When It’s Time To Invest in Your Data Infrastructure: Do You Need One?

Key Takeaways

• It’s time to invest in your data infrastructure when you’re working across many different tools or platforms, can’t easily make quick decisions, or spend too much time on data management.
• A data management platform can help you compile multiple data sources into one place, understand how your campaigns translate to ROI, simplify reporting, and make better decisions.
• When considering a data platform, weigh factors and features like attribution capabilities, reporting frequency, and the number of platforms supported. 
• Popular data management platforms include Supermetrics, Funnel.io, Adverity, Domo, and Fivetran, to name just a few.

Investing in a Larger Digital Marketing Data Infrastructure

As a smaller boutique marketing agency, we like to keep our tech stack as light as possible, but sometimes it’s worth investing a little bit more for the right tool. Despite some back and forth, we found we were at a point where spending on a tool that makes our data organization and decision-making more efficient was necessary. 

If you find that you are struggling to prevent your data strategy from becoming a time sink, investing in a dynamic platform can streamline your process and make you more capable of making key decisions. We can trust our team to use their own logic and reason to compile data, and don’t necessarily need a tool to do everything, but after a certain point, keeping up with our data without having the right tools becomes unrealistic.

If you’re having a similar internal debate with your team, this guide covers some of the key considerations to decide if it’s worth it to press the button and add to your tech stack.

Benefits of Having a Data Infrastructure

A data infrastructure helps prevent siloed data, simplify data management, consolidate, and analyze data from multiple sources. A data management platform helps collect, organize, and activate your data so that you can make better decisions and inform your other efforts.

Some of the key benefits of having a data infrastructure include:

• A single source for gathering and analyzing data across many platforms
• Clearer reporting for clients
• Saving time on collecting and compiling data from multiple sources
• A more efficient process for generating reports and working at scale
• Easier aggregation of data for analysis, decision-making, and campaign optimization
• More options to manipulate data than on a singular Google Sheet 

Signs You Would Benefit from a Larger Data Infrastructure 

Consider some of the following signs as your checklist for when you may need to start building a larger data infrastructure.

1. You’re Working Across Many Different Tools, Platforms, and Service Lines

If you have a handful of tools and dashboards you pull from, one platform can be great for providing you with a single dashboard and a single source of truth. A management platform is especially beneficial if you run several service lines, like SEO, Paid Social, and Paid Search, all at once.

A stronger data infrastructure aligns all your tools and compiles all your critical data for better collaboration and to see the bigger picture. It also drastically simplifies reporting for both efficiency and practicality, rather than forcing you to create a bunch of custom reports.

2. You Need To Have Data Available, But Can’t Get There in a Scalable Way

If you’re struggling to get your data together easily, a marketing intelligence platform makes the process more efficient and more achievable. Having to manually export multiple data points from multiple platforms throughout the week adds up and pulls attention from other tasks. While it may be reasonable for one or two clients, it becomes unrealistic as soon as you start to scale further.

The hypothetical case scenario shows a perfect example of how this takes place in action:

3. You’re Struggling to Get Data To Connect Across Platforms

Some platforms, like Google and Meta, simply don’t like to connect with each other, making outside integrations more beneficial. A third-party tool can help you consolidate this data to paint a larger picture about multi-channel campaign performance.

4. You’re Spending Too Much Time Sifting Through Data

If you find time is your most limiting factor, you need a data management tool that consolidates your data in one place for quick decision-making. Taking too long to sift through data leads to delayed decisions, half-informed campaigns, and ultimately wasted time that could be better spent on other tasks. With the right tool, you can get insights to your team faster, enabling quicker and more frequent decisions on adjusting campaigns or strategies. 

5. Your Team is Spending More Time on Data Wrangling Than Strategy

In the event that your team is spending more time on finding and organizing data than strategy, it’s worth it to pivot toward a more capable data management platform that can rein everything in. These platforms can help you bring your data together so you can actually start putting it to use for insights that matter, like building audience profiles, segmenting your audiences, adapting campaign creatives, and adjusting spend.

6. You’re Managing 3+ Marketing Platforms But Can’t See the Full Picture

If you have several marketing platforms and are struggling to see critical business trends, like audience engagement data, seasonality, and retention, a data management platform may be necessary to pull everything together. A good platform can pull data from CRM systems, websites, and mobile apps to help you see broader trends in engagement and conversion rates. 

7. You Can’t Answer Basic Questions Quickly

Your clients, or your leadership team, will ask questions like, “Which audiences and marketing channels are driving the most conversions?” or “Why did traffic and conversions suddenly drop?” When you constantly find yourself struggling to dig into several platforms to compile the right data points, you could use a platform that paints the picture for you.

A platform can help get you to the answers more quickly than having to bounce between tools and do the final calculations yourself by consolidating key data and allowing you to isolate information from each channel to tell a larger story behind what’s happening. 

8. You’re Struggling to Prove Marketing ROI

Return on investment is the most important part of campaigns to you, your clients, and your leadership team. Without a data management platform to truly prove and understand ROI, you’re likely taking a lot of shots in the dark and leaving your team with unanswered questions.

