How Wärtsilä Uses Dataddo’s UI and API to Make the Most of Marketing Data

Main Challenge

Wärtsilä, a major manufacturer of industrial technology and solutions for the marine and energy markets, had outgrown the agency they were using to run and report on marketing campaigns, and needed to bring management of their marketing data back in-house. What started as a basic deployment of Dataddo to solve a common reporting problem turned into Wärtsilä’s ability to make the absolute most of their marketing data.

Key Outcomes

• 1 source of truth for all marketing data: AWS S3. 
• More time spent using data to drive profits.
• Eliminated costs of external data management.
• Reliable dashboards for marketing and sales teams.

Solution

• Robust integration functionality, wide connector portfolio, and streamlined UI enable flexible combination of sources with BI tools and databases.
• Dataddo’s ability to build new connectors in 10 days ensures that Wärtsilä is never “stuck” with an unsupported data source.
• Access to full REST API lets Wärtsilä’s data team custom-automate key integration workloads.
• Universal JSON connector enables extraction of custom datasets.

“[Dataddo] enabled me to gather the data from all these different platforms and saved me a lot of time - it made my life easier.” - Sujata Karan, Marketing Performance Analyst at Wärtsilä.

Full Case Study

Wärtsilä is a major manufacturer of industrial technology and solutions for the marine and energy markets. Founded in Helsinki, Finland, nearly 200 years ago, the company now has around 18,000 employees on all seven continents.

This is the story of how they’ve used Dataddo to enable their marketing and sales teams to drive more profits with data—starting from initial deployment via Dataddo’s UI, through adoption of Headless Data Integration via Dataddo’s full REST API.

The Initial Challenge: Bringing Marketing Analytics In-House

Wärtsilä’s marketing team used to rely on an external agency to manage and report on campaigns. This worked well for a while, but as the company expanded its online marketing efforts, two problems began to emerge.

First, the cost of running campaigns externally was becoming unsustainable. Second, lack of full control over marketing data was negatively affecting cooperation between Wärtsilä’s sales and marketing teams (they were unable to directly interact with their data, and there was no single source of truth).

It was clear that marketing dashboards needed to be managed in-house.

The data analytics team at Wärtsilä knew that manual integration was not an option, and they didn’t want to spend their engineering resources building and automating integrations themselves. So, they started demoing data integration platforms that could connect their marketing sources to their dashboarding tool: Google’s Looker Studio.

The Initial Solution: Custom Connectors in 10 Days

Wärtsilä initially settled on Dataddo for its expansive connector portfolio and its willingness to build new connectors quickly.

Most of Wärtsilä’s marketing data sources were popular services like Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Ads. But Wärtsilä couldn’t find a vendor with a connector for  GoToWebinar—their webinar platform and a major source of marketing-qualified leads. 

Whereas other companies quoted a minimum turnaround time of 3 months to develop such a connector, Dataddo was able to create it for Wärtsilä in under 10 business days.

"Dataddo has the flexibility we value; even if we wanted to develop a new connector, their turnaround time was fast. I thought that was pretty impressive,” said Sujata Karan, Marketing Performance Analyst at Wärtsilä.

The Next-Phase Solution: Centralizing Data in AWS

After successfully eliminating the costs of external data management and increasing the reliability of their dashboards, Wärtsilä’s marketing team was able to scale up their marketing efforts. Naturally, the volume of data they were working with soon exceeded what direct app-to-dashboard connections could handle. 

Wärtsilä’s data team therefore decided to start using Dataddo’s ETL capabilities to centralize the data in AWS. With ease, they redirected existing pipelines from Looker Studio to AWS’s S3.

As marketing operations continued to scale up, they began integrating data from other marketing platforms, like YouTube, as well as using Dataddo’s universal JSON connector to extract custom datasets from various sources.

The Final-Phase Solution: Direct Connection to Dataddo’s API

There was still one workload not so conveniently customizable via Dataddo’s user interface: the loading of historical data from Google Analytics.

Due to a limitation of Google’s API, it’s usually not possible to get granular historical data from Google Analytics if you load it in larger intervals. For example, if you require lots of dimensions and want to load historical data in 30-day intervals, there will be too many records to process, so Google will simply provide a “sample” of the data from that period. These samples are, unfortunately, not always accurate. 

The only way to get around this limitation of Google Analytics is to load the data in very short intervals, such as one day at a time. However, this would take lots of effort to do manually through Dataddo’s UI.

To solve the problem, Wärtsilä tapped into Dataddo’s Headless Data Integration capabilities by connecting directly to Dataddo’s unified, full REST API. This enables them to automate the repetitive task of loading data in short intervals with a simple, custom script.

Now, whenever they need to create or reload a Google Analytics source, they can use their script to load a full snapshot of historical data from any time frame, for a fraction of the effort it would otherwise take.

The Outcomes: Flexible Integration of Marketing Data, Accurate Insights for Sales and Marketing

What started as a basic deployment of Dataddo to solve a common reporting problem turned into Wärtsilä’s ability to make the absolute most of their marketing data. 

Once they dropped the costs of external data management and enabled their marketing and sales teams to spend more time analyzing data, it became easier to scale marketing efforts. They exploited new channels, and built a rich repository of data in AWS. As their data needs became more complex, they custom-automated key integrations by connecting directly to Dataddo’s unified API.

Now, they use a combination of Dataddo’s UI and API to flexibly and comprehensively integrate marketing data. The result is unified, accurate insights, for both sales and marketing.

“[Dataddo] enabled me to gather the data from all these different platforms and saved me a lot of time - it made my life easier.” - Sujata Karan, Marketing Performance Analyst at Wärtsilä.