Customer Data Platform
Buyer’s Guide
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide Overview
O V E R V I E W
Until recently, the easiest way to answer “what is
a Customer Data Platform?” was to list a slew of
related acronyms to highlight what a CDP isn’t. A
Customer Data Platform is not a Data Management
Platform (DMP), Digital Experience Platform (DEP),
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Tag
Management System (TMS). While highlighting
what a CDP isn’t may be helpful, you shouldn’t need
a Ph.D. in marketing technologies just to learn what,
in fact, a Customer Data Platform actually is.
Rest assured that you’re not alone in trying to understand what a
Customer Data Platform is. In the last year, the number of vendors in
the industry has doubled,¹ and Gartner client inquiries on the topic
have quadrupled.2
This guide will not only help you understand what a Customer Data
Platform is, but it will also highlight:
Why you should use a Customer Data Platform
When is the right time to invest in a Customer Data Platform
How to find the right Customer Data Platform for your business
Best of all, you only need to remember a single acronym to use this
guide: Customer Data Platform (CDP).
1 Customer Data Platform Institute, 2018 CDP Industry Update
2 Gartner, A Marketer's Guide to What Is — and Isn't — a Customer
Data Platform
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide Table of contents
What is a Customer Data Platform?
How do you find the right Customer Data Platform?
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Table of
contents
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide What is a Customer Data Platform?
What is a Customer
Data Platform?
Four common elements of a CDP
Based on research from Gartner, the CDP Institute, and customer
discussions, there are four common elements that all true CDPs must offer.
This will likely change as the industry evolves, but here is the leading
definition of Customer Data Platform today:
A Customer Data Platform is a system that enables you to
Collect data from every customer touch point,
Unify profiles and store customer data in one place,
Segment customers into meaningful audiences, and
Activate customer data and audiences in tools needed to
drive personalization and revenue.
Why use a Customer Data Platform?
Your customers interact with your brand in a variety of places. In a single
day, a customer may discover your business through an ad on Facebook,
download your app to browse products, and then decide to purchase
something on their laptop later that night.
This valuable data is siloed in disparate tools, making it difficult to
understand exactly who your customers are and what motivates their
actions. A Customer Data Platform aggregates and unifies data across
every touch point, so you can understand how each part of the customer
journey impacts revenue.
By taking a unified approach to data collection, your engineering team
can save months of time spent integrating each marketing and analytics
technology separately. Once your data is unified, you can use a CDP to
build actionable segments to personalize every customer interaction. By
creating target audiences with a CDP instead of your end tools, you can
keep your segmentation rules and messaging consistent across channels.
With over 80 companies claiming to be Customer Data
Platforms, it’s important to have a clear definition of what
a Customer Data Platform is so you can accurately
evaluate and categorize different vendors.
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide What is a Customer Data Platform?
Infrastructure for your customer data
Instead of a standalone analytics tool or marketing technology, think of
a Customer Data Platform as the foundation or infrastructure for your
customer data. Your CDP should make your tools, and the teams that use
them, even better. Here’s how:
When is the right time to invest in a
Customer Data Platform?
If you’re still not sure, here are a few signs that your company would benefit
from investing in a Customer Data Platform:
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Trust that your data is consistent in every tool
Get your teams on the same page with standard data tracking that feeds all
of your integrations and tools.
Understand every customer touch point
Centralize siloed data from your email, payment, CRM systems, and more
into a single platform for analysis.
Adopt new marketing technology quickly
Empower business teams with the flexibility to use new vendors right away,
rather than waiting for long integration projects.
Focus engineers on your core product
Use a single platform for data collection and distribution, so you can focus
your engineering resources on your core product.
You want to consolidate all customer data into a single place
You’re searching for a granular understanding of your customers
You’re thinking about switching analytics or marketing vendors
You want to personalize customer experiences across all of your channels
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide How do you find the right Customer Data Platform?
How do you find
the right Customer
Data Platform?
Once you’ve decided to invest in a Customer Data
Platform, your next step is to find the right CDP for
your business requirements. Here are nine criteria
to consider:
Omni-channel data collection
High-quality data integrations
Accurate profile unification
Custom audience segmentation
Advanced data controls
Proven reliability and company trajectory
Rigorous security and privacy practices
Raw data access
Cross-functional utility
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Omni-channel data collection
Your Customer Data Platform should enable you to collect data
from every channel and platform where customers engage with
your business. This includes your owned platforms like your
website and mobile apps. It also includes your advertising
channels, as well as your email, CRM, and payments systems.
