Top 15 data management platforms
A data management platform (DMP) is a group of tools designed to help organizations collect and manage data from a wide array of sources and to create reports that help explain what is happening in those data streams. Deploying a DMP can be a great way for companies to navigate a business world dominated by data.
The name “data management platform” can be confusing because it comes across as a generalized product that works with all forms of data for all types of data scientists. Lately, however, the term has been adopted by marketing teams, and many of the data management platforms vendors currently offer are tuned to their needs. In these instances, data feeds come largely from various advertising channels, and the reports they generate are designed to help marketers spend wisely.
This market shift is emerging because modern, data-driven marketing teams must navigate a web of connected data sources and formats, including ad marketplaces that dump statistics about audience engagement and click-through rates, sales software systems that report on customer purchases, and websites — and even storeroom floors — that track engagement. All this data arrives by the terabyte, and a data management platform can help marketers make sense of it all.
Marketing-focused or not, DMPs excel at negotiating with a wide array of databases, data lakes, or data warehouses, ingesting their streams of data and then cleaning, sorting, and unifying the information therein. Some are general tools that can be used for any job where data may be gathered, including scientific labs, manufacturing plants, or government offices, as well as sales divisions. Others are more focused on serving marketing teams, offering many common integrations to ad platforms out of the box.
Some DMPs specialize in producing reports with elaborate infographics. Others aim simply to manage the collection and integration of data, leaving the analysis and presentation work to other tools that specialize in data science and statistics.
Some major advertising platforms offer DMPs that house elaborate tools for squeezing the best performance out of their channels.
Lately a cousin of DMP has evolved, called the customer data platform (CDP). These tools are designed to track individual customers, often using third-party data sources for identifying individuals viewing ads or visiting websites. These may use personally identifiable information and create profiles to track potential customers through the sales funnel.
Some vendors and industry observers make the distinction between CDPs and DMPs by suggesting that CDPs focus on following individuals whereas DMPs provide more general and anonymous answers about market segments or large blocks of potential customers. Others believe that this distinction is disappearing and that platforms should be able to answer both types of questions.
Here are some of the best data management platforms available today, arranged in alphabetical order. Many are focused on delivering the best returns for marketing teams but some are more general tools that can handle any data science task.
Any company relying on Adobe and its various advertising platforms, such as the Experience Cloud, can also use its Audience management software to gain up-to-the-minute insights into how various ads or promotions are performing. The deep integration begins with first-party sources, including storefronts, CMS-based web channels, or email campaigns, and moves on to second- and third-party sources from Adobe and others.
Advertisers and their agencies can use what BidTheatre calls a “demand side platform,” a fun name for a system that enables organizations to build and then distribute banner, video, and native ads through their own CDN. The reports BidTheatre generates compares the channels to provide data-driven insight into performance. It’s an integrated solution that both nurtures the creation of the ads and watches their performance.
