If you’ve come here, you are probably looking for a way to transfer data from Microsoft Advertising Bing Ads to Snowflake quickly. In this article, we talk about why Bing Ads is essential and how you can get access to this data without having to write any code.
The choice for eCommerce businesses when it comes to marketing and selling their merchandise is growing every day. eCommerce vendors have to decide on what channels they want to sell on, which channels they want to spend their advertising dollars on, whether the channels include:
- Branded Websites
- In some cases branded eCommerce sites per country
- Marketplaces
- In many instances, marketplaces per country
- Retail Stores
- To create an omnichannel presence and to engage buyers where the shop
Complexity increases with the addition of every sales channel. For instance, if we consider marketing channels available to support online business, you will find a choice of:
- Social Media ads – Some platforms include Bing Ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others
- Digital ads and remarketing – Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, and others
- PPC – Bing Ads, Bing ads, and others
- Email – Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Hubspot, and others
- Podcasts
- Affiliate – Refersion, CJ Affiliates
- Influencer marketing
- Offline marketing
Choice, while being a great virtue, leads to complexity and this complexity when not managed properly, can, in turn, impact the efficiency of running an eCommerce business. Most eCommerce businesses grapple with this complexity; some well and many not so well.
In a competitive digital landscape that we live in, it has become imperative that eCommerce businesses of all sizes that aspire to grow and stay profitable have to look into their data deeply and leverage this for growth.
With the increase in competition, eCommerce Companies should strive to be more data-driven for various reasons. Some of these reasons include.
- Understanding the balance between demand and supply
- Understanding customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Segmenting customer base for effective marketing
- Finding opportunities to reduce wasteful spend
- Optimizing digital assets to maximize revenue for the same marketing spend,
- Improving ROIs on Ad campaigns and
- Offering an engaging and seamless experience for customers in every channel that the customer engages with the brand.
Businesses these days need to be efficient in terms of their data analysis. They are struggling to make sense of the data generated from various applications and tools used to manage different processes efficiently.
Due to the reasons highlighted above, any eCommerce business typically operates at least 10-15 different software/platforms to deliver on their customer expectations. As a result, data silos are created, which makes it more difficult to consolidate data and use the data for reporting, operations, analysis, and taking informed forward-looking decisions.
Marketing platforms like Bing Ads generate a substantial amount of data like impressions, user behaviour, clicks, product details, and more. Additionally, eCommerce companies that sell globally often end up having separate ad accounts for each country which in turn creates data silos for each country. Imagine a brand selling on three marketplaces or three countries – They may have three accounts per channel in which they are generating data—consolidation of data from these accounts for effective reporting.
These silos make an analysis of the entire business data comprehensively, challenging. Data Savvy eCommerce businesses try to reduce the effort of reporting and analysis by integrating data from all these channels into a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake. By taking this step, the process of reporting and analysis becomes easy, inexpensive, and consequently done more frequently.
In this post, we will be looking at methods to connect data from Bing Ads to Snowflake.
Before we start exploring the process involved in data transfer, let us spend some time looking at these individual platforms.
Microsoft advertising / Bing Ads Overview
With BING, you can lower your costs per acquisition (CPA) and increase the overall conversions. Using Bing Ads, you can leverage lower CPA’s and CPC’s than Google AdWords because of a fundamental reason – Less Competition.
For those who still have not used Bing Ads, it is Microsoft’s platform that competes with the well-known Google AdWords. They typically provide the advertisers with a unified platform to place ads on two search engine results pages: Bing and Yahoo. Microsoft Bing Ads provides the option to restrict advertisements to specific demography and to random times and days of the week. It also supports offline synchronization updates (via the Bing Ads Editor). Bing advertising tend to have higher CTRs for purchases and financial services. That is because they offer numerous shopping and financial services. Ads in these search verticals on the platform attract extremely interested visitors. Thus engagement and CTR are high on Bing Ads.
- Bing Ads has cheaper CPC’s and less competition.
- It tend to have better CTRs.
- Bing Ads provides more granular control at the campaign and ad group levels.
- It has better device targeting options.
- Bing Ads offers more control and transparency over the search partner targeting.
- It enables you to control search demographics.
- Bing Ads has better social extensions than other advertising networks
Snowflake Overview
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse created by three data warehousing experts at Oracle Corporation in 2012. Snowflake Computing, the vendor behind the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse product, raised over $400 million over the past eight years and acquired thousands of customers. One might wonder if another data warehouse vendor is needed in an already crowded field of traditional data warehousing technologies like Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, and cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery. Well, the answer is the disruption caused by cloud technologies and cloud opportunities for new technology companies. Public clouds enabled startups to shed past baggage, learn from the past, challenge the status quo, and take a fresh look at cloud opportunities to create a new data warehouse product. You can read this article, to understand the core technology components that make up this modern, cloud-built data warehouse for consumers of cloud technologies.
You can register for a $400 free trial of Snowflake within minutes. This credit is sufficient to store a terabyte of data and run a small data warehouse environment for a few days.
Why Do Businesses Need to Integrate Bing Ads to Snowflake
Let’s take a simple example to illustrate why data consolidation from Bing Ads to Snowflake can be helpful for an eCommerce business.
An e-commerce company selling in multiple countries is running campaigns on Bing Ads. They have different selling platforms, payment gateways, inventories, logistic channels and target audience in each country. An ad might be running off a product which might no longer be in stock, or might not be deliverable in the location which it is running, rendering these ads as redundant and thus causing a substantial loss for the company. Now when the decision-makers want to rectify this and optimize the Bing Ad campaigns to maximize ROIs, they are faced with the following problems.
- There are separate data silos for inventory data, logistics data, which need to be separately downloaded and compared and updated regularly to optimize the Microsoft Bing Ads campaign.
- Again if you want to do remarketing effectively, then people who have not completed payments, or have encountered a failed transaction need to be targeted in addition to people who have added products to their cart, wishlists or favourites. People who have responded to other marketing campaigns like email, SMS, social media marketing also need to be targeted. So again separate data silos from various selling platforms, payment gateways, marketing tools need to be downloaded, analyzed and compared.
- Audience profiling data from e-commerce platforms, CRMs, customer support systems need to be analyzed to optimize audience targeting.
- While calculating profits/losses of the overall business, it becomes a nearly impossible task to pull all of these data from multiple platforms for each country separately, and then analyze all of this data together with the expense data and calculate profits. It involves a lot of working hours which costs money, and there is usually a time lag involved, which reduces the accuracy of the analysis and its effectiveness as the data is not analyzed in real-time.
- The compilation and processing of data from multiple sources for thorough research is a considerable challenge if carried out manually.
- Additionally, and more importantly, hardly any company runs advertising merely on Bing Ads. Marketers use multiple marketing channels to take the brand message out to the public. To understand the true ROI of campaigns across all the marketing channels, data consolidation cannot be escaped whether the process is manual or not.
For these reasons, top companies consolidate all of their data from Bing Ads and other apps and tools into a data warehouse like Snowflake to analyze the data and generate reports at a rapid pace.
The more data you can gather and use from different sources in your Bing ad campaign, the more your ad delivery is optimized. All these data can not be natively transmitted to Bing. Such data must be collected and analyzed correctly in a data warehouse before you use the relevant information to run ad campaigns on Bing Ads.
Replicate data from Bing Ads to Snowflake
There are two board ways to pull data from any source to any destination. The decision is always a build vs buy decision. Let us look at both these options to see which option provides the business with a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution for reporting and analysis of Bing Ads data. The following data is available from the Bing Ads for replication to a data warehouse. You can also retrieve the data from Snowflake any time you want.
Build your own Data Pipeline
To build support for extracting data using Bing Ads APIs, the developer or analyst will have to follow the steps.