Most importantly, your CDP should enable you to collect
customer data from your servers for greater reliability
and accuracy.
W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
A Customer Data Platform is most useful when it enables you
to capture complete customer data from wherever your
customers interact with your brand.
Your CDP should enable you to collect first-party data from the
following sources:
Website
Javascript or other website tagging option
Mobile
iOS, Android, AMP, etc.
Servers
NET, Clojure, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Pixels, Python, Ruby, etc.
CRM systems
Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.
Payments systems
Stripe, Amazon Payments, etc.
Attribution platforms
AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, Tune, etc.
Email systems
MailChimp, SendGrid, Marketo, etc.
Advertising campaigns
Facebook, Google AdWords, etc.
Help desk systems
Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, etc.
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W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
When it comes to evaluating a CDP’s integrations, quality and ease
of use are just as important as quantity. Make sure your CDP offers
the following:
High-quality data integrations
Your CDP should serve as the technology layer between your
digital properties and customer data tools. This means a CDP
should enable you to collect a master set of customer data and
then activate that data in the tools your team relies on. The
promise of a CDP is only realized if it’s easy for you to get these
new tools set up.
A core competency of a CDP is the ability to easily route data
to the tools you use. Once setup, your CDP should allow you to
easily turn on and off new integrations – think of your CDP as
the last integration you ever have to do.
The ability to turn on new integrations without needing to add
duplicative tracking code or SDKs
A short setup flow and comprehensive documentation per
integration, so you can get up and running with new tools faster
An extensive integration catalog across a diverse set of categories
(analytics, advertising, email, etc.)
Server-side integration components so you can remove code from
your applications
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W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
Accurate profile unification
Your Customer Data Platform should be customer-centric and
provide you with a single view of each customer across all of your
touch points. This means it can accurately unify a customer’s
identity across different channels into a single profile. These
profiles should be high fidelity enough to deliver tailored
messaging across in-app, email, advertising, and push
notification channels.
You need a unified customer profile to understand the
entire customer journey and accurately build audiences to drive
personalization. If your CDP matches on “fuzzy” data, you can
only send ads and not email or push notifications based on user
profiles. Consumers expect that you accurately understand their
history when you communicate via these channels.
Your CDP should unify customer data without any manual
input. Here are key features to look for:
Unification across all data sources: web, mobile, servers, and more
Historical data storage so your customer profiles can become more
complete over time
Deterministic matching for more accurate unification (probabilistic
matching can be less reliable)
An API to programmatically access customer profiles and personalize
your on-site and in-app experience
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W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
If you plan on using your CDP for audience segmentation, here is what
you should look for:
Custom audience segmentation
CDPs are uniquely situated to create custom audiences based on
any customer data you have collected. Your CDP should make
it easy to activate these audiences across your advertising
networks, marketing tools, and owned applications.
Without a centralized audience manager, most marketing teams
don’t refresh their segments, overspend on advertising, and send
irrelevant emails. If you are interested in driving personalization,
make sure your CDP can synthesize raw data into traits and
actions for each customer.
An interface that enables you to create and manage segments based
on customer attributes or behavior
The ability to enrich customer profiles with custom attributes to
enable one-to-one personalization
Audience integrations that enable you to activate your audiences for
cross-channel personalization
The ability to compute segments based on historical data
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Advanced data controls
Not every integration needs to receive every piece of data. Your
CDP should make it easy for you to control and visualize what
data is sent to which integrations and data warehouses. Many
CDPs also offer data replay, which is a feature for backfilling
historical data into new tools or warehouses.
W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
Data-driven decision making is only possible when you have
clean and accurate data. With fine-tuned controls, you can also
save money on other software contracts by only sending the
data you need.
In addition to making it easy to understand where you’re collecting data
from and where you’re routing it to, make sure your CDP offers the
following features:
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Data filters to send customer data to specific integrations without
updating your code
The ability to block, or disable, events without making changes to
your implementation
A visual schema to manage your data from a single UI
Historical data replay to backfill historical data into new tools or
recover data when other tools experience downtime
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Proven reliability and
company trajectory
As the single point of collection for customer data, make sure
your CDP offers battle-tested reliability features to ensure data
deliverability and durability. It’s also important to invest in a CDP
that’s not only going to be around for the long haul, but that will
also grow and scale with your company.
