📙Core Concepts
Exploring DinMo's Core Concepts
DinMo transforms all your customer touchpoints into high-value audiences and helps you leverage them in all your activation platforms without code or Engineering in less than 5 minutes.
Using Data in Marketing Made Easy
Your data warehouse is your single source of truth, storing all your valuable data. DinMo helps you put your data in motion and get value everywhere.
Connect your data warehouse, segment your customers to create high-value audiences, load conversions, and activate this data on all your marketing platforms.
DinMo is the piece you need to improve your marketing performance with first-party data.
We sit between your datawarehouse and your business tools and build a bridge between the data and IT domain and the tools that you use. This ensures all your platforms are always connected to the fresh data in your single source of truth.
To put your data in motion, you just need to configure where the data originally comes from, how you want to segment it, and where you want to send it.
Continue reading to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles we use at DinMo.
Sources
A source refers to the data warehouse where all the data you want to get value from is stored. Snowflake, or Google BigQuery are among the most common DataWarehouses. Note that your data always stays in your source, DinMo never imports or stores something from it.
To add a source into your DinMo workspace, you simply need to connect your data warehouse to the platform, ensuring that DinMo has the necessary permissions to read the data and execute jobs.
DinMo uses the source to store some info into specific schemas/datasets:
DINMO_SEGMENTS
: views of the query of the segments and models created within DinMoDINMO_STATS
: tables that contain statistics about your segmentsDINMO_DELTA_STORAGE
: snapshots of a historical run of segments queries that enable DinMo to calculate the changes that occur on a segment and update, therefore, the destination.
For guidance on connecting your designated data source, consult the corresponding section Connect a Source
Knowledge Store
The Knowledge Store is DinMo's version of a data model. It serves as the representation of your business data, defining the data you want your business teams to have access to. Providing a rich no-code experience for business users. It is created and maintained by a data expert user familiar with the DataWarehouse.
Models
Models are the fundamental building blocks behind DinMo's data model, representing specific types of objects. Models define which of the data stored in your source will be available to use in DinMo. Each model is analogous to a table in a database and serves as a container for all relevant information about the objects it represents.
Model types
Models can be either of type Users, of type Events, or of type Custom. The type will affect how data from the model is sent to destination platforms.
Users: models that describe the characteristics users, customers, leads, etc.
Events: models that contain temporal information about business events and transactions, such as user events or sales.
Custom: models that contain any other type of information with business meaning (products, companies, deals), or without business meaning (relationship tables).
Models Relationships
Models are related by relations like one-to-many or belonging to. For instance, the Customer model is related to the Order model, meaning that there is a customer behind each order being made. Mapping relationships between the different models enable advanced customer segmentation. For instance, selecting all customers who ordered a given type of product is a question of a few clicks.
Models Fields
Each model has its own set of fields, which can be either an Identifier, or an Attribute:
Identifiers: These individual identification keys allow you to recognize your customers across all your owned platforms or walled gardens like Ads Platforms. (example: user_id, email, phone, first name, last name, etc.).
Attributes: These are characteristics or properties of a model that can be used by business users to filter entities and create segments (for example: first order, country, number of orders, etc.).
Custom Attributes: DinMo's users can enrich the data stored in their data warehouse by creating new attributes. A custom attribute is created as a SQL query that generates a two-column table: a key that can help recognize customers in the parent model and the value of an attribute in the second column.
Categorical Fields
Categorical Fields are defined by the user during the creation of a model. They are fields which have a limited number of distinct values, for instance, the Product Type, or the Country. By defining a field as categorical, it will be displayed in a much more intuitive manner when creating filters:
Primary Key
A primary key uniquely identifies each record in the model. It acts as a unique identifier to keep track of records and reconcile the data in your segments with the ones in your destination. Using a primary key allows your destination to recognize your customers uniquely. The primary key is generally the email address or a user ID for User Models.
Segments
A segment is a subset of a parent model.
For instance, it is possible to create a segment of “users living in Europe” or a segment of “users who spent more than 100€”, from the Customers model.
All segments are associated to a parent model. Segments hence share the same properties, mapping, configuration, and primary key of their parent models.
For guidance on creating a segment, consult the corresponding section Create a segment.
Activations
Activation is the process of synchronizing a segment’s or a model's data to a predefined destination.