- Register with the Microsoft Ads Developer Program
- Understand the data available from Bing Ads for replication
- Handle Bing Ads API based authentication
- Understand the rate limits enforced by Bing Ads
- Handle different data types in the data that is generated in the files pushed from Bing Ads to Snowflake.
- Handle errors, changes and upgrades to the APIs, which happen quite frequently
- Handle notifications so that you were made aware when the script has failed.
- Handle incremental data extraction and avoid full data extraction with every replication task
- Once you have automated the extract of data from Bing Ads and you manage to save the data as a CSV or a JSON file, you can use the file to load Bing Ads data into Snowflake.
You can leverage Snowflake loading routines to accomplish the task of loading data. However, understanding how to do it right is important and the links below can help.
- Snowflake loading features overview
- Understand the considerations to load data
- Using the COPY commands to load batch data
The table below lists the reports available for automated integration from Bing Ads. Remember that to automate replicate the data from these reports to Snowflake, each report has to be understood, data types explored, scripts written to automatically schedule these reports, and generate output files that can be loaded into Snowflake.
If you want to finish configuring your Bing Ads integration in less time than it took you to scroll through the report list, then the next section is relevant for you.
Use a Cloud Data Pipeline
Building support for APIs is not only tedious but it is also extremely time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. Engaging analysts or developers in writing support for these APIs takes away their time from more revenue generating endeavours. Leveraging an eCommerce data pipeline like Daton significantly simplifies and accelerates the time it takes to build automated reporting. Daton supports automated extraction and loading of Bing Ads data into cloud data warehouses like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Oracle Autonomous DB.
Configuring data replication on Daton on only takes a minute and a few clicks. Analysts do not have to write any code or manage any infrastructure but yet can still get access to their Bing Ads data in a few hours. Any new data is generated is automatically replicated to the data warehouse without any manual intervention.
Daton supports replication from Bing Ads to a cloud data warehouse of your choice, including Snowflake. Daton’s simple and easy to use interface allows analysts and developers to use UI elements to configure data replication from Bing Ads data into Snowflake. Daton takes care of
- Authentication
- Rate limits,
- Sampling,
- Historical Data Load,
- Incremental Data Load,
- Table Creation,
- Table Deletion,
- Table Reloads,
- Refreshing Access Tokens,
- Notifications
and many more important functions that are required to enable analysts to focus on analysis rather than worry about the data that is delivered for analysis.
Daton – The Data Replication Superhero
Daton is a fully-managed, cloud data pipeline that seamlessly extracts relevant data from many data sources for consolidation into a data warehouse of your choice for more effective analysis. The best part analysts and developers can put Daton into action without the need to write any code.
Here are more reasons to explore Daton:
- Support for 100+ data sources – In addition to Bing Ads, Daton can extract data from a varied range of sources such as Sales and Marketing applications, Databases, Analytics platforms, Payment platforms and much more. Daton will ensure that you have a way to bring any data to Snowflake and generate relevant insights.
- Robust scheduling options allows users to schedule jobs based on their requirements using a simple configuration steps.
- Support for all major cloud data warehouses including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, PostgreSQL and more.
- Low Effort & Zero Maintenance – Daton automatically takes care of all the data replication processes and infrastructure once you sign up for a Daton account and configure the data sources. There is no infrastructure to manage or no code to write.
- Flexible loading options allows to you optimize data loading behavior to maximize storage utilization and also easy of querying.
- Enterprise grade encryption gives your peace of mind
- Data consistency guarantee and an incredibly friendly customer support team ensure you can leave the data engineering to Daton and focus instead of analysis and insights!
- Enterprise-grade data pipeline at an unbeatable price to help every business become data-driven. Get started with a single integration today for just $10 and scale up as your demands increase.
For all sources, check our data connectors page.
Interested in learning more about data warehouses, their architecture, and how they are priced? Checkout our other articles.
We Saras, can help with our eCommerce-focused Data pipeline (Daton) and custom ML and AI solutions to ensure you always have the correct data at the right time. Request a demo and envision how reporting is supercharged with a 360° view.
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