Your CDP should offer the following reliability features:
Here are positive signs that a CDP has a solid trajectory:
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W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
As the infrastructure for your customer data, it is critical that
your CDP invests in features to protect against data loss.
99%+ data delivery rate (most CDPs offer a public status page)
A proven track record of supporting sustained bursts of traffic
Fault tolerant libraries that batch, de-duplicate, and retry messages,
so you never lose any data
Partner API monitoring with data backfill (replay) capabilities for
when end-tools experience downtime
A strong engineering team with continuous investment in
engineering and product
Check out the “careers” page on a vendor’s website for insight
into its hiring plan
A growing customer roster with reputable brands you trust
Most vendors include this on their website, or you can use
Datanyze for information on market share
Reputable investors and board members
It’s a good sign if investors from earlier rounds continue to invest
in the company
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Your CDP should take a holistic approach to security and privacy.
This means the platform provides the following:
Rigorous security and privacy practices
Customer data can be a liability if not properly secured through all
of the systems where you use it. As a result, your CDP must take the
responsibility of managing your data seriously and invest heavily
in security.
W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
A single data breach exposes your company to legal and financial
risks. More importantly, you risk damaging your customers’ trust
if you don’t take adequate steps to protect their privacy.
Data encryption over the Internet and at rest
Regular internal and external security evaluations
Role-based permissions, including read-only access
Single sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication
Data privacy features to enable GDPR compliance
(user data deletion, suppression, etc.)
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For easy access to your data, make sure your CDP offers the following:
Raw data access
Your CDP should make it easy for you to access your raw data at
any time. This lets you use data in the tools and systems you need to
answer any question about your customers. Without a CDP
offering these systems, it’s likely your team will duplicate customer
data infrastructure internally.
W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
The first-party data you collect with a CDP should be thought of
as a competitive advantage, and raw data access ensures you can
leverage this advantage. Raw data is often used for advanced
marketing attribution and product analytics, as well as machine
learning applications.
Raw data integrations, like Amazon S3 or Webhooks for building
internal systems on top of your customer data
Data warehouse integrations, like Redshift, BigQuery, Postgres, or
Snowflake for advanced analysis
A schema that’s optimized for analytics and dynamically updated
based on your tracking
Custom syncing schedule to choose how frequently you want to
refresh your data
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Cross-functional utility
Customer Data Platforms should offer features and support use cases
that are valuable to a diverse set of stakeholders. When selecting a CDP,
make sure that it benefits your marketing, engineering, product,
and analytics teams.
W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S
Your Customer Data Platform shouldn’t be thought of as a
resource for just one team.
Make sure your CDP has the following features to benefit
these teams:
Marketing
A simple user interface to enable integrations and create or manage
audience segmentation
Integrations for advertising, deep linking, email, personalization, and
push notifications
Data sources to collect data from advertising, email, and
mobile platforms
Engineering
Debugging tools to make sure data is tracked correctly
Open-source libraries and integrations for transparency you can trust
Easy implementation with straightforward libraries
and documentation
Product
Lightweight SDKs and server-side integrations to remove
duplicative tracking code and improve performance
In-app announcement, A/B testing, funnel analytics, and
survey integrations
Data warehousing integrations for advanced analytics
Analytics
Turnkey data warehouse integrations with a fully
managed schema
Out-of-the-box analytics integrations to set up self-service metrics
for business stakeholders
A wide array of data sources, including web, mobile, server, CRM,
help desk, and payments, to analyze the complete
customer journey
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Customer Data Platform Buyer's Guide Learn how Segment stacks up
Learn how Segment
stacks up
Whether you’re just starting to explore Customer Data Platforms or
you are ready to evaluate potential vendors, we’re here to help.
We’d be happy to share what makes Segment unique and how we
stack up against these criteria. Drop us a line at segment.com/demo.
A B O U T S E G M E N T
Segment provides the customer data infrastructure that businesses use to put their customers
first. With Segment, companies can collect, unify, and connect their first-party data to over 200
marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. Today, over 19,000 companies across 71
countries use Segment, from fast-growing businesses such as Atlassian, Bonobos, and Instacart
to some of the world’s largest organizations like Levi’s, Intuit, and Time. Segment enables these
companies to achieve a common understanding of their users and make customer-centric decisions.