Custom Data Sources

Lytics can onboard and process data from custom data sources helping to further build out user profiles with data specific to your company. Custom data is often the most valuable for your marketing efforts as it grants the ability to personalize web experiences and build meaningful audiences using data unique to your users.

Unlike data collected from web activity and integrated marketing tools which automatically map data to Lytics user fields, custom data sources require an evaluation, planning, and implementation process. The Lytics team will assist in identifying use cases and the data fields needed to achieve them. Our CE team will then produce a data dictionary that describes the structure, format, location and relationship of your data. The data dictionary is used to write Lytics Query Language (LQL) queries which map custom data fields to Lytics user fields as it is ingested. Finally your custom data is uploaded to the Lytics and made available for use to build audiences, personalize web experiences, or export to marketing tools.

Data can be uploaded to Lytics via CSV SFTP upload or our data upload API. Lytics can ingest both large, bulk uploads of user data and smaller, real-time uploads of event data. Before uploading data to Lytics, ensure all necessary LQL queries are in place or it will not be mapped to Lytics user fields, preventing identity resolution. When considering large uploads to the Lytics platform, be aware that this may cause an event backlog on your account. This occurs as our platform queues incoming information as it processes the content of the upload. Processing begins when the upload completes and can last considerably longer than the initial upload. This can result in a delay in seeing information from other sources in your account as well as delays in any outbound, trigger-based workflows. For formatting recommendations see Custom Data Ingestion.