Building our Always-on MMM with automated Data Ingestion
Automating data ingestion drastically improves marketing analysis, speeding up workflows, improving data quality, and enabling more robust modelling. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot that goes into making automation work: from engineering skills to infrastructure, the process is more than just plugging in an API.
Linea’s advantage is consistency
Manually wrangling spreadsheets from different teams leads to delays and errors. Automated pipelines, on the other hand, ensure fresh, reliable data flows regularly into your marketing models. This is particularly essential for time-sensitive methods, such as Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), where even small delays or data mismatches can significantly distort results.
Capturing all drivers of business
Marketing data alone isn’t enough. MMM and other advanced measurement frameworks also require integrating non-marketing data such as:
- Historical sales
- Pricing changes
- Competitor media activity
- Macroeconomic indicators
- Weather patterns
The ideal solution is to ingest all of this through APIs, which offer real-time access, strong security, and minimal manual effort. But not all sources have APIs available, especially legacy systems or partner data. In these cases, automation can begin with simpler tools like SFTP-based pipelines, with a long-term plan to migrate toward APIs for better reliability and scalability.
The Engineering Behind the Scenes
Automated data ingestion isn’t just about connecting endpoints. It involves:
- Maintaining API connectors
- Building APIs (when not available)
- Setting up ETL/ELT pipelines to clean, transform, and validate data
- Hosting databases and servers that store and serve data to modelling pipelines
- Monitoring and logging to ensure uptime and catch failures early
These are typically the domain of data engineers, but as marketing analytics grows more technical, understanding and investing in this foundation becomes critical for any organisation aiming for reliable, scalable measurement.