TAXONOMY DISCOVERY, WORKSHOPS AND ROLLOUT
Rolling out a rock-solid taxonomy for the UK’s biggest advertiser.
Our customer needed a new taxonomy designed to cater to all digital channels and ensure data quality. We ran a series of discovery workshops to validate and refine the design with analytics stakeholders before configuring and rolling out the Bright Analytics Taxonomy module.
Role-based permissions and approval processes, logical associations between values to ensure data quality, a suite of new naming conventions for all channels, and a massive increase in data quality.
The challenge : enforce data quality, enhance granularity, and meet the needs of a large number of stakeholders.
Our customer has a wide range of products, channels, teams, budget sources, all operating across multiple digital channels and partners. With a high rate of campaign turnover and offer rotation, multiple agency teams and short time frames to launch reactive activity, data quality issues would sometimes creep in.
With many internal stakeholders reliant on robust digital campaign performance data – from teams managing data-day performance through to the central budget planning and econometrics teams – we needed to not only eradicate data quality issues, but introduce a taxonomy that supported new levels of detail to support an ever-growing range of data use cases.
Key challenges
- Multiple Agency teams & stakeholders
- Complex array of products and offers and audiences
- Fast-moving activity with tight turnarounds
- Excel-based naming solution
- Version control issues
- No central process for ensuring data quality
Centralising the creation & maintenance of all marketing naming conventions
We configured and rolled out the Bright Analytics Taxonomy Manaagement module. This is a centralised, web-based interface in our platform for the creation of master data for every level in your taxonomy, association of values between levels in your taxonomy, defining of naming conventions and the generation of rock-solid names, built on this central master data.
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Worked with internal stakeholders and agency leads to workshop and define the master taxonomy and value sets for our customer.
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Configured our Taxonomy Management module with master taxonomy levels, associating permitted values between levels.
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Defined naming convention templates for different channels, with a web-based interface for agency teams to build new names.
From inconsistent names and data quality issues to a rock-solid process and clean, reliable data.
Creation of all names for digital marketing activity was handled through our taxonomy management interface. Hosted centrally in the Bright Analytics platform, this ensured the validity of all names being created. A unique identifier was generated for every name, meaning that if any activity was created outside of our taxonomy framework, it was automatically flagged as an exception for investigation and fixing.
Workflows were defined around our value creation and approval functionality. For some ‘levels’ in the taxonomy we wanted to accept labels created by end-users but to require validation of these new levels by a nominated group of administrators. This would ensure that work was not held up by the creation of new labels, but meant that any approval of new values would be controlled, preserving data quality.
Robust data, clear insights, effective decisions
We eliminated the vast majority of data queries and time spent investigating naming convention-related queries. This allowed teams to work more effectively by building and maintaing confidence across customers teams and agency teams that data was robust and reporting was accurate. QA dashboards and automated alerts meant that an eye was constantly kept on all new activity being created.
Marketing Platforms
The modules that made
it possible
The following Bright Analytics modules worked together to deliver this taxonomy solution.
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Taxonomy
- Master Data definitions
- Permitted value rules
- Central naming conventions
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Semantic Layer
- Taxonomy parsing rules
- Data QA metric logic
- Auditing dimensions
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Monitoring & Alerts
- Exception Reporting
- Automated Data QA
- Automated Notifications
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Dashboards
- Monitoring Dashboards
- QA Reports
- Data Sharing
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The taxonomy is the overall way of describing and breaking down the way an organisation needs to report. For example by Market, Audience, Channel, Product, Creative, Offer message. In reality there will likely be many more ‘levels’ to the taxonomy.
A naming convention is something which is built from the levels in the taxonomy. You will likely need multiple naming conventions – for exmaple a Campaign naming convention, a Creative naming convention. Again in reality you need a range of naming conventions to deal with the intricacies and quirks of the various marketing channels and platforms you’re working with.
Each naming convention will reference different levels from the taxonomy – for example Market, Channel, Audience and Product may be in your campaign naming convention, but Creative may consist of Market, Audience, Product and Offer.
We began with a series of workshops to agree the ‘levels’ in the taxonomy – i.e all the ways our would need to break their data down – and to start to capture the values we needed to report on. At a high levee this would typically be defined by budget sources and the need to report back, but it was critical that we captured the more detailed breakdowns that were needed by channel specialists on the agency teams. Ensuring that all stakeholders were involved, had visibility of what was being created and were able to influence was essential to the success.
As many as you need! We don’t charge by the number of naming conventions you need.
Absolutely. Different permissions grant access to different areas of the taxonomy management module. Amdin users can generate new values, can determine whether end-users can generate new values for any levels, and can also access approval screens to determine if any new values that have been proposed are to be accepted or rejected.
Yes. Each value that you create for level can have an associated coded value. A naming convention can be configured which allows a name to be generated based on selections from drop-downs which show the ‘full’ value, whilst the final name generated consists of codes which can be unpacked when it comes to reporting.
Of course! You can customise every last element of the ‘formula’ for a naming convention, from delimiter’s to coded values, forcing upper, lower case, replacement of specific characters for any free text levels you allow.
Need to improve data quality?
Want to add more depth to your data?
Contact us today to talk about taxonomy management.