Unify your marketing data with Lakeflow Connect

This is the first post in a new series exploring how Lakeflow Connect brings fully managed data ingestion to every line of business. Each post focuses on a specific domain, showing you how to unify scattered data sources with native connectors and activate that foundation for downstream workloads — from reporting dashboards to conversational analytics with Databricks Genie. We are kicking things off with the most notoriously fragmented stack of all: Customer 360.

One platform, any source

Lakeflow Connect provides a comprehensive suite of fully managed native connectors across SaaS applications, databases, and file sources that ingest your data directly into the Databricks Platform. Each connector can be set up via a point-and-click UI or a simple API. From there, your data is incrementally ingested as governed, managed tables in Unity Catalog, with no infrastructure for you to provision, manage, or scale.

Prioritized by customer demand, Lakeflow Connect’s ingestion connectors span every line of business, including Productivity, Operations, Finance, and — perhaps the most fragmented of them all — Customer 360.

Craft a complete customer 360 with Lakeflow Connect

The modern marketing stack is a sprawl of ad platforms, analytics tools, and CRMs, each capturing only a slice of the customer. Painting a full picture has historically required a patchwork of custom ingestion pipelines and brittle scripts that data teams must both build and maintain. This drains engineering resources and slows down marketing analysts, who need answers fast: which campaigns actually drive retention? Which customers are about to churn?

Lakeflow Connect resolves this by providing built-in connectors to ingest seamlessly from every stage of the customer journey:

• ACQUISITION: How do customers find you? Google Analytics, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, and Google Search Console
• ENGAGEMENT: How do you engage with your customers? Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SendGrid, and Marketo
• RELATIONSHIP: Who are your customers? Salesforce, HubSpot, and Dynamics 365
• EXPERIENCE: How do customers experience your product? Zendesk Support, Amplitude, and Pendo

With this breadth of martech connectors, Lakeflow Connect becomes the critical ingestion engine that powers a complete customer 360, without the integration bottlenecks that traditionally slow teams down.

For example, EcoVadis, a globally trusted provider of business sustainability ratings and supply chain intelligence, uses Lakeflow Connect to ingest its marketing and CRM data quickly and reliably.

At EcoVadis, Lakeflow Connect's HubSpot and Salesforce connectors gave us fast, reliable ingestion of our marketing and CRM data with none of the usual overhead and no custom integration pipelines. Because it supports Declarative Automation Bundles, it fits right into our existing CI/CD processes and saves us a lot of time during implementation." —Milena Milewczyk, Lead Senior Data Engineer, EcoVadis

Another Databricks customer, iManage, a leading cloud-based knowledge work platform for legal and professional services, is also using Lakeflow Connect to reduce data engineering overhead and accelerate their ingestion pipelines. 

We spent months building a custom Salesforce connector on Synapse five years ago. With Lakeflow Connect, I had it set up in Databricks in an afternoon with zero issues. We have 500 to 700 custom objects, with new requests coming in constantly. What used to be a whole process is now just clicking a box.” —Martin Zugschwert, Data Engineering Manager, iManage

Cross-channel ad reports out of the box

Ad reports sit at the heart of marketing analytics, and our ad connectors provide them out of the box. The Lakeflow Connect Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, and LinkedIn Ads connectors deliver report tables with spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions, already aggregated and ready to analyze. Each report lands as its own governed Delta table and refreshes incrementally. The ad connectors support two types of reports:

• Pre-built reports: These cover the most common analytics needs with no configuration needed. For example, the TikTok Ads connector offers a ready-made campaign_report_daily report for daily campaign performance, or a campaign_age_gender_report report to split those metrics by audience.
• Custom reports: These let analysts tailor the exact level, dimensions, breakdowns, and metrics of a report, for more specialized needs. For example, the Meta Ads connector allows an analyst to set the attribution window and timeframe so the data matches how they measure performance.

Today, the Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads connectors also support a managed authentication flow that streamlines setup to just an OAuth sign-in. From there, every report lands as a consistent, governed Unity Catalog table, ready for downstream analysis. To keep things cleanly organized, you can route each ad account's tables to its own destination schema — this is already possible via API, with UI support rolling out soon.

The Krazy Coupon Lady, a leading shopping intelligence company that helps millions of consumers find the best deals, relies on Lakeflow Connect’s Meta Ads and Salesforce connectors to streamline its marketing data pipelines.

At The Krazy Coupon Lady, our edge is turning deals into measurable reach for the brands we partner with, and that depends on well-governed data.Lakeflow Connect's managed connectors land our Meta Ads performance data and Salesforce records straight into Databricks as Delta tables, and we're expanding to additional sources on our roadmap. Because these pipelines are fully managed and refresh incrementally, our analysts stay focused on which placements actually move results, so every campaign delivers more for the brands that trust us with their spend." —Yixiong Goh, Head of Data, Krazy Coupon Lady

One data foundation, every analytics answer

Once campaign spend, CRM activity, and product behavior sit in the same governed tables, that unified data becomes the foundation for downstream analytics. Business stakeholders can build AI/BI dashboards on it, or ask Genie questions in natural language and get instant, reliable answers.

Our new Ad-Genie solution accelerator makes this even easier for Lakeflow Connect’s ad connectors: it refines the ingested bronze tables into silver and gold tables that power an out-of-the-box AI/BI dashboard and Genie agent, all backed by governed metric views in Unity Catalog. To learn more about how to set up this accelerator and optimize your ad spend, check out our step-by-step guide in this Databricks community blog, Tutorial: Transform your Lakeflow Connect ad data into visual and conversational analytics.

Lakeflow Connect is launching new connectors across every line of business, with support for even more Customer 360 sources like Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics! Try Lakeflow Connect for free now and deploy the Ad-Genie solution accelerator.

Watch for the next post in this Lakeflow Connect blog series to keep learning how to bring all your enterprise data into Databricks and give your AI agents the full context they need.