You can configure multiple activations from the same Knowledge Store to different destinations, ensuring all parts of your business are working off the same source of truth.
Sync
An activation process triggers a sync. A sync is a technical term that refers to the operations that will be made on the destination to reflect the changes observed in the segment query’s data between two executions.
Sync operations
When syncing a segment to a destination, four operations can be made to ensure the data within keeps up to date:
Insert a new record and its attributes
Delete an existing record
Clear all existing records
Update a record's attributes
Mapping
Mapping involves defining how fields from a segment should be matched with the standard user information used by marketing destinations. This includes identifying which column corresponds to specific details, such as email, phone number, or last name. Additional custom columns can also be mapped at the synchronization level for destinations that support it.
Sync modes
DinMo supports three types of sync modes, depending on the type of data being sent or the intent:
Full sync: This will insert all segment records into the destination. It is the default sync mode when syncing a segment for the first time. It can also be triggered when the user asks for a full refresh of the segment.
Incremental Sync: This mode is specifically designed for events. Incremental syncs transmit only the most recent event data, optimizing bandwidth usage.
Delta Sync: This mode is exclusive to dimensional segments. It updates the destination in the destination by inserting and deleting records based on calculations of the differences between the segments. Furthermore, it updates attributes of the segment members in the destination when they undergo changes.
Destinations
A platform refers to any external tool or service to which you can send source data. This is where the data is usually accessed and utilized by the end users.
Examples of platforms include advertising platforms (such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads), customer relationship management software (such as Hubspot or Salesforce), or customer support tools (such as Zendesk). Other types of platforms, such as Facebook Catalog, are also supported on DinMo.
A destination refers to a specific target configuration of data synchronization within a platform.
A destination is defined by:
Core parameters defining where your data will be sent. This information cannot be changed after the creation of the destination. Core parameters typically include:
The Destination Platform (for example, Google Ads, or Meta Ads)
The Destination Configuration (for example, the ad account, or the pixel ID)
A specific service. For instance, two distinct use cases can be setup with our Meta integration:
Synchronizing audiences
Exporting conversion events
One destination must be configured for each of the target use cases the user wishes to implement.
For guidance on connecting your designated destination, consult the corresponding section Connect a Destination
As each destination has unique requirements, refer to the Destinations documentation for guidance.
Destination platforms
These are typically where end-users consume data, including CRM systems, ad platforms, marketing automation tools, and support tools. DinMo seamlessly integrates with these destination platforms, providing a unified data solution. To add a destination platform, you establish a connection to the platform authorizing DinMo to create objects or/and update them with your source data.
Destination services
Destination services refer to what you are syncing/updating in a destination platform.
DinMo can update three types of objects within a destination platform:
Events: such as conversion events for Facebook Ads or conversion actions for Google Ads. This is the default destination type of event segments. DinMo syncs events to destination platforms in batch to optimize the data transfer process and ensure efficient handling of large volumes of event data. By grouping events together and sending them as batches, DinMo minimizes the number of individual requests made to the destination platforms, reducing network overhead and improving overall performance. The sync frequency is set when configuring the activation and can be up to real-time.
Lists: in some platforms, they can also be called segments or audiences, such as Customer List in Facebook Ads, static segments in Selligent Cloud, or cohorts in Braze. They are used to indicate membership of the platform contacts or users (ex., HubSpot contacts table) to a specific based on specific rules. This is the destination of User Segment in DinMo.
Attribute objects: such as contacts tables within a CRM or catalog items in advertising platforms. They are dimensional entities that describe an identifiable contact. They contain attributes that change slowly, like (lifetime value, address, etc.).
Default activation settings
Default activation settings simplify the activation configuration process by allowing you to set it up just once, eliminating the need for repetitive configuration.
Default activation settings define how your data should be sent to the related destination. Default parameters can always be changed when creating an activation, but is proposed by default in order to simplify the activation process. Default activation settings typically include:
The identifiers to match your model segments with the target’s data (example: user id, email, phone, first name, last name, etc.)
The attributes within the target to be updated with segment attributes (if relevant)
The time frequency at which DinMo will update the destination
Default activation settings are only supported for audience synchronizations. This is because other services typically involve specific configuration for each new activation.
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