Appsflyer to Snowflake – Made Easy

If you’ve come here, you are probably looking for a way to transfer data from Appsflyer to Snowflake quickly. In this article, we talk about why Appsflyer 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, and 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:

1. Social Media Ads – Some platforms include Appsflyer, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others
2. Digital ads and remarketing – Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, and others
3. PPC – Google ads, Bing ads, and others
4. Email – Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Hubspot, and others
5. Podcasts
6. Affiliate – Refersion, CJ Affiliates
7. Influencer marketing
8. Offline marketing and more

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.

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 channels 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 is necessary for effective reporting, so that accurate attributions can be given and ROIs can be increased. Additionally, and more importantly, hardly any company runs advertising merely on a single marketing channel. 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.

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 replicate data from Appsflyer to Snowflake.

Before we start exploring the process involved in data transfer, let us spend some time looking at these individual platforms.

Appsflyer Overview

Appsflyer is a global leader in marketing analytics and mobile attribution. The platform processes billions of mobile actions every day, to enable app marketers and developers to maximize return on their marketing investments. AppsFlyer’s marketing analytics tools help marketers, UA managers and product managers all the tools they require to app determine customer engagement and measure ROI. The cohort and retention reports, raw data reports, BI support and APIs, live alerts and mobile access allow users to get all the in-depth insights they need to achieve marketing success. It is featured with AppsFlyer’s Attribution, Audiences, Marketing Analytics Dashboard, OneLink’s Deep linking capabilities and Protect360 enterprise-grade fraud solutions. Companies that use Appsflyer typically love :

• Seamless integration with Facebook Ads, Google and Twitter Ads
• Affordable pricing structure
• Helpful and concise user documentation.
• Easy partner integration and set-up.
• Multi touch, exponential, last click, first click attribution models

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.

For more information on Appsflyer Data Connector, you can visit the linked article.

Why Do Businesses Need to Replicate Appsflyer data to Snowflake?

Let’s take a simple example to illustrate why data consolidation from Appsflyer to Snowflake can be helpful for an eCommerce business.

An e-commerce company selling in multiple countries is running campaigns on various platforms and is using Appsflyer to optimize ad delivery. They have different selling platforms like Shopify, Amazon, eBay, payment gateways, inventories, logistic channels, and target audiences 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, or the ad might be focusing on people with lesser buying intent, rendering these ads redundant. Furthermore, on multiple occasions leads coming from multiple channels overlap, leading to incorrect attribution possibilities and thus causing a substantial loss for the company. Now when the decision-makers want to rectify this and optimize their Ad campaigns using Appsflyer to maximize ROIs, they are faced with the following problems.

1. The typical buying journey of a customer is no longer linear. They switch between websites, compare similar products, search Google for promo codes, drift to trusted online sources for reviews, before returning to your website and finally making a purchase; perhaps using a completely different device. Thus, the company needs to decide on what channels they want to sell and how much to spend. Appsflyer attribution data is used in this case.
2. However, there are separate data silos for inventory data, logistics data, which need to be separately downloaded and compared and updated regularly to optimize all the ad campaigns.
3. Again if you want to do re-marketing 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, wish lists, or favorites. 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.
4. Audience profiling data from e-commerce platforms, CRMs, customer support systems need to be analyzed to optimize audience targeting. Some of the Ad channels are dependent on the target audience, rather than their searched keywords or topics, it is essential to have an accurate target audience to get the optimum ROI.
5. 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 numerous 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.
6. The compilation and processing of data from multiple sources for thorough research is a considerable challenge if carried out manually.
7. Finally, and most importantly, not many digital businesses trust the attribution that is received from Ad platforms or CRMs. There is a good reason for it as well, although that is a topic for another day. In order to measure attribution, a data warehouse and an accurate analytics tracking platform like Apssflyer are critical.

For these reasons, top companies consolidate all of their data from Appsflyer and other apps and tools into a data warehouse like Snowflake to analyze the data and to generate and automate reports at a rapid pace.

The more data you can gather and use from different sources in your Appsflyer ad campaign, the more your ad delivery is optimized. All these data can not be natively transmitted to Appsflyer. Such data must be collected and analyzed correctly in a data warehouse like Snowflake before you use the relevant information to run ad campaigns on Appsflyer.

Replicate data from Appsflyer 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 Appsflyer data. You can also retrieve the data from Snowflake any time you want.

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 endeavors. Leveraging a eCommerce focused data pipeline like Daton significantly simplifies and accelerates the time it takes to build automated reporting. Daton supports automated extraction and loading of Appsflyer 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 Appsflyer 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 Appsflyer 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 Appsflyer 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 Appsflyer, 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 allow users to schedule jobs based on their requirements using 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 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.

Interested in learning more about data warehouses, their architecture, and how they are priced? Check out our other articles.

We Saras Analytics, 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.