Glossary/Data & Martech

• Audience Segmentation

  Dividing customers or prospects into groups based on shared attributes or behaviors so each can receive more relevant marketing.

• BigQuery

  Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse, popular with marketers because GA4 and Google Ads data can export into it natively.

• Business Intelligence (BI)

  Tools and practices, such as Tableau, Power BI and Looker, for analyzing business data and presenting it in reports and dashboards.

• Composable CDP

  A customer data platform approach built on a company's existing data warehouse, using modular tools like reverse ETL rather than a separate all-in-one system.

• Data Activation

  Putting collected and modeled customer data to work in marketing channels, such as building audiences, personalizing messages or feeding ad platforms.

• Data Enrichment

  Adding information from internal or third-party sources, such as firmographics or demographics, to existing customer records.

• Data Governance

  The policies, roles and processes that ensure an organization's data is accurate, secure, compliant and used appropriately.

• Data Lake

  A storage repository holding large volumes of raw data in native formats, structured or unstructured, until it is needed for analysis.

• Data Lakehouse

  An architecture combining a data lake's low-cost flexible storage with a data warehouse's management and query performance.

• Data Layer

  A structured JavaScript object on a website that holds page, user and event information for tag managers and analytics tools to read consistently.

• Data Quality

  The degree to which data is accurate, complete, consistent and timely enough to be trusted for decisions.

• Data Warehouse

  A central, structured database optimized for analytics that consolidates data from many sources, such as Snowflake, BigQuery or Amazon Redshift.

• dbt (data build tool)

  An open-source tool that lets analysts transform warehouse data with version-controlled SQL models, tests and documentation.

• ETL / ELT

  Extract, Transform, Load (or Extract, Load, Transform): processes that move data from sources into a warehouse, transforming it before or after loading.

• Looker Studio

  Google's free dashboard and reporting tool, formerly Data Studio, that connects to GA4, Google Ads, BigQuery and other sources.

• Reverse ETL

  Syncing modeled data from a data warehouse back into operational tools such as CRMs, ad platforms and email tools so teams can act on it.

• Server-Side Google Tag Manager (sGTM)

  A Google Tag Manager container hosted on a server the company controls, which receives events and forwards them to analytics and ad platforms.

• Single Customer View (Customer 360)

  A unified profile combining a customer's data from every system and touchpoint into one consistent record.

• Snowflake

  A cloud data platform providing data warehousing, data sharing and clean room capabilities, widely used as a marketing data hub.

• Tag Management System (TMS)

  Software, such as Google Tag Manager or Tealium, that lets marketers deploy and manage tracking tags on a site without editing code directly.

• Tracking Plan

  A document specifying every event and property a company tracks, with naming, definitions and owners, to keep analytics data consistent.

• Warehouse-Native

  Software that runs directly on a company's own data warehouse instead of copying data into the vendor's platform.