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CaliberMind Common Data Sources

Cathy Funderburg Updated by Cathy Funderburg

CaliberMind Common Data Sources

Data Naming Conventions

  • The first landing point for data being pulled in from various systems is typically in a dataset that shares the same name as the system in question. Examples include salesforce for all relevant data being pulled in from a Salesforce CRM, ajs for all raw AnalyticsJS coming in from our web tracker service, etc.
  • Core CaliberMind tables are prefixed with cm_. Examples include cm_attribution, cm_events, cm_opportunity, etc.
  • Core CaliberMind tables are typically created by unioning several child tables. These child tables follow the naming convention cm_xxx__yyy where cm_xxx is the parent table and yyy is a specific source of data flowing into that table. Examples include cm_event__analyticsjs, cm_opportunity__salesforce, etc. The act of going from raw data to child table is typically where source-specific normalization and manipulation occur.

Common Data Sources

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are the backbone of most companies' marketing, sales, and customer success organizations. These systems act as the database of records for everything that a business knows about its customers and how they interact with them. This includes ideas like

  • Customer information (names, companies, addresses, phone numbers, etc.)
  • A collection of leads (people/companies for sales to target)
  • A collection of opportunities (people/companies that have passed some threshold for being far enough along the sales process)
  • Information about marketing campaigns (what they are, who they target, etc.)
  • Product information (who is buying what product, etc.)

Most CRMs share these concepts but their table schemas and data models can differ. This leads to development efforts at standardizing information into a CaliberMind-friendly format so it can work with the rest of our data model. Customers typically have a single CRM but there are non-trivial examples where customers have multiple CRMS (migrating following an acquisition, different business units, etc.) that can be challenging to handle.

While the majority of the CaliberMind Data Model deals with data ingestion, we often push data back to a customer’s CRM after it has gone through our systems.

Web Tracker

Tracking people that visit a customer’s website is a core component for assessing the performance of campaigns and correctly being able to attribute credit. This is typically done by including some snippets of Javascript code on a customer’s website that then fires relevant information to a collection service which CaliberMind then ingests. The most common package here is based on AnalyticsJS and includes page (tracking visitation behavior) and identify (tracking self-identification events of visitors) calls. Additional but less common AnalyticsJS calls include page/screen, group, and alias.

UTM Parameters

UTM parameters are the industry standard for encoding URLs with relevant information. The five standard UTM parameters are:

  • utm_source
  • utm_campaign
  • utm_medium
  • utm_term
  • utm_content

These parameters are often embedded in the source URL that brings a person to a website and can be used to identify how they got there. Additionally, custom UTM parameters are possible depending on how a customer constructs the URLs embedded in their campaigns and materials.

Effectively parsing and understanding these UTM parameters is key to connecting web behavior with marketing activities and fully understanding attribution, return on ad spend, and general impact.

Ad Platform

Ad platforms provide customers with integration capabilities to track and analyze the performance of their various campaigns. Integrations vary depending on the platform. Typically this data includes things like campaign metadata, cost-per-click, cost-per-mille, total spend, reach, impressions, frequency, etc.

Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) are a collection of various tools that allow marketers to source prospects, manage email and other campaigns, and score leads among other things. They’ve gained popularity in recent years as integrated platforms where marketers can manage their processes and reduce repetitive, manual tasks. These platforms are often key sources of campaign and event information.

Other

A vital feature of the CaliberMind platform is our ability to support an ever-growing catalog of data sources. This enables us to provide a flexible and extensible experience for our customers. Much of this is due to our deep integration with FiveTran, a data ingestion, and pipeline solution. They provide prebuilt connectors that allow us to integrate a much larger array of data sources than we would be able to if we had to build our custom connectors. Some other notable data sources we can integrate include:

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