Automating Digital Marketing Campaigns for MandM Direct

Our impact

• Progressed from a manual to fully automated digital campaigns creation process.
• Enabled scalability to 200+ custom audiences across six European markets, configured for flexibility to add new ones in the future.
• Helped our client to replicate the automated workloads in other markets through code sharing sessions and detailed technical documentation.

The challenge

MandM Direct was looking to automate its process for creating custom audience campaigns within Google Ads and Facebook. Their Data Science team had worked on developing new RFM customer segmentation to aid personalised targeting strategies across its digital marketing. Despite such advances, the Digital Performance team were manually uploading these audiences to Google Ads and Facebook, on a daily basis. With ever-advancing customer and marketing strategies, our client wanted to automate this process with a solution that was scalable to additional advertising platforms and markets.

“Working with Datatonic on this project enabled us to create a greater variety of more complex first-party customer audiences to push into different marketing platforms. This process has helped us be much more personalised in the ad creative we are showing to our customers; helping them to discover the brands and products they will be most interested in. The fact that the audience creation is automated means our teams are not having to handle any personally identifiable information, plus the process runs daily, so our customer is more in control of their data.” – Tom Goode, Customer and e-Commerce Director, MandM Direct

Our solution

Our Engineering team designed and built an automated, production-grade pipeline in Google Cloud Platform to export customer audiences from BigQuery and loading them into Facebook and Google Ads using their respective APIs.

The solution was orchestrated and scheduled to run on a daily basis using Cloud Composer. Google Cloud security best practices were implemented to minimise access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data; this was delivered through service accounts designed with specific IAM permissions. Stackdriver enabled live emails alerting of any job failure, and the full logging history was stored for auditing purposes. The deployed pipeline updates more than 200 custom audiences across six European markets, every day.

For more information, check out our article on automating audience creation.