CleverTap is the world’s No. 1 retention cloud that empowers digital consumer brands to increase customer retention and lifetime value. As a retention platform, we focus on analytics and engagement and offer customers enough flexibility to export their data into external Business Intelligence (BI) platforms such as Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Power BI for automation and analytics.
In this blog post, we will learn how to harness CleverTap’s cloud connectors and APIs for this purpose along with the pros and cons of each approach. We will also share some code snippets that you can use as a template and a bonus tip to get custom alerts to monitor your most important events!
There are generally two options for integrating CleverTap with your BI platform:
CleverTap allows you to export your data into the cloud provider of your choice and from there, bring it into your BI system. You can do this via Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud connectors.
Export your data into the cloud provider of your choice and from there, bring it into your BI system.
Here we will take the example of the GCP bucket to demonstrate how you can integrate and automate your CleverTap report. You can also harness Amazon’s S3 bucket for this purpose depending on the organization infrastructure available.
CleverTap provides several choices when it comes to exporting. You can export both the profile data as well as the events data (including customizing the event that you want to export). You can customize the period as well as set up recurring data exports using the steps below. More information can be found in our user documentation.
Choose how to export your data from CleverTap.
Let’s say you are exporting an order placed event to the cloud. This is what your file name for the same event will look like:
Day 1 – 1663664837-1663785000-Order-Placed-20220921-0-0.csv.gz
Day 2 – 1663664837-1663957800-Order-Placed-20220922-0-0.csv.gz
Day 3 – 1663664837-1663957800-Order-Placed-20220923-0-0.csv.gz
As you can see, in the file name above, for Day X, the file name will look like – 1663664837-1663785000-Order-Placed*
So you can use the wildcard characters with the ‘*’ operator to append the data into a specific Bigquery table, meaning irrespective of the value beyond %, append the files in the same table.
Automate the integration of the files in Google Cloud Storage using the Bigquery Transfer Service.
CleverTap offers various kinds of APIs that can help you programmatically generate data in your desired JSON or CSV format to integrate with the BI platform of your choice. Here we will only focus on APIs required for Business Intelligence, you can read about all the other options we provide in our developer documentation.
Check out the developer docs for how to get started with the CleverTap API.
Here are some of the top APIs that can be used to fetch data for independent analysis. Refer to our developer documentation for more details and code snippets that you can use:
If you are a semi-technical person not comfortable with coding we have also created a python code template where you can just fill in the credentials and names of events you want to get and it will create a folder and CSV file with the required events/profiles in your local system. Feel free to copy the collab notebook and make it your own.
For a better integration between CleverTap and other platforms in your tech stack, we provide webhooks. When configured correctly, you can use a webhook to send an event notification to a third-party end-point.
Some common use cases for webhooks include:
As seen in the examples above, webhooks are lightweight, event-driven communication, and may not be the best way to export large amounts of data from CleverTap into a BI platform.
These are some of the ways in which CleverTap provides you with the flexibility to use your data in your BI system for analytics and notifications. And if you have any interesting use cases, we’d love to hear about them. Reach out to us at [email protected]