A milestone in our data-driven journey.

In today’s dynamic and complex markets, we recognize that data is the backbone of strategic decision-making. However, raw data alone isn’t enough—it must be gathered, cleaned and transformed into actionable insights at speed. This is easier said than done. Many enterprises struggle with fragmented data sources, messy pipelines and the challenge of drawing meaningful insights.

Without a structured approach, it’s easy to miss valuable insights while juggling data from ad platforms, CRM systems, web analytics tools and internal databases. That’s why we teamed up with Funnel: to offer a streamlined solution to integrate, harmonize and analyze data efficiently, empowering businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions. Together, we help businesses:

• Seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources without manual effort.
• Clean and structure data efficiently, reducing errors and inconsistencies.
• Generate real-time insights for proactive decision-making.

A partnership that enhances how we show up to our clients.

When we talk about efficiently organizing and analyzing data, we’re really talking about making smarter decisions, tackling ongoing challenges and uncovering new opportunities for growth. Our partner with Funnel makes this possible in three key ways: saving valuable time to focus on deeper insights, offering greater control over media reporting and empowering highly personalized, scalable marketing strategies. Let’s dive into each of these.

An Orchestration Partner in smarter marketing.

Successful marketing orchestration across the full breadth of business units, markets, internal teams and external partners demands a lot of time and expertise. As the Orchestration Partner to global brands, my team at Monks is changing the economics of advertising—centralizing content production, paid media and owned channel activation, and data analytics to deliver outcomes (not overhead) for faster and smarter marketing with more cost-efficiency. With Funnel’s technology, we seamlessly centralize data, freeing up valuable time to extract deeper insights and drive more impactful decisions.

Driving insights with Glass Box Media.

Partnering with Funnel enhances transparency by giving greater control over media reporting, unifying all channels and delivering clear, actionable insights to drive growth. This aligns with our Glass Box approach—ensuring clients always know where their media is, why it’s there and how it impacts their business.

Personalization at scale creates Real-Time Brands.

With consumer skepticism at an all-time high, brands are wise to prioritize building trust through genuine interactions while using AI and first-party data to scale personalization. Funnel seamlessly integrates first-party data with media sources, enabling highly personalized, scalable marketing strategies—proving impact while keeping a human touch at the core. "Having Monks as a certified Funnel Solution Partner is an exciting step forward." says Adam Stead, Director of APAC at Funnel. "Their expertise in data analytics combined with our technology empowers businesses to take full control of their data."

In summary, our partnership with Funnel helps clients optimize performance and drive sustainable growth. By leveraging data science and automation, businesses can:

• Optimize marketing spend by analyzing campaign performance in real-time.
• Identify high-performing channels and reallocate resources for maximum ROI.
• Leverage predictive analytics to forecast future trends and stay ahead of competitors.

Let’s talk data.

Achieving Funnel Solution Partner Certified status is a proud moment for us, cementing our position as leaders in data-driven transformation. It reflects our commitment to innovation and excellence in analytics. As we look ahead, we are excited to continue collaborating with Funnel and exploring new ways to push the boundaries of data analytics—through advanced automation, AI-powered insights and innovative reporting solutions.

As we celebrate this milestone, we invite businesses to discover how Monks and Funnel can revolutionize their data strategies. Whether you’re looking to streamline analytics, enhance marketing performance, or gain deeper insights, we’re here to help.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your data? Let’s talk!

The reason why we measure more and more is straightforward: so that we can forecast the performance of different strategic scenarios, and thereby help the brands we partner with optimize their media efforts. And just like any other discipline within advertising, the field of media continues to evolve, so let’s put a spotlight on what matters right now and will support your media measurement. 

Welcoming incrementality in the media world. 

First, let’s take a step back and look at what incrementality entails. Simply put, it refers to the lift in conversions or sales that can be attributed to a specific advertising campaign above those that would have occurred regardless—also known as the base. Incrementality has recently been adopted by us media folks, and the term has risen in importance because it’s a media measurement solution that isolates the incremental uplift. This matters because otherwise you can’t tell which media is driving growth and which is just harvesting conversions that you would have gotten anyway. As such, incrementality delivers a far more accurate view of how your media channels are driving conversions.

For example, traditional multi-touch attribution (MTA) often fails to separate the base from the uplift of the advertising campaign. This can lead to overstated results. Instead, in order to accurately measure incrementality, it's important to use MTA in conjunction with incremental techniques like market mix modeling (MMM). This way, you can better understand the true impact of advertising campaigns, move from ROAS to ROI, and as such have a more sensible conversation with your finance teams on the effectiveness of media.