If you have a hard time justifying your campaign spend or understanding which campaigns are most successful, a data management platform may be necessary to see the audience funnel more clearly and understand the full picture behind whether your spend translates to tangible results. A data management platform helps clarify and trace attribution so you can understand where traffic and conversions are coming from and make better decisions about how to lean into those channels going forward.

What To Look For and Where To Look

Without sugarcoating it, data management platforms and related tools can be costly. Before you spend on a tool, it’s important you know what you are getting yourself into, so you aren’t spending on something you don’t actually need. Consider the following features and options.

Key Features

Intelligence platforms differ most in how they help you consolidate data and the extent of the features they offer. When you pay for a platform, you’re essentially paying for more features and capabilities.

Here are some of the most important ones:

• Behavior or model-based attribution
• Cross-channel attribution
• Platform integration and licensing
• Significant data storage
• Scalability
• Granular control 
• Strong privacy 

Factors like scalability, privacy, and basic attribution are usually the most foundational features for a small to mid-size agency. Depending on your client load or the number of marketing platforms you use, you may not need a full suite of tools, and anything past data compilation may be over the top.

However, if you have a significant number of clients and they work across a wide range of platforms, factors like data storage, platform integration, and number of seats become more important.

Popular Platforms

There is a wide variety of data platforms out there that each offer different features at different subscription levels. You’ll have to weigh costs against capabilities for each. Some key platforms to look at as potential options include:

• Supermetrics
• Funnel.io 
• Fivetran
• Adverity
• Domo
• Stitch
• Windsor.ai
• Datorama

While we recently adopted Supermetrics and subscribed to its more advanced features, there are many other options out there. We like Supermetrics, but we also have gone for several years without a subscription, so you may also be at the stage where a full-scale data management platform is not necessary — it all depends on your business goals.

Is the Price Worth It?

When deciding between various data platforms, price vs. value is the most important consideration. While tools can vary from a few hundred to tens of thousands a year, the features can vary widely as well, and you don’t always need everything. 

Be very particular about which features you actually need and which are extras, so you can decide which are actually worth paying for. If you’re a small agency or marketing manager for a small business, you may be able to get by with a free tool that offers limited seats and only a few platform integrations. Meanwhile, medium-sized agencies may benefit from a premium tool that offers more seats and more frequent data syncs.

Data Management Platform Free vs. Premium Features

Common Free Features	Common Premium Features
Temporary trialsBasic integrationsLimited seatsLimited data syncs and historical data lookback windowsOnline support forums and FAQs	Added seatsAdditional platformsFaster data syncsLonger historical reporting windowsData Blending and ETL A dedicated support team When it’s justified to seek premium features

If you find that a free platform isn’t sufficient for where you’re at as a business, then you can start to consider if you need something more capable for the information and efforts you need. At that point, you can gauge which tier platform makes the most sense for you.

What To Look for in a Data Platform

Factor	GOOD	BETTER	BEST
Cost	$0-500/year	$2,000-12,000/year	$15,000-100,000+/year
Setup Time	2-4 hours	1-2 weeks	4-12 weeks
Monthly Work	8-12 hours	3-5 hours	1-2 hours
Platforms Supported	2-3	4+	10+
Data Freshness	24-48 hours	12-24 hours	Real-time
Reporting Frequency	Monthly	Weekly/Daily	Daily/Real-time
Attribution	Last-click	Basic multi-touch	Advanced multi-touch
Scalability	Poor	Good	Excellent
Team Size	1-3	4-8	10+
Training Required	None	4-8 hours	20-40 hours
Tools Examples	Google Sheets	Supermetrics + Google Data Studio	Funnel.io, Segment, Tableau
Best For	Startups	Growing teams	Enterprises
ROI Payback	N/A (free)	4-8 weeks	6-10 weeks

Our Experience

After realizing we were spending too much time on consolidating data and reporting, we realized a more robust data infrastructure was necessary to keep us efficient and responsive to client needs. We ultimately decided on Supermetrics as our go-to tool. 

Here’s why we like it: 

• It connects the many different tools we use, allowing us to get data where we need it.
• It allows integration between key tools like Google Ads, Search Console, SEMRush, and others we use, with APIs available.
• It features a responsive support team that has helped us navigate any challenges. 
• It saves significant time by eliminating manual data exports and report preparation.
• It is easy to scale for our smaller team as we take on more clients without price hikes based on added data or queries.

We’ve even recommended it to clients because the HubSpot native solution for blending data was not as helpful for what we needed as an agency. That said, your agency or small business may be at a different place, and you may need something lighter for your tech stack or something that is even more capable.

Handle Your Data More Easily with collystring

A larger data infrastructure can ultimately make your agency more efficient in gathering and handling data, support better marketing decisions, and improve your ability to optimize campaigns. If you’re finding that you are unable to compile your data, prove ROI, or meet client requests without losing considerable time, it might be time for a more capable tool.

Our Data and Analytics team at collystring can move your strategy and related infrastructure in the right direction. We’ll help you overcome fragmented data, unreliable tracking, and ineffective reporting by building a robust tracking infrastructure with relevant integrations and identifying meaningful insights. 

Contact us at collystring to walk through your data challenges and start building solutions together.