Insight
When Real-Time Data Integration Breaks: Here’s How to Fix It
30 July 2025 Marketing Technology
Real-time activation sounds straightforward. Connect your customer data platform to your campaign tool, and start sending personalised messages in near real time. The reality? It’s often messier than expected. Why? Because most campaign tools weren’t built to handle the volume and velocity of modern customer data.
Table of contents
Where Standard Integrations Fall Short
In many setups, data flows directly from a CDP into a campaign platform’s database, triggering immediate processing. But when your automation tool wasn’t designed for that kind of pressure – constant read/write operations, high-frequency updates, etc – things start to fall over.
Common symptoms:
- Database deadlocks
- Empty recipient tables
- Failed campaign triggers
- Lagging performance during peak times
And these aren’t just backend annoyances. They disrupt how your customers hear from you – if they do at all!
So What’s the Fix? A Smarter Integration Layer
For one of our clients, this exact scenario played out. Their real-time CDP and legacy campaign tool just weren’t playing nicely together.
After integrating two platforms (in this case, Zeotap and Adobe Campaign Classic v7), we encountered technical issues that needed a rethink.
So, we designed a custom architecture that decouples the real-time data feed from the campaign engine. It keeps the benefits of fast, personalised comms, without pushing the system past breaking point.
How It Works
- Buffer the Data
Webhooks from the CDP hit an API gateway, which queues them. This shields the campaign tool from volume spikes. - Translate and Clean
Functions convert the data into a format the campaign platform can handle (SOAP instead of REST, for example), and validate it before it gets stored. - Stage, Then Trigger
Data lands in a temporary table. Campaign workflows query it every 15 minutes to execute sends—keeping things responsive, not fragile. - Manage the Data
Depending on the client’s needs, we either sweep the table regularly or store certain records for future use, including support for transactional data.
This layered setup solves the real conflict: real-time data wants to move fast, but campaign platforms need time to process. Staging the data and managing how and when it moves keeps both systems stable and the customer experience seamless.
Our Best Advice
- Start with the constraint. Understanding platform limitations helps shape better solutions.
- Don’t force direct connections. A decoupling layer adds resilience.
- Think queues, not floods. Controlled data flow handles scale better.
- Real-time doesn’t always mean instant. 15-minute cycles can be fast enough.
- Design around your existing tools. You don’t need to replace everything – just rethink how it fits together.
Helping You Get More from the Tech You’ve Got
This challenge is bigger than any one platform. It’s about how modern data flows meet legacy systems – and how smart integration can bridge the gap. We help clients solve this kind of problem every day: embedding technical and strategic expertise into their teams to get better results from the tools they already have.
If that’s a challenge you’re facing, we’d love to help.