How market mix modeling has got media measurement’s back. 

Market mix modeling—sometimes referred to as media mix modeling, but I prefer the former—is certainly not new to the scene, and this technique has been around in its commercial application to understand media uplifts for several decades now. However, the discipline has significantly improved, especially in the last few years.  

Contemporary MMM has come a long way. In the old days, annual updates would take months to bear results, while today you can get a pilot up and running within six weeks and use automation and machine learning to obtain monthly updates in just a matter of days. Besides, visualizations have also become much better, as today’s reporting dashboards offer analysts a plethora of ways to approach the data sets.

It's important to note that market mix models consider the whole market—including drivers like promotions to pricing, the recent pandemic, seasonality and more—and thus offer a holistic view. If you fail to take these other factors into account, you can’t get an accurate read on media and risk overstating its impact. As such, we’re seeing more and more brands partner with specialist MMM experts to help build the market mix models, or work with them to in-house this capability.

I have to point out that some players out there might say they execute “media mix modeling,” but are actually just building a simple regression with media variables or using multi-touch pathway techniques (which is not an incremental analysis). What’s so concerning about this is that they offer so-called MMM solutions at very cheap rates, which may sound appealing, but the damage of using these cannot be underestimated. Basing your decisions on a cheap but bad model could go wrong and cost you over 40% of your media-driven revenue—compared to an increase of roughly 30% if the technique is applied properly. You can make the call on what’s best for your brand.  

Leveraging AI to accelerate our analysis. 

Another very timely reason why I’m so excited about applying market mix modeling is the recent rise of artificial intelligence and the automation solutions that have stemmed from it—AI has been advancing fast in various areas, and it did not forget about MMM. 

At Media.Monks, we’re bullish about AI. That said, we also know that it’s important to be cautious and do our due diligence, especially as we see many AI providers claiming to build market mix models without having the right experience and tools to do so. When it comes to MMM, we believe that AI and automation solutions can be incredibly useful in speeding up the process, but of course there are also some instances that require manual labor. Let’s take a look.  

Raw data and processing. This can be automated using APIs or templates to stream data in, and then pre-ordained processes automate cleaning, saving lots of time. Beware of providers who take several months to initially onboard data pipes, as you really should be up and running in a matter of weeks.

Initial models. We use evolutionary algorithms to automate the initial model build, running thousands of models instantly in the cloud and scoring them, which enables us to arrive at a base model much faster and save weeks across MMM projects with multiple KPIs.

Final models. Note that this (still) requires manual intervention with a very experienced modeling team. We need to sense-check the models, triple-check the data, and use our extensive experience to spot any anomalies and alternative analysis to interrogate any controversial findings.

Sales effects and ROI calculations. These can be automated without the use of AI—this is just a process that can easily be repeated using code.

Automated reporting. Once all the numbers are calculated, it’s easy to automatically populate dashboards and media optimization tools. One thing that can’t be automated, however, is the answering of bespoke client questions around most effective second length, audience, and more. 

Engagement. Reporting ROIs and optimizations is one thing, but gaining an understanding of and trust in the models is another. Therefore, in the early stages of MMM engagements, it's imperative to have people who can explain the models and results to the wider team—not just marketing, but also finance, sales, the board, to name a few. My advice would be to circle back to this in later stages, once people understand and trust the model, and then you can move to more automated reports.

In short, automation can replace a lot of the heavy lifting of data and results processing and visualization, while AI can be used in the initial modeling stage. But what can’t be replaced is the sense-checking, interpretation, and experience of a good modeler to ensure the results are robust, realistic, understood and therefore usable.

Decreasing time, while increasing results. 

In the context of economically uncertain times, a time-saving—and thus cost-saving—solution like market mix modeling, especially when it’s powered by AI and automation, comes in very handy. Based on these models, media measurement typically enables brands to forecast different sales scenarios. In turn, having a robust forecast of performance is critical in justifying different strategic scenarios to the board, owners and investors of a company.

Incrementality is critical in the quest for accurate ROI, and MMM is a main way to get there. Though this technique has been around for decades, its pace of change and adoption rate is accelerating, which I’m sure will be further driven forward by AI. That said, in order for you to reap the many rewards of this tried and tested technique, it’s critical to work with a media partner who includes the whole mix of sales drivers and can take your models from sheer numbers to clear business actions.

If you missed it (or could use a refresher), no worries—we’ve collected insights from across the week that set the agenda for what brands and their partners are focusing now and into the next year. Want to see the key themes at a glance? Find our deck at the bottom of the page.

Surprise: everyone was talking about AI.

It’s no surprise that among all the themes covered at Cannes this year, generative AI was the toast of the town. Our programming at Les.Monks Café centered on how marketers are using the tech now—or how they can lay the foundation for the revolutionary effects of AI in the very near future. “AI: Powering Transformative Customer Experiences” was one panel touching on these topics.

At the top of the conversation, Jay Pattisall, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared insights from his recent forecast report co-authored by Michael O’Grady. “In Q1, 19% of marketers in the US have used generative AI in their marketing execution. By Q2, that grew to 56%. There’s a really substantial growth,” he said, noting that early use cases include content development as well as media strategy and buying.

But what does this look like? Carlos Ricardo, Sr. VP Marketing Services & Creative Production at HP, laid out the brand’s strategic balance in identifying opportunities now versus building toward future goals. “We established what would be the potential business impact in terms of prioritization,” he said. “So, we determined 14 different work streams that we are currently working on which we call ‘Day Zero’—experiments that have already started.” In addition, the team has mapped out plans for 30, 60 and 90 days into the future to keep its AI transformation on-track.

Solange Bernard, Sr. Director/Head of Marketing Communications at Tim Hortons, also offered a peek behind the counter at how they’re using AI: “The way we’ve been approaching it is twofold. One, you see it as an opportunity to be more efficient. And then there’s also creative content development—there’s a lot of excitement in what we could be doing.” Bernard noted AI tools have enabled the team to take their first steps into virtual production to scale up creative.

AI plays a key role as an integrator that unlocks growth for brands.

As Pattisall shared, AI is more than unlocking creative content at scale—there’s also great potential in media. Later in the panel, Media.Monks Co-Founder Wesley ter Haar explained that when you bring both disciplines together through dynamic creative optimization, you truly unlock AI’s revolutionary impact. “For me, it brings to the front the original intent and promise of digital advertising: this idea that we can be real-time responsive, have highly personalized goals, and highly targeted feedback loops.”

This sentiment was echoed at our “TuesdAI Breakfast Session” with our EMEA CEO Victor Knaap and EMEA Chief Growth Officer Maria Nordstrom. With the discussion focused primarily on the basics of generative AI, Knaap explained the importance of integration across the business to “make an enterprise-ready pipeline where we can go all the way from insights to the assets that run on media,” and that he expects to see brands implement structural changes from the top down to accommodate.

One example: the work we’ve done with BMW and Mini, in which “atomic assets”—bits and pieces of creative, like the car model or environment featured—come together based on user profiles and data. “So, you get an infinite amount of assets that can be served into media,” says Knaap, noting that this infinitude can even resonate with audiences you haven’t formally targeted—leading to newer insights along the way.

The secret to cultural relevance? Leaning into communities that align.

AI wasn’t the only topic for discussion at Cannes this year. There was also a lot of talk on building cultural relevance and authenticity, especially when it comes to serving a movement or community. This is already top of mind for many brands during Pride Month—but the 50th anniversary of hip-hop during August this year offers a case study of this concept in real time as brands lean into the culture.

This was a key topic in our panel “Hip Hop 50. Then. Now. Forever,” hosted in collaboration with Billboard, ADCOLOR and Sony Music Group. “Any time a brand wants to utilize or activate a culture, it’s got to be really thoughtful, and it’s got to have intention,” said Eric Johnson, Executive Creative Director, North America at MassiveMusic. “It’s really important for brands to honor the culture and understand the culture.”

With the group diving into legendary brand collaborations in the early days of hip-hop—like Run DMC’s historic signing with Adidas in the 80s after endorsing the shoes in their songs—Cashmere President and Chief Creative Officer Ryan Ford expressed the importance of seeking these natural alignments. “We’re trying to help brands understand where the authentic alignment is already. It’s not just about slapping a ‘Hip-Hop 50th Anniversary’ logo on your product, right?” Instead, he says, you need to think hard about how to show up for the cultural moment.

Mike Van, President at Billboard, offered one approach. “[Hip-hop culture] is inherently entrepreneurial, it’s bootstrap culture all the way. It’s all about financial independence and empowerment, and you have a whole generation now of consumers and fans of hip-hop who are thirsting for that kind of content.” The opportunity: brands can become arbiters to build knowledge within the culture.

Real purposeful marketing focuses on real solutions. 

One area where cultural relevance is key is purpose-driven marketing, which shows no sign of slowing down on the award circuit. That said, the nature of what passes for truly transformative, purposeful work has evolved from previous years. “We’ve moved beyond just raising awareness for good causes. We need tangible solutions,” Sara Cosgrove, our Global Director of Awards & Creativity, on our “Women Connect” panel.

Cosgrove was joined by Jo Wallace, Global Executive Creative Director, and Ashley Knight, Strategy Director, in the panel, which was moderated by Luciana Haguiara, Executive Creative Director, Latam. With Wallace and Knight having served on juries this year, the group pushed back against work that tacks on a cause. “It has to have absolute relevance,” Wallace said. “We’re noticing a real disparity between brands that have a genuine purpose and a reason to function in that space and to bring good, and brands where there’s some laziness—you’re trying to bolt on this purpose and it shows.”

A favorite piece of work among the team is our Havaianas Pride Research project, where we teamed up with Havaianas, Datafolja and All Out to create Brazil’s biggest LGBTQ+ survey. Questions related to community had been excluded from Brazil’s official census, so the survey was designed to make the community and its needs more visible. Its findings were released on a beautifully designed web platform developed by the Media.Monks team. 

There’s no single definition of “good” creative.

Speaking of impactful work, the leadup to Cannes this year didn’t have the single frontrunner that was expected to sweep all the awards—but that’s not a bad thing, because it’s indicative of more diversification of what “good” creative is. An increasingly diverse talent base, plus more diverse and representative juries at the festival, will continue to affect what work is awarded and further challenge industry norms and expectations.

“It all comes down to empathy. There’s never been as many diverse crises we’ve been facing as a group of people, as an industry, and I think the expectation is creativity needs to do more to create empathy among these groups,” Knight shared. “Having more diverse perspectives that can speak to other people’s circumstances and needs can only be a good thing and that’s where I see a lot of change in the work this year.”

So, what makes outstanding work? The Women Connect panel made a rubric: have a clever insight that links to the brand, don’t overcomplicate things, play to emotion, and give newcomers the chance to challenge their more established peers. This helps bring new perspectives to the fore that can uniquely relate to audiences.

Supporting green talent is the idea behind our NextUp.Monks competition, in collaboration with Cannes Lions, which aims to elevate up-and-coming creative talent. This year, teams competed by answering a creative brief from Meta, "VR for Good," which challenged participants to transform how Gen Z thinks about VR and show how a headset can change minds and transform lives. We finished the week with a toast to the six competition winners—Vasyl Ilba, Mykyta Zolotoverkhyi, Ashwin Paul, Jorene Chew, Anna Zhang and Yazad Dastur, Jr.—who touched on their processes and experiences bringing the brief to reality.

One interesting tidbit came from Dastur, on zeroing in on an idea that has an impact. “While we wanted to do something different, we didn’t want to do something big. We aligned really quickly that we wanted to focus on a very small problem that would be able to help everyday life.”

Looking ahead, brands are planning their transformation strategies.

Throughout Cannes, we got a glimpse into what brands are thinking about right now. But what should they be doing now to prepare for next year—and beyond? S4 Capital Executive Chairman sat down with Salesforce President Sarah Franklin and Diageo Chief Digital Officer Susan Jones to speak on “Gathering the Transformation Trio” and aligning C-suite leadership across agency, technology and brand for continued success.

Franklin kicked things off by touching on the evolving role of the CMO. “You’re seeing more CMOs as more strategic in the business, the pathway to these more strategic roles, even the pathway to the CEO which, I think, speaks volumes for how much is on the shoulders of the marketeers and how strategic they are,” she said. Sir Martin Sorrell’s advice to building more strategic brands: be agile, take back control, and invest in first-party data.

On agility, Jones spoke on the need of continually evaluating and re-evaluating your activities. “Test new things as they come long to understand how they work, and then take a step back and go, ‘Is this sustainable? What’s a better way?’” This agility helps empower teams to reorganize around changed or emerging needs.

When it comes to in-housing, Sorrell notes that the important thing is bringing teams together to work far more efficiently—something that AI can help unlock. “Being able to disseminate knowledge across the organization on the assumption that you’ve ingested the right data, and that you’ve opened it for access to all, is the really powerful thing—and it means you’re going to become a much more singular force for agencies to deal with,” by breaking down the silos and politics that typically slow things down.

Finally, “You have to have a strong foundation of your data. Your data has to be in order,” particularly when it comes to setting up artificial intelligence. But as the lifeblood of your brand, a solid data foundation can accomplish even more. Franklin mentioned Formula One, whose “Drive to Survive” Netflix series brought in a new fanbase, many of whom are women. “So you see how something which is very orthogonal to their actual business, which is a TV series, created this whole new community of fans for them. And what they’ve done from the data side to be able to really drive that personalization has been really impressive.”

The festival captured an industry at a pivotal moment.

While AI dominated the conