Build vs. buy: Making the right choice for your marketing data pipelines

When it comes to automatically collecting data from different sources for your analytics and reporting tools, you’ve got two options—build your own data pipelines or buy it from a third-party provider like Supermetrics.

In this article, I’ll compare them to help you make an informed decision. 

• Time to market
• Total cost of ownership
• Maintenance
• Features and functionalities
• Your technical expertise
• The final verdict

Time to market

Building your marketing data pipelines involves multiple steps: scoping, development, testing, and integration. This process can take 3 to 12 months, depending on its complexity and the number of data sources you want to integrate. This can slow down your team’s ability to make quick data-driven marketing decisions.’

On the other hand, ready-made marketing data pipelines can be implemented in just a few days. Your team can get data, find insights, and improve your campaigns almost immediately.

We’ve gone from building our product backlog to going into beta in about four months. Thanks to Supermetrics, we’ve reduced time to market by 35-40%, and that’s being conservative.

David Clevinger, VP of Products, First Tube

Additional resource: Read how First Tube Media builds new products with supercharged efficiency using Supermetrics.

Total cost of ownership (TCO)

Deciding whether to build or buy a data pipeline has many financial impacts beyond the initial costs.

Building an in-house data pipeline means spending a lot of money upfront. You need to pay for development, hardware, software, and data engineers’ salaries. These costs can add up quickly, especially when considering the ongoing expenses of maintaining and updating the system. Additionally, unexpected issues and the need for continuous improvements can require even more budget.

Buying a pre-built solution usually comes with a more predictable cost. Subscription fees often cover the software, maintenance, and support, so you know what you’re spending. While the initial cost might be higher in some cases, the long-term savings from lower operating costs and fewer unexpected issues often make buying a more cost-effective choice.

Maintenance

Marketing platforms’ APIs change frequently. These changes include adding new data and features, removing data, etc. In some cases, you can make a few tweaks to your data pipelines. However, if the change is bigger, you’ll need to spend more time and effort implementing it. It may be manageable if you have 3 to 5 marketing data pipelines. But if you’re a big team running ads across 10 platforms, maintaining and keeping the data pipelines up-to-date will be very challenging.

The last thing we wanted to do is build the data pipelines ourselves. That could easily take 50-100 hours per connector, and then you have to take care of the maintenance yourself as well. We ended up looking for a vendor and decided Supermetrics was the best fit for us.

Jarle Alvheim, Head of Data Technology, dentsu Norway

Additional resources: Read how dentsu Norway builds better data models with Supermetrics and Google BigQuery.

Features and functionality

Building a custom solution means you can create features that fit your requirements. However, this takes a lot of time and effort to achieve. Often, in-house solutions start with basic features and may take a long time, 6 months to one year, to be fully functional.

On the other hand, pre-built solutions are fully functional and tested properly. These data pipeline providers, particularly, have large networks of partners and users who give them feedback, test new features, and request new ideas. As a result, their solutions come with advanced features, such as data blending, AI-driven insights, and ready-made reporting templates.

Knowledge and expertise

Building your solution requires a team of skilled data engineers who know the latest technologies and best practices. They also need to keep learning to keep up with new standards and changes in data source APIs. This can be tough because people often move to different jobs in the tech industry.

In contrast, purchasing a solution means you can benefit from the expertise of a vendor whose main focus is managing data pipelines. These vendors employ specialists who update the solution with the latest features and compliance requirements. For example, at Supermetrics, our bread and butter is marketing data. We do our best to build connectors and features that support marketing use cases.

As a result, your teams can focus on strategic activities rather than sweating over fixing broken data pipelines.

The final verdict: To build or to buy

To build or buy a marketing data pipeline depends on several factors: how quickly you need it, the total cost, the features you need, the expertise available, and risk management.

Typically, companies build their solution because this approach gives them more control and customization. For example, you can follow your internal security guidelines or tailor the pipelines to suit your data needs. Additionally, if you already have a team of engineers and developers, you may think it’s cheaper to take this in-house than pay for a tool. However, maintaining and updating marketing data pipelines has many hidden costs.

On the other hand, buying a ready-made solution lets you get your data immediately. Additionally, since marketing data pipelines are the vendors’ main business, they’ll keep adding new data sources, features, and functions that allow the solution to adapt to your growing data needs. Last but not least, you’ll get support from a team of dedicated and skilled engineers and supports in case there are any issues.

So if you’re interested in seeing Supermetrics’ data pipelines in action, get in touch with our experts to book a demo or start a trial.