defined rows and columns. It should be noted that the data is often still somewhat raw and not "matched-up" with tables from different data sources in the same data warehouse out of the box. It typically takes analysts many hours each month to build and maintain a data structure.
  3. Reporting Backbone - This is the consumer-ready reporting database, which is highly performant and intuitive. The Data Lake and Warehouse alone are not typically set up to enable streamlined reporting and insight discovery. Data warehouses are sub-optimal for producing meaningful reports unless organizational-specific schemas are set up to enable the average user to produce accurate insights.
  4. Customer Data Platform - An autonomous Data Lake, Data Warehouse, and Reporting Backbone all in one. In addition, CDPs have workflows to tag and improve data in your CRM or MAP tools. This is known as "data activation" or "data hygiene" depending on the use case. CDPs are extremely powerful because they have access to the reporting backbone and segmentation. These aspects enable your operations team to leverage data from any silo in the organization without having to do the work of stitching it all together. CaliberMind's CDP also uses best-practice fueled reporting structure and is built for B2B businesses--which means we allow our customers to look through an Account-Based lens.
CaliberMind Customer Data Platform Reporting Architecture

Reporting Backbone

An in-depth overview of CaliberMind's Core Reporting Backbone and schema can be found here.

The Reporting Backbone creates a centralized definition of a customer and assigns unified IDs across all your data sources.

While we offer reports and dashboards out-of-the-box, it's your data and we believe you should be able to visualize it wherever and however you'd like:

  • BI Tools - Your company may use Looker, Tableau, or Power BI. Many of these visualization tools have standardized connectors to Google BigQuery and can be connected directly to your CaliberMind instance.
  • CRM Reports - We recommend pushing Engagement data to your account and person records in your CRM, and we can push attribution data to a Salesforce custom object.
  • Reporting Templates - We have dozens of dashboards. If you don't find what you need, we're always open to creating custom dashboards through either project-based work or managed services packages.

Campaign Hierarchy

At times marketing data can get very confusing, especially when data definitions are used inconsistently.

The CaliberMind reporting structure for marketing starts with "Campaigns." Campaigns can be housed in your CRM, but we also pull the data from your MAP and paid advertising platforms (or elsewhere!). A campaign is an offer meant to incite a response from your prospect.

"Campaign Members" are a record that joins the person and the campaign. The Campaign Member is a record of how and when a prospect interacted with your brand. Somebody who opts into a Newsletter will flow into your CRM as a Campaign Member. CaliberMind associates users clicking on ads, emails, or visiting your website as virtual Campaign Members in our system (which we can push back into your system if you prefer).

Campaigns can be grouped as "Programs." Programs are also known as initiatives and often group together different campaign tactics under a single umbrella. Campaigns in a single program are meant to attract a specific audience into engaging with your brand. Programs can also bucket together a single offer rolled across multiple tactics (like a free trial offer on your website, LinkedIn, and a third-party website like G2).

Campaigns also have a tactic, category, or "Campaign Type." This is where your offer is presented. For example, we could try to get people to register for a Webinar, fill out a Web Form, or engage with Chat. Webinar, Web Form, and Chat are just a few examples of Campaign Types.

The last bucket we use in our hierarchy is the "Channel." This is how your prospect heard about the campaign and it often correlates to the UTM Medium in your URL query string. Examples could be paid-ads, paid-social, retargeting, direct, or organic-search.

CaliberMind Campaign Hierarchy

Campaign Types

Campaign types are completely customizable in CaliberMind, however we typically start by leveraging the list of campaigns types (or tactics if you use Dynamics) in your CRM.

If you are interested in standardizing your campaign types, here's a good list:

----SAMPLE CAMPAIGN TYPE LIST----

Account Based (ABM)
Content Download
Content Syndication
Demo Signup
Direct Mail
Email
Event
Operational (designates campaigns not intended to generate Attribution/ROI)
Paid Display
Paid Search
Paid Social
Sales Outreach
Referral Program
Retargeting
Webinar/Virtual Event
Website Content

Virtual Campaigns

In CaliberMind, we sometimes create our own campaigns to better organize your raw data for reports. For example, we create campaigns and events (which are vaguely similar to Campaign Members in your CRM) for website visits whether or not we can identify the person or company associated with the activity. This data would quickly blow up the volume of your CRM data storage--which is expensive--so we recommend only pushing identified interactions back into your CRM or leaving them in CaliberMind.

Channels

People have short attention spans and are distracted easily. It's not uncommon for someone to visit your brand's website with a research goal in mind and then navigate away only to come back again later. To make sure the original entry point (or UTM value) into your website persists throughout the day's interactions, we associate the Channel used in the first entry point to every interaction that user takes on your website that same day. For example, when a user comes to your website from Organic Search, we would give the Organic channel credit for all the user's activity that day.

In the example below, we are attributing a "Demo Request" to the "Paid Search" channel (even though the demo request wasn't the first thing the visitor did when they came to the website):

Channel

Adjusted Channel

Campaign

Date

Paid Search

Paid Search

Banner Ad

1/1/2020

Direct

Paid Search

Ebook

1/1/2020

Direct

Paid Search

Demo Request

1/1/2020

Direct

Direct

Case Study

1/3/2020

Here is the standard list of channels you will find in CaliberMind and their definitions (this is customizable for your organization):

  • Direct - No page referrer, UTMs, or campaign ids were found in the URL string.
  • Direct-Influenced - A person outside your company referred a visitor to your webpage.
  • Direct-Revisit - A "Direct" visit that occurs after the initial engagement.
  • Display Ads - The UTM string matches your Display Ad platform.
  • Email - The UTM string has "email" as the UTM Medium or is picked up as the result of a click in your MAP.
  • Event - Trade shows, in-person events, or webinars captured by your MAP and/or CRM.
  • Organic Search - The URL string contains a page referrer of Bing or Google.
  • Organic Social - The URL string has a UTM Source or page referrer of Facebook or LinkedIn, but no campaign id.
  • Other - Has UTMs but they don't match a mapped Channel or Campaign.
  • Outbound Sales - A page visit from a sales email or an opportunity is created without any logged touches.
  • Paid Search - The URL string has a UTM Medium of Paid Search.
  • Paid Social - The URL string has a UTM Medium of Paid Social.
  • Referral - An employee or partner refers a lead and the salesperson has added a "Referral" campaign.
  • Syndication - A campaign upload in your MAP or CRM with a source of Syndication or a web visit with a UTM Medium of Syndication.

To learn more about the standard business logic for channels, here's a deep-dive article about which data schema attributes map to.

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