NJM Insurance Builds Data Pipelines 10x Faster to Analyze Marketing Impact

CData Sync accelerates NJM’s integration build time, yielding faster data insights at a lower cost.

NJM Insurance is a regional property and casualty insurance company. For personal customers, it offers auto, homeowners, renters, condo, and umbrella insurance. For commercial businesses, it offers workers’ compensation, commercial auto, commercial package, businessowner and commercial umbrella policies.

NJM Insurance is a regional property and casualty insurance company. For personal customers, it offers auto, homeowners, renters, condo, and umbrella insurance. For commercial businesses, it offers workers’ compensation, commercial auto, commercial package, businessowner and commercial umbrella policies.

The NJM marketing team needed to analyze ad campaign performance across more than 10 platforms to understand the impact and related customer lifetime value of each campaign. Aggregating this data presented numerous challenges, chiefly the time and application API knowledge needed to build data pipelines into NJM’s data lakehouse. Facing a potential 9-to-12-month project timeline, NJM’s data team turned to CData Sync, which offered a solution not only to marketing analysis but also to a reorientation of how the business thought about data and analysis.

The challenge: Data integration timeline stretching to 300+ days

The marketing team at NJM had expanded its strategy into a broader range of digital advertising platforms. To understand the impact of its ad spend on each platform, NJM needed to verify how the audience aligned with its target, whether that audience exchanges further with NJM, and ultimately whether those who saw ads became customers. But as data engineering colleagues Felix Muñoz and Ameya Narvekar soon realized, the variety of data points and formatting via API endpoints in applications like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and YouTube was nearly endless.

Extracting the necessary data from each application necessitates deep knowledge of each API, requiring poring over tedious documentation for each pipeline. Muñoz and Narvekar built two test integrations and wound up spending two months on the project, attempting to get the permissions correct, standardize data table formats, and map to their data lakehouse destination. To make available all the data that marketing requested, it would take an estimated 200-300 days based on the manual in-house process.

At that point, Narvekar and Muñoz began investigating a software solution that could provide them the data connections to all the needed ad platforms right out of the box. Ready-to-go connectors would make the marketing team’s request seem reasonable to fulfill.

The solution: Rapid pipeline deployment with CData Sync

To solve the marketing connection dilemma, the NJM data team decided it needed a scalable solution that would solve not only the current connectivity problems but also future integration needs. Above all, NJM needed to dramatically accelerate its project-delivery timeline. The team additionally sought out data transformation capability, technology agnosticism, and cost-effectiveness.

Sync proved the right fit because it met several core criteria. Sync’s low-code/no-code interface meant that NJM didn’t have to hunt through API docs to configure any connections, providing the enhanced time-to-value they needed. Sync’s structure of providing replicated data as SQL tables gave Muñoz and his team a format they knew well and could standardize on. Additionally, knowing they would need to move billions of data rows monthly, Sync’s fixed-cost pricing model based on the number of connections meant they could scale their efforts without exponentially increasing their spend.

With Sync, the NJM marketing team gets all of its ad data aggregated in reports to analyze impact. NJM is also able to ingest policy and claims data into its lakehouse for analysis, as well as other third-party data. This enables it to see a full picture of business performance and better serve customers.

The outcome: From 300 days to integrate down to 20

The impact of adopting Sync at NJM was substantial and immediate. The data team’s estimate of 200-300 days to build the necessary marketing integrations fell to 20-30 days, meaning Sync enabled those pipelines to deploy 10 times faster. And compared to the developer time and processing, using Sync costs NJM 66% less than building the pipelines manually.

With these efficiencies, NJM has been able to accelerate pipeline builds and now uses more than 20 connections within Sync.

“It takes 4 hours max for any client to get up and running, and we can start looking at the data.” – Ameya Narvekar, Data Insights Supervisor, NJM

With the efficiency and flexibility of Sync, NJM is planning numerous other data projects to maximize the value of its data. Within data science, the team is looking at ingesting more third-party data like weather patterns, better resolve data gaps, and enhance fraud-detection efforts. Within its usage-based insurance offering, the team aims to power real-time risk assessment, geographic risk avoidance, and enhanced customer engagement.

To learn more about NJM’s story, watch the team’s presentation from CData Foundations 2024.

Make better use of your data to drive business with CData Sync

CData allows organizations of any size to connect their entire data stack, providing timely, accurate information based on real-time data. CData Sync provides data integration pipelines from any source to any application – in the cloud or on-premises. Want to test it out? Get a 30-day free trial today.