Integrating siloed data: Springer Nature marketing and sales case study

The Springer Nature Group is an academic publishing company, with brands dating back to 1842, that advances scientific discovery by publishing robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge, making ideas and information accessible around the world, and leading the way on open access.

The challenge

The sales and marketing teams depended on incomplete data, which didn’t capture the entire customer journey due to different systems in use. Transactions and revenue data were in another platform, unavailable for marketing or user behaviour analysis. There were no ready-made connectors to extract this data for use in BigQuery.

The solution

Given the need for API extraction, BigQuery load and then low-level transformation and table join, we decided on a custom architecture in the Google Cloud that included the following services: Cloud functions; Cloud Workflow; Dataform; BigQuery; Cloud Scheduler; Secret Manager and Looker Studio.

The results

The solution effectively resolved the client’s issue by merging acquisition and behavioural data with completely accurate transaction and revenue details, providing a clearer revenue view across all channels. This also enhanced detailed reporting, trend analysis, and improved marketing and sales with better bidding strategies and channel targeting.

What’s next?

The client is now able to do more detailed reporting and analysis, identify trends and patterns in data, and has improved marketing and sales performance with more accurate bidding strategies and channel targeting.