Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager) is a web-based ad management system that advertisers and agencies use to manage creative assets and run ad campaigns.

Azure Synapse (formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse) is a cloud-based petabyte-scale columnar database service with controls to manage compute and storage resources independently. It offers encryption of data at rest and dynamic data masking to mask sensitive data on the fly, and it integrates with Azure Active Directory. It can replicate to read-only databases in different geographic regions for load balancing and fault tolerance.

Campaign Manager has an API that you can use to get information about advertisers, campaigns, creative assets, and more. For example, to get information about a campaign for a given profile, you would call GET /userprofiles/{profileId}/campaigns/{id}.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
  "kind": "dfareporting#campaign",
  "id": long,
  "idDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
  "accountId": long,
  "subaccountId": long,
  "advertiserId": long,
  "advertiserIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
  "advertiserGroupId": long,
  "name": string,
  "archived": boolean,
  "startDate": date,
  "endDate": date,
  "comment": string,
  "billingInvoiceCode": string,
  "audienceSegmentGroups": [
    {
      "id": long,
      "name": string,
      "audienceSegments": [
        {
          "id": long,
          "name": string,
          "allocation": integer
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "eventTagOverrides": [
    {
      "id": long,
      "enabled": boolean
    }
  ],
  "clickThroughUrlSuffixProperties": {
    "overrideInheritedSuffix": boolean,
    "clickThroughUrlSuffix": string
  },
  "defaultClickThroughEventTagProperties": {
    "overrideInheritedEventTag": boolean,
    "defaultClickThroughEventTagId": long
  },
  "creativeGroupIds": [
    long
  ],
  "creativeOptimizationConfiguration": {
    "optimizationModel": string,
    "optimizationActivitys": [
      {
        "floodlightActivityId": long,
        "floodlightActivityIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
        "weight": integer
      }
    ],
    "id": long,
    "name": string
  },
  "additionalCreativeOptimizationConfigurations": [
    {
      "optimizationModel": string,
      "optimizationActivitys": [
        {
          "floodlightActivityId": long,
          "floodlightActivityIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
          "weight": integer
        }
      ],
      "id": long,
      "name": string
    }
  ],
  "lookbackConfiguration": {
    "clickDuration": integer,
    "postImpressionActivitiesDuration": integer
  },
  "createInfo": {
    "time": long
  },
  "lastModifiedInfo": {
    "time": long
  },
  "traffickerEmails": [
    string
  ],
  "externalId": string,
  "nielsenOcrEnabled": boolean,
  "adBlockingConfiguration": {
    "enabled": boolean,
    "overrideClickThroughUrl": boolean,
    "clickThroughUrl": string,
    "creativeBundleId": long
  },
  "defaultLandingPageId": long
}

Azure Synapse provides a multi-step process for loading data. After extracting the data from its source, you can move it to Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Store. You can then use one of three utilities to load the data:

• AZCopy uses the public internet.
• Azure ExpressRoute routes the data through a dedicated private connection to Azure, bypassing the public internet by using a VPN or point-to-point Ethernet network.
• The Azure Data Factory (ADF) cloud service has a gateway that you can install on your local server, then use to create a pipeline to move data to Azure Storage.

From Azure Storage you can load the data into Azure Synapse staging tables by using Microsoft's PolyBase technology. You can run any transformations you need while the data is in staging, then insert it into production tables. Microsoft offers documentation for the whole process.

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from the Campaign Manager API and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new data?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, many of the API results include fields like createInfo that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

Azure Synapse is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, To S3, and To Delta Lake.