Distil is powered by data. The more data you provide, the more features you unlock. This document describes how to prepare your data before it can be brought into Distil.
Document Audience
While we have tried to make on-boarding your data as simple as possible there are some aspects that will likely need a technically-minded individual to integrate into your environment. Data can be bought in from three types of source:
- Tracking code placed on your web and mobile platforms;
- Backend and analytical Databases
- Integrations with third-party products, such as Salesforce, MailChimp, Klaviyo, DotDigital etc.
Of these, setting up Tracking and connecting to your Databases is most likely to require some technical skills and assistance from your development team. Integrations into the third-party products will at most require a member of your team with Administrator privileges to the platform.
Types of data
Distil revolves around 5 Core datasets, which are described in this document:
- Your Customers
- The Products and Services you sell
- The Content you publish
- Your Customers’ Purchase History
- The stream of Events that make up your Customers’ interactions with your platforms.
Customers is the primary dataset. However many features of Distil require use of your Product and Content catalogues. For example the Distil recommendation engine can provide a set of Recommendations tailored for individual Customers. These recommendations can then be pushed into an email marketing application such as MailChimp for merging into a template. Without the Product catalogue Distil cannot push highly relevant information, such as Product Name, Price, Images. The same is true for Content.
Therefore, the better you complete your Core Data integration, the more Distil features are unlocked.
Getting Started
The goal of onboarding your data is to load into Distil as much relevant data as possible for each of the core datasets.
While a lot of valuable data is held in your third-party tools it is likely that the majority of data loading is done via use of the Database Sync and Tracking API.
A typical setup has these two sources working in harmony with each other. For example Tracking is used to identify when a Customer has logged in, looked at a Product, viewed an item of Content or placed an Order; while the Database Sync pulls in the full details of the Customer, such as first and last name, address and postcode, the full Purchase details as well as granular details of the Product, such as pricing, thumbnail, URL and availability.
Therefore to get started it is worth reading the Database Sync and Tracking sections before putting in place an implementation plan. Integrations with third-party tools can be done at any point in this process, however setup will not be complete (and therefore access to the main Distil application become available) until the Core Data elements have been set up.
If you have any questions regarding this or any other setup tasks, please contact Distil Support – we will be happy to help you.
Next Steps
Once your databases have been configured to make data available to Distil and the Distil tracking code has been applied to your Website, then you can use the Settings within the Distil platform to enable the sync between these datasets and Distil.
Please refer to the enabling data connections document for more information on how this is done.
