Data governance

Traditional data governance is a process of standardization that ensures coherence across an organization. This is critical for companies that want to reduce operational friction.

In marketing, data governance is similar, but it’s focused slightly differently. It’s still about standardization, but marketers’ needs are a bit different. Marketers need data governance because all of their analytics tools must be able to read all of their creative names, campaign names, geo encoding, conversion outcomes, and any other metadata required for optimization and reporting in standardized ways. When that’s done, they will be able to provide actionable insights. Without that standardization, it’s next to impossible to slice and dice attribution, measurement, and delivery data to turn data into action.

One partner calls it a view. Another calls it an impression. One partner says a video watch is 3 seconds; another says it’s 15, and yet another says it’s 10 seconds.

Whether you’re measuring clicks or taps or installs or downloads, you need a common language so your database and analytics and make sense of what’s happening. While there are many commonalities, most ad networks and platforms report metrics in slightly different ways with slightly different language and slightly different metrics.

You need a standardization layer for that.

Just as important is a data governance layer for ensuring all the links you create and the campaigns you build follow the same structure, formatting, and naming conventions.

That provides the ability for data unification. It’s also important if you want to be able to combining top funnel ad delivery data from your ad partners with your own bottom-funnel conversion and results data. Being able to do so gives you the most granular insight into advertising success that you can get in the age of SKAN and Privacy Sandbox.

Realistically, you can’t achieve this reliably at scale via manual processes.

Marketers need automated naming and link taxonomy. They also need a way to build in compliance by default to ensure your naming conventions become standard operating procedure.

This is why Singular Links allow you to create links automatically, with all the data you need embedded … and all the metadata appended.

This ensures your tracking codes are properly embedded. It also improves campaign reporting accuracy. And it helps you unify cross-channel and cross-platform data.

Only in this way can you be sure that the results are reliable, and that you can slice all of your data effectively by multiple dimensions when working to optimize click-through, conversions, or ROI.

With proper data governance in marketing, you unlock data-driven decision making capability. Your analytics in Singular’s dashboard or your own BI systems are based on good data, and can provide reliable results.

You also have integrity and transparency in marketing data. Your data structures for marketing campaigns will be auditable.

It’s important to remember that this kind of result can’t get built into your analytics on the back end. Rather, it has to be something that is designed in from the beginning. It starts at the source and getting this right enables maximal granularity of data and trackability of marketing impact.