Five Reasons to Build your own CDP using GA-4

Customer Data Platform (CDP) have become a need of the hour for every organization. They present a single view of the customers including transactional, demographic and behavioral data. They overcome the problem of data silos and enable segmentation and activation of customer data using multiple marketing channels. Consumers across retail are used to personalization, and CDPs provide a central hub to enable this personalization.

Google Analytics 4(GA-4) has revamped the foundation of analytics data and is a disruptive enhancement rather than an incremental enhancement. Google has moved away from Urchin developed analytics which is more than a decade old and moved to a more user-centric measurement model. GA-4 provides ecommerce managers and marketers the playground to dig deep into user behavior by providing access to granular user level tracking.  The latest edition of Google Analytics is the perfect foundation to create your own customized CDP than rely on third party partners.

For starters the unification of data across web and app properties is at the core of GA-4 . It makes use of proprietary Google Signals to provide a single view of user data across devices and properties. Google Signals is the identity graph of Google and considering the hegemony of Google on the web, the accuracy and consistency of user mapping is arguably the best. GA-4 like previous editions of Google Analytics enables options to pass custom user-id for each authenticated user and stitches historic non-logged in data for the user to that user-id. This provides the ability to map transactional and PII records for the user. Although this has to be done in an encrypted manner to keep user privacy in check.

Secondly, GA-4 provides access to most granular event level user logs free of cost. Unlike previous editions, where markets had to subscribe to the paid version of GA or GA360 which came at a significant cost, linking BigQuery to GA-4 is free of cost till 10Gb of monthly storage. This would for most apps and websites translate to 5 Million event records a month. These event level user logs provide access to the lowest level of behavioral data which can be used to segment users and create further machine learning models to personalize experiences. 

Thirdly, since GA-4 is a standard activation which most retailers and customers cannot do without, making most use of GA-4 eliminates third party tools. Using GA-4 as your CDP and personalization engine, eliminates the need to custom tag the website and integrate SDKs in mobile apps which is a big pain point for a third party CDP or a Data Management Platform (DMP). One time rigorous tag implementation of GA-4 not only serves the analytics and measurement functions but also provides the ability to create a segmentation engine.

Fourthly, GA-4 implementation means complete ownership of user-data in the Big Query cloud ecosystem. This data can be combined with transactional or CRM data within the Big Query environment using the User-ID attribute for authenticated users. This ownership allows the ecommerce managers and marketers to create custom ML models on both behavioral and transactional data with ownership of data being completely with the advertiser/partner. 

Fifth and the most critical factor in a GA-4 Customer data platform integration is the ability to custom integrate the BigQuery data warehouse to the activation partners of your choice. Most third party CDPs provide their native web personalization and their marketing automation engines where user activation and ML segmentation cannot be untied to customize the user modelling. Big Query eco-system provides a lot of ML features like  recommendation engines , propensity models for user conversion and Life Time Value modelling. The BigQuery ML provides the most powerful and customized modelling available across any CDP or DMP partners. At DeepFlux, we have been helping many organizations to set up a CDP warehouse, use BigQuery ML capabilities to uncover insights that go a long way in improving customer acquisition, retention and experience.  Then we help in integrating the activation channels to the BigQuery ecosystem to make use of the user modelling.  

To make use of GA-4 and set up your custom CDP get in touch with us at contact@deepflux.io