How Product and Engineering Teams Can Launch PPC Software Faster with Shape ADI
Your company has an ingenious idea for a new PPC solution that will help propel your results—or your clients' results if you’re an agency—ahead of the competition. The C-levels have bought in and the tool’s functionality has been agreed upon. Now comes the tough part.
It's exciting to start building a custom PPC software solution. But before anything else can begin, the time-consuming and costly work of building a data foundation must be done first. That means building out one or more ad platform API connections to accumulate data, launching a data warehouse infrastructure to store it, and layering in complex machine learning algorithms on top of it. Only after that would you start on the user interface. And, in order to keep your tool running once it’s launched, you have to devote resources to maintaining and updating all those backend systems as well.
With so much to build and maintain, it’s not surprising why more companies don’t build their own PPC solutions. But, that’s exactly why we launched Shape Advertising Data Infrastructure (ADI). We wanted to give PPC agencies and companies a headstart in building their own tools by letting them focus on building front-end solutions as soon as deliverables have been set.
What is an Advertising Data Infrastructure (ADI)?
The Shape ADI makes building in-house ad technology simple by unifying all your advertising data in one place. Shape’s one-stop Advertising Data Infrastructure combines a two-way API that normalizes data across all major PPC ad networks, a fully-managed warehouse to store all your data, and public connectors to your favorite software tools.
Within hours of activating a Shape ADI, product and engineering teams have access to current and historical PPC spend and performance data across seven ad networks. Teams can begin prototyping, testing, and coding against thousands of data points immediately. This can eliminate months of work it would have otherwise taken to build ad platform API connections and data warehouse infrastructure.
Shape’s flexible Advertising Data Infrastructure allows you to generate new PPC data views in minutes. You can also control the frequency and date range of data collection for any project.
How Does an ADI Reduce Workload for Product and Engineering Teams?
1. Includes Built-in Ad Platform Integrations and Version Updates
PPC data is foundational to building any digital advertising software solution. Before you code a single line of a reporting solution, an auditing tool, or an optimization platform, your team will need to determine the best way to collect and store PPC data (often across multiple ad platforms and ad accounts). This can be achieved by integrating with each platform individually; combining PPC data pipelines with your internal data warehouse; or implementing a Shape ADI.
The Shape ADI gives a headstart to companies who want to start building PPC solutions immediately. ADI users can skip the process and cost of building out and maintaining API integrations and data warehouse infrastructure.
Forget spending months writing API integrations (that need constant API version updates) or determining how to best scale your data warehouse to handle multiple data pipelines. Shape ADI collects and stores PPC data across many major ad networks including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Twitter Ads. Regular version updates for each ad platform are completed by our engineering team and are automatically pushed to your fully-managed Shape data warehouse.
2. Normalizes Data Across All Major Ad Networks
Building out integrations with ad platform APIs is not only time consuming, but it presents another huge headache as well. PPC data isn’t normalized. When you’re building out tools that need to scan and/or analyze data across multiple ad platforms, you’ll quickly notice data formats and fields are stored differently across major ad platforms. This can cause errors and erroneous data to accumulate immediately.
Shape ADI normalizes data across seven ad networks. Engineers can query layers of data across multiple ad platforms and multiple ad accounts with one call (versus writing different calls to each platform individually).
3. No Data Warehouse Scaling or Maintenance Required
Before starting their PPC software build, companies also need to determine the best data warehousing infrastructure for all their ad data. Product and engineering teams must determine how to store and support terabytes of PPC data, along with building a scalable and transparent database structure. Unfortunately, even when those teams are in alignment about the PPC tools their building, we’ve seen data warehouse infrastructure challenges stop solutions in their tracks before they could launch.
By eliminating the work and time necessary to build out complex PPC platform integrations and data warehouse infrastructure, Shape ADI makes it possible for teams to launch ppc solutions in months (versus quarters or years). When an ADI is enabled, Shape immediately generates a Google BigQuery data warehouse. Shape’s engineering team maintains and scales the data warehouse architecture as your data needs grow so your team can focus solely on the hard work of building tools and software.
4. Two-Way API Access Allows Teams to Make Ad Platform Changes
Many PPC solutions—automated reporting or campaign creation tools for example—only need a one-way flow of data into the tool to work. But for product and engineering teams that are building optimization tools, their systems need to ingest PPC data, analyze it for optimizations, and then push changes back to ad platforms. Two-way API integrations must be coded so that data can be pushed and pulled from ad platforms. This can add weeks or months to development and testing since companies need to be confident that the changes their solutions are making will not derail PPC performance.
The Shape API is a two-way, cross-platform API that can be used to programmatically make changes to any search or social campaign. Teams can use the API to do everything from changing campaign statuses based on inventory to adjusting keyword bids to optimize for conversions. Shape’s API, which uses GraphQL, enables rapid development of PPC solutions. Along with support from our engineering team, ADI access includes rich documentation and access to our Forge Query Builder for prototyping.
5. Consulting with a PPC Technology Focused Engineering Team Included
When developing any software solution, engineering teams inevitably face roadblocks and must determine the best way to proceed. If your engineering team doesn’t specialize in building ad technology, working through those challenges while developing against constantly-changing PPC APIs can create big hurdles as well. Likewise, if your company is building something truly innovative in your market, finding resources or peers with advice on how best to proceed may tough.
Enterprise ADI users automatically have access to partner-level consulting services. Shape’s engineering team has spent years focused on developing our world-class PPC advertising technology and have partnered with award-winning agencies to build their own as well.
Start Building Ad Technology Today with Shape ADI
Shape ADI is your team’s secret weapon to building industry-changing PPC technology fast. With Shape’s ADI, every development team has cross-channel PPC data, a two-way API, and a powerful data warehouse right at their fingertips.
Not sold yet? We’ve made campaign-level warehousing and API access free. See Shape ADI in action before you ever commit to writing a single line of code.
Looking for more data views or interested to learn more about what you can build with a data warehouse? Don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation with our engineering team today before diving in.