Big Data

How to Approach Migrating Marketing Analytics Platforms; By Yogeeta Chainani, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Swaarm

Migrating Marketing Analytics Platforms

With dozens of data analytics and tracking platforms available in the market to support your company’s marketing program, each with their own unique capabilities and features (from business intelligence to predictive modeling), it’s already challenging enough sourcing the right solution for your business. A ‘one size fits all’ approach doesn’t work when it comes to selecting the right data analytics and tracking platform for your business, and your needs are likely to change as your business scales, or perhaps expand into new markets or verticals.

Even when it’s clearly time to make a change, and there is a more useful and innovative tracking platform provider available, many companies will avoid switching to a new provider due to fear of the migration process. This is a legitimate concern as it often takes a lot of manual effort to migrate from one platform to another, and there is still the potential for financial loss from making this platform change. However, these concerns can prevent you from working with the tracking platform that is best suited to your needs and gaining the tools to achieve ambitious targets.

Fortunately, more data analytics and tracking providers are recognizing the migration challenge as an addressable problem to include on their feature roadmap and tapping into more innovative tech (like automation) to solve this today. Here’s how platform migration is changing today.

There are three stages of the data analytics and tracking migration process with varying degrees of difficulty. 

  1. First, you as a company needs to migrate all the data you have from one platform to another. This is the most complex step in the process for the company that wants to change platforms. 
  2. Second, the advertiser needs to change postback links within their platform. This is a much smaller task but is still just as necessary to successfully switch platforms without losing data and revenue.
  3. Third, the publisher will need to connect with a different API. This will be an easier step if you are moving to a platform the publisher has already integrated for other clients.

With these three essential steps in mind, here’s how innovation is making it easier than ever before to switch analytics and tracking platform providers.

Tapping into Automation

Automation should be the first step – migrating all of your data – to make this as easy as possible. Affiliate networks don’t often have their own in-house tech teams. This means there isn’t someone who can automate any part of the migration process, such as saving offers and advertisers, and pushing this data onto a new platform. With a choice between doing this work manually or staying with their old provider, a lot of companies unfortunately opt to stay with an inferior service. This is where the power of automation can help. A provider that automates the migration of your data from one platform to another, simplifying the most complex part of this process, should be high on your list. This includes all of your offers and advertisers (including tracking links, marcos and postback link marcos). This process should literally be completed at the click of a button, making your data available on the platform as quickly as possible.

Running Platforms in Parallel

Today, most companies will run two platforms at the same time during a migration for a long period of time, which unfortunately means paying twice for the same service, but it ensures that no traffic or postbacks are lost. Thanks to automation and innovative solutions, today companies can run two platforms in parallel which guarantees no loss of revenue in the migration process

The first step, migrating your data, is automated but it may take time for advertisers to change postback links and your publishers to connect with a different API. So, running two platforms in parallel can be very helpful for this process – for instance, perhaps there are late postbacks that are pertaining to the traffic from the old platform, so you’ll want these to be forwarded to your previous provider until the migration is complete. This ensures you don’t lose any data or revenue throughout the process.

Yogeeta Chainani is the co-founder and CPO of Swaarm, an affordable, easy-to-use platform for successfully measuring, optimizing, and automating your marketing efforts.

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