FAQs
Switchboard for business teams - your questions answered
Switchboard’s data automation platform delivers reliable data insights, fast, so you can make business decisions based on up-to-date information. But how does it work? Here are the most common questions businesses like yours ask us.
Q: My team is global, operating with different partners in different markets. This means a lot of their time is spent aligning the different time zones in our internal reporting, which takes forever. Can you help save time here?
Yes, We can build custom logic into each connector we support. This will allow for unique business rules for each unique data source you’re using. And if you need it automatically adjusted to time zones, we can do that for you.
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Q: Can you work with Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube?
Yes. We support all of those connectors, plus a whole load more - see our full list HERE. We’re adding an average of four new connectors every two weeks.
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Q: My Facebook API changes frequently, which means we have to find the exact time of disruption, fix it, and manually backfill all the lost data. It’s a lengthy process that has a lot of room for human error. Can Switchboard save us the time, hassle and propensity for error?
Yes. We send alerts via Slack or email any time an API has a disruption. We fix it and automatically backfill any data needed so your team doesn’t have to.
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Q: We need a solution that will cover all of our partners and we need it to live within our cloud data warehouse (currently BigQuery but we may migrate to Snowflake or Amazon Redshift next year). Can you support all our programmatic, ecommerce, social and direct partners, and help us migrate?
Yes. We have 150+ connectors now and can ingest the data however it comes to you if an API isn’t available. Migration is no problem for us. Many of our long-term partners have migrated their data and we are more than willing to assist/provide best practice during the process.
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Q: We want to test out new SSPs to help optimize our current revenue. Can you help us with this?
Yes, we help customers secure that data automatically. We’re continually building new connectors based on their needs, so oftentimes, the connector for a particular SSP already exists.
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Q: The process of name and ID mapping is driving my team crazy. They are spending hours cleaning up data across our channels and partners before the data can be used. Why don’t ‘Playstation’ and ‘Play Station’ match automatically?
We see this all the time. Each data source reports things slightly differently and organizations recognize, report and name those metrics uniquely. We can automate that clean-up process within our platform so your IT team has time to do more valuable things.
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Q: Google Ad Manager has so much data that we don’t know where or how to leverage it to our best advantage. Can you help?
Yes. Google Ad Manager is one of our preferred data sources to work with. Our team is experienced in leveraging large volumes of data with the platform and helping our customers strategize around how best to use it.
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Q: Our programmatic advertising is covered through one tool, but it doesn’t help with our direct and ecommerce sources so we’re pulling the data into spreadsheets, cleaning it up and then pushing it into graphs and charts. Can you help streamline this process?
Yes. We cover the entire data pipeline to provide a holistic view of all revenue. Ecommerce, direct and programmatic are blended together so you can see how you perform. This also allows your business to develop a single source of truth for each department rather than creating data silos.
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Q: Can you send data from Switchboard into two or more systems or dashboards – for example, can you populate a Tableau dashboard and also send data into our Boostr CRM/OMS platform?
We can send it wherever you need it to live. We partner with Boostr to do just that and help automate the third-party budget process to make revenue recognition/audits more efficient.
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Q: Can you provide data that we are able to filter per SSP or partner? Can you help us unlock the additional data within each of our SSP partners?
Yes. We can provide a holistic report with all your SSPs and enable you to filter between them so you can start to pull more dimensions from each SSP as you begin to ask more of the data.
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Q: We keep most operations in-house because we want to own and control the data. How would this work with Switchboard?
You own your data. We train your team to own the Switchboard platform or we can manage it for you. The choice is yours, but your team will always have complete governance and visibility over your data pipeline.
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Q: Our data team is stretched really thin. What do you need from them during the implementation process and how much bandwidth will that take?
All we need is credentials from your team for the connectors in your use case. Once we have those, we do all the heavy lifting.
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Q: We don’t have an internal data team. Do we need one to work with Switchboard?
No. We can act as the engineering arm of your team. Whether you have one data engineer/analyst or a whole team, we tend to find that most resources are stretched very thin as it is. That is one of the reasons we built Switchboard – to provide an enterprise-grade platform combined with engineering expertise where needed.
Q: When an API changes or breaks, we have no way of knowing unless we are constantly monitoring for it. We then spend cycles figuring out exactly when it happened so we can attempt to backfill the data, which pushes back the timeline on other projects. How can you help?
Our system automatically detects API breaks or changes. We’ll send an alert immediately so that it can be identified and corrected. We also alert you when a credential expires, so you can focus on driving the business forward.
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Q: ‘Pay and pray’ is a common theme across media ad spend. How can you help us track and understand the data to improve our ROI and efficiency?
With the market growing ever more digital, we find the budget rarely increases alongside the partner ecosystem, meaning that optimizing current spend is critical. We can pull granular data from each of your current partners to give you a more holistic view of performance.
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If you’d like to know more about how you can gain a unified view of your data, let’s connect today.