Make the Most of Your Experian Data in BigQuery

Experian and BigQuery are a natural fit for data modeling, business intelligence and data activation – especially for retail brands interested in optimizing their overall business performance, acquisition and retention marketing programs, and merchandising and fulfillment operations decisions.

Experian is a global information services company that specializes in providing data and analytical tools for businesses and individuals. It offers services such as credit reporting, identity protection, fraud prevention, and marketing assistance. Experian is known for its role in assessing and managing credit risk, as well as providing solutions for various data-related needs across different industries. BigQuery is a serverless and cost-effective enterprise data warehouse that works across clouds and scales with your data. Use built-in ML/AI and BI for insights at scale. Together, the software application and cloud data tooling provide business and data practitioners with an opportunity to analyze and optimize data enrichment platforms, DMPs and demographic shopper data to drive profitable growth.

Connect to Experian

The first step toward useful, modeled Experian data in BigQuery is to connect the source and destination systems. There are many legacy tools available in market that handle the ETL or ELT transfer of Experian data to BigQuery, and there are emerging tools that accomplish this transfer while providing value-added services like local data logging, and semantic data labeling and mapping along the way – making Experian data modeling, analytics and activation easier once the data is landed in BigQuery.

To connect to Experian, follow these easy steps

• Open SoundCommerce in any browser. Open the “Intelligent Pipeline” application from the top right navigation menu. Select “Sources” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Source” from within the Sources pane to open the data source library.

• Search or browse to find “Experian” within the data source library.

• Complete the “Connection Setup” form with your credentials and token to securely connect to Experian and begin collecting source data.

Log Experian Data for Flexible Modeling in BigQuery

There are a few more considerations to address along the way. First, what happens if Experian is unavailable for some reason, or the data you’re expecting has been purged by Experian? What happens when Experian changes their API schemas and data scope? What happens if you need to reinterpret your Experian data for a new use case in the future?

You’ll want your Experian data immutably logged locally, just upstream of BigQuery to ensure you have the data and data flow flexibility you need to future-proof your Experian data and models. SoundCommerce provides permanent logging of Experian data upstream of BigQuery to ensure failover and future-proofing. Regardless of how you connect your Experian and BigQuery data, you’ll want a data lake or event log in the middle to ensure data integrity and modeling flexibility.

Define and Label Experian Data for BigQuery

As new technologies arise and best practices evolve, traditional integration tools like ETL and ELT data pipelines are giving way to intelligent pipelines that help prep data for BigQuery starting at ingest. Simply moving JSON from Experian to BigQuery leaves all the work for your data team in BigQuery.

As you onboard your Experian data into BigQuery, you’ll want to create semantic labels and metadata that describe the Experian data for easier unification and modeling across other systems and data in BigQuery.

There are third-party solutions that will catalog your Experian data and generate semantic labels and mappings after you’ve landed it in BigQuery. With SoundCommerce, the Experian data is defined and labeled on its way into BigQuery instead, to avoid this costly rework later. You’ll end up with business-ready entities like orders, customers, products and campaigns, making it much easier to model your Experian data in BigQuery.

Map Experian Entities to BigQuery

Once the raw Experian data has been organized into useful entities, it’s time to map the Experian data into useful tables in BigQuery.

Why do defined and labeled entities from Experian matter so much? The main reason is that Experian data needs to be combined with data from other SaaS and on-premise software systems in useful ways. Landing raw Experian data in BigQuery without this semantic understanding means data engineering and analyst teams must do all of the heavy lifting regarding the meaning of the Experian data and the standardization of the meaning of that Experian data from scratch in BigQuery.

Defining, labeling and mapping the Experian data on the way in means much less effort once the data is landed in BigQuery.

Materialize Experian Data in BigQuery

Next, you’ll establish a secure connection to BigQuery:

• Select “Destinations” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Destination” from within the Destinations pane to open the data destination library.

• Complete the “Connection Setup” form to securely connect to BigQuery to establish a secure destination for your labeled, mapped and modeled data.

That’s it! You now have logged, labeled and mapped data from Experian flowing securely to BigQuery.

Model Experian Data in BigQuery

Once you have well-formed entities from Experian onboarded to BigQuery, it’s time to build useful analytical and behavioral models on the Experian data – and combine the Experian data with data sets from other systems in BigQuery for more advanced, cross-dimensional analysis.

You can build your own analytical models on the Experian data in BigQuery using languages like SQL and Python, organized into model libraries in tools like DBT or Coalesce. With SoundCommerce, you get prebuilt analytical models for Experian running in BigQuery, with ready access to the model source code in DBT.

Host the Modeled Experian Data in BigQuery for Analytics

BigQuery supports reporting and visualization through a wide variety of analytics tools including Sigma, Tableau, Looker, Power BI and Microstrategy to name a few. You can build your own dashboards, tabular views and graphs in any of these tools to reveal insights about Experian in your BigQuery models. SoundCommerce provides pre-built embedded reports in Sigma to reduce the time, cost and risk of BI reporting of Experian data out of BigQuery – so you can start making better decisions and taking better action as soon as you’ve connected Experian to BigQuery.

Host the Modeled Experian Data in BigQuery for Campaign and Customer Activation

Whether your marketing team uses Experian for activation – or uses other tools and channels or both to take action on the data – you’ll want to be able to easily move your modeled Experian data in BigQuery to your most important marketing applications.

If you’ve followed the steps above to properly onboard and model your Experian data in BigQuery, it’s easy to use reverse ETL (rETL) tools like Census or Hightouch to orchestrate the data from there, or use SoundCommerce native orchestrations to push data into common channels and applications like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Braze, Klaviyo, Insider or Dynamic Yield to put the Experian data in BigQuery to use!

Getting Your Experian Data Defined, Labeled, Mapped and Modeled in BigQuery is Easy!

SoundCommerce can automate the steps necessary to bring Experian data into BigQuery, addressing the key functions of raw Experian data logging, Experian semantic definitions and mappings, and pre-built Experian data models that are analytics- and activation ready in BigQuery.

Contact us today to get started with Experian in BigQuery!

Technical Resources for Integrating
Experian Data with BigQuery

More information and technical specifications for data collection from Experian is available at:

Experian API Documentation

More information and technical specifications for data ingest into BigQuery is available at:

BigQuery API Documentation