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Datorama Harmonization:
Code-less, Unified Campaign Reporting

By Ross Jenkins, Revised on July 12, 2022 at 7:26AM EDT

Understanding Datorama Harmonization

A few years ago, Datorama announced two game changing features to help marketers bring data preparation, analysis, and visualization, to the next level.

These tools were Data Canvas and Datorama Harmonization Center, two undervalued features that truly make Datorama standout.

Data Canvas allows marketers to quickly and effortlessly create impressive and customized widgets without having to understand JavaScript or CSS. Data Canvas provides drag-and-drop actions and beautiful out-of-the-box themes, to “skin” dashboards and reports. Decision Foundry excels at developing signature visuals using this feature. Check out our 10 Tips for Designing Better Data Experiences.

However, in this article, we’re going to closely examine Datorama’s Harmonization Center, which was designed to help marketers cleanse, classify, and enrich data for more accurate and meaningful, marketing analysis. Watch Mastering Datorama Fundamentals, episode 4, Harmonization for a quick, visual introduction.

“Data harmonization is the unification of your data across different data sources with varying file formats, naming conventions, and columns, and transforming it into one cohesive data set.”

Understanding your customer journey, and how customers engage with your marketing campaigns is vital to your business. But unified campaign reporting creates a significant challenge when you have multiple regions, buying platforms, campaigns, audiences and creatives.

To accomplish this, you’ll need Datorama Harmonization Center to create an integrated view of your customer’s journey and the good news is that this feature comes at no extra charge.

Before we begin, here are a few definitions you should know.

  • Extract, Transform, Load are database operations responsible for moving your data into a common database. Extraction reads the data in the original database. Transform refers to changing the format for querying and analysis. Loading is the writing of data to your destination database. Traditionally, this use to be the most challenging part of data integration because a single error in any step can create inaccurate or missing data throughout the process.
  • Data centralization is the process of getting your marketing data in one centralized location.
  • Data cleansing helps correcting or moving inaccurate, broken, or erroneous data from your dataset.
  • Data normalization can be used interchangeably with data harmonization. Both make the fundamental aspects of your data the same.
  • Classifications are the field names in your data. They’re the titles at the top of your columns in a table. In other ways, these are what help you segment your data.

What Is Data Harmonization?

Data harmonization is the unification of your data from different data sources with varying file formats, naming conventions, and columns, and transforming it into one cohesive data set. If “centralizing” your marketing data is about putting it in one common place then “unifying” is about connecting it all into a seamless form for analysis.

Consider the LUMAscape, marketing data is inherently siloed and the use of Different data platforms, naming conventions and tagging conventions make it even more challenging to integrate. Further, marketing is a team sport with potentially many players executing your campaigns, websites, events, audience buying, partners and strategies. To organize your reporting across these dimensions you need standardization, and a common key to describe regions, channels, campaigns or audiences, as an example.

Datorama Harmonization Example

Datorama Harmonization examples

Why Harmonize Data in Datorama?

Datorama’s Harmonization Center is a no-code feature that allows you to create consistent naming conventions across siloed data sources.

Datorama was built by marketers for marketers, with a user-friendly data integration system, and an intuitive data model to make the data orchestration process as easy as possible.

This no-code feature blends data for you without the need for technical support, or complicated, custom development.

Naturally Harmonize Data with Datorama

In digital marketing, the same campaign can be active across more than one marketing channel and be associated with more than one data type. So, the campaign entity is available in various data stream types. Mapping campaign values from different sources to similar campaign dimensions — regardless of info stream type, source, or number of sources — can be automatically harmonized at the campaign name level.

For example, if similar campaigns are active on different platforms like Google Ads, social media, Marketing Cloud, and Google Analytics, when visualizing this data, you will ideally see measurements from all data sources for matching campaign name values.

There are several benefits of automatically harmonizing data in Datorama:

  • Quickly structure and organize data to establish clear relationships
  • Seamlessly unify business intelligence from different sources
  • Effortlessly merge multiple data sources and formats for easier comparison and analysis

Why Choose Decision Foundry for Datorama Implementation Support?

We follow a defined process while meticulously aligning with our client’s requirements and approved technical solutions.

We will document, build, and automate a new reporting solution, or extend the value of existing reporting infrastructure. Harmonization can be tricky to the uninitiated, but once we walk you through the process, you’ll easily make edits on your own.

Reach out and partner with an award-winning leader in Visualization and Datorama Data Management.

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