Information for: DEVELOPERS   PARTNERS   SUPPORT

Getting Started

Onboarding overview

As a Customer Data Platform (CDP) customer, you can access training materials, best practices, and assessments on Acquia Academy, which is Acquia’s learning management platform. The self-paced, electronic learning (e-learning) program helps you get familiar with CDP on your own schedule. The program also helps you develop the skills that you need to implement your CDP successfully. You also get the support of your onboarding resources to guide the way. Once implementation is complete, instructor-led training prepares your team to adopt CDP best practices as you operationalize its use.

Onboarding resources

The following resources are available to support you during your onboarding:

  • A Program Manager - Responsible for the overall success of the implementation, including project management and planning, status reporting, and scope and budget management.

  • A Customer Value Manager (CVM) - Responsible for the overall success of your CDP initiatives. The CVM works with you to identify and refine business requirements, and documents requirements in a Business Planning Document.

  • An Implementation Consultant - Oversees day-to-day technical aspects of the project, including reviewing data feeds, mapping feeds and configuring environment customizations, writing scripts for data transformation, and data reconciliation activities.

  • An optional Marketing Cloud Consultant or strategist - Conveys best practices for utilizing CDP features and capabilities, and provides guidance during onboarding and implementation. They can develop a deep understanding of your implementation to provide optimal support during implementation, deployment, and operations, as well as identify new opportunities for enhanced value and product utilization.

  • Access to Acquia Support - Provides support for any product-related questions that arise as you work with your CDP and proceed through launch.

Planning for success

Acquia has identified that the most successful Acquia CDP implementations have alignment across the project team and organization. Acquia suggests identifying personnel for each of the following roles:

  • Executive Sponsors / Steering Committee:

    • Provides executive leadership for the project

    • Provides support, guidance and oversight of progress

  • Project Manager:

    • Provides project management support, such as budget, scope, and schedule management

    • Ensures customer team completes tasks to completion and on time

  • Business Lead - One main point of contact for the business and marketing team, responsible for:

    • Defining and prioritizing the business requirements

    • Filtering information directly to the CDP CVM

  • Technical Lead - One main point of contact for the larger technical team, responsible for:

    • Defining and prioritizing the technical data feeds

    • Filtering information directly to the Acquia IC

Implementation activities

These are the key activities that are part of CDP implementation. Depending on the scope of your services, you may participate in all or some of these activities:

  • Configuration of one CDP environment to store your unique data:

  • Onboarding to standard CDP tools:

  • Validation of input data sources:

    • Webtag to capture customer and event data from your site

    • Tracker API for custom in-store and SMS events

    • Data feed Data feed to ingest customer, transaction, product, and other data

    • ESP for email events and subscribers

    • Google Analytics for site data

  • Configuration of output integrations

    • Connectors for ESP, Facebook, Instagram, and Google

    • SFTP for direct mail data

    • Display of existing reports

Customer preparation

The first step toward the CDP implementation is to share your data in the correct format with your Acquia Implementation Consultant (IC). Your IC works with your Technical Lead to ensure that they have all the data they need, in the correct format to proceed with implementation.

Acquia’s CDP offers a proprietary extract, transform, load (ETL) process that allows your data to be ingested and mapped to CDP entities through:

  • CDP Webtag to collect real-time data from your site

  • CDP Tracker API to send data via a REST API

  • CDP Data feed for bulk delivery of your data in comma-separated text files via Secure File Transfer protocol (sFTP)

  • API connectors to connect to external systems such as email service providers, ecommerce systems, social networks, and more

To get started with CDP, sign in to Acquia Academy and access the E-learning material, or learn more about: