Data Lake

Most marketing teams answer questions by stitching things together. Sales sit in the store, spend sits with each ad platform, opens and clicks sit with the email tool, and site behaviour sits somewhere else again. Every question that crosses two of those turns into a spreadsheet, and the answer is only good for as long as the export is fresh.

When you connect a platform to En Garde, its data flows into the lake and keeps flowing. Nothing has to be re-pulled by hand, and the same numbers back every screen. That is the whole point: one source, so a segment, a report, and an answer from Ennie do not disagree with each other.

• Audiences that stay current. Segments are worked out from your data as it stands, not saved as a list someone built once. Your VIPs, your loyal buyers, the people who have gone quiet, the ones who just bought for the first time — those groups move on their own as orders come in.
• Reporting that agrees with itself. Campaign results, audience counts, and revenue all come from the same place, so you are not reconciling two dashboards before a meeting.
• History, which is what makes trends possible. Because past data is kept rather than overwritten, you can look at how something moved over months, compare periods, and see which channels actually contributed to a sale rather than just which one was last.
• Room to ask new questions. The data is not shaped around a fixed set of reports. When you want to know something you have not asked before, the material is already there.

Broadly, four kinds of thing, and they only appear once you have connected the platform they come from:

• Commerce — your customers, products, and orders, tidied into a consistent shape so a customer from one platform is comparable with a customer from another.
• Advertising — day-by-day performance per campaign and platform: what you spent, what it earned, and the rates that fall out of those, such as cost per click and return on ad spend.
• Email and messaging — what you sent and how people responded.
• Behaviour and activity — the stream of things that happened, which is what makes it possible to say a person did this, then that, then bought.

Incoming records are checked before they are accepted. Anything that cannot be matched cleanly is flagged for a person to look at rather than quietly guessed at, because a wrong customer record is worse than a missing one.

There is no data lake screen, and you never have to think about it directly. You meet it through the parts of the product you already use:

• Audience — segment sizes and who is in them.
• Analytics and campaign reporting — performance over time, by channel and by campaign.
• Attribution — what contributed to a conversion, which only works because history is kept.
• Ennie AI — the answers you get back when you ask a question in plain language.
• Your agents — the insights and recommendations they raise are drawn from the same data.

Two things come with your plan, and they are separate. One is how much you can store. The other is how far back your history reaches. Higher plans give you more of both, and the top plan is unlimited on both.

History is a window, not a promise of forever. Your plan sets how many days back the lake covers, and data older than that is cleared out. If you need something kept beyond that window, export it while it is still in range.

Your storage figure counts your marketing data together with the files En Garde generates for you, such as created images. That is worth knowing, because heavy creative work can move the number as much as data volume does.

You will not be surprised by a full account. En Garde watches your usage against your limit and warns you well before you reach it, then more insistently as you get closer, with an upgrade route offered each time. Only once you are actually at your limit does new storage stop, and even then it stops cleanly rather than losing what you already have. On an unlimited plan none of this applies.

1. Check the storage card on your Dashboard, or under Settings then Billing. It shows your plan, what you are using, and what is left.
2. Read the breakdown underneath to see whether the growth is coming from your marketing data or from generated files. That tells you what to act on.
3. Look at the retention note for how far back your plan keeps history. On an unlimited plan there is no note, because there is no window.
4. Act on any warning while it is still a warning. A shorter version of the same card sits on your Profile page.

• An empty Audience screen almost always means nothing has been connected yet, not that segmentation is broken. Connect a store or an ad account and the segments fill themselves in.
• A newly connected platform takes a little while to appear. History has to arrive before it can be reported on.
• Not every number moves the instant a platform reports it. Campaign figures refresh on a regular cycle, so expect a short lag between something happening and the figure catching up.
• Treat the storage and retention figures shown in your own account as the real ones. They follow your plan and can change, so they are more reliable than any number quoted elsewhere.
• Where your data is kept is our responsibility, not a setting you manage. There is nothing to configure, tune, or maintain on your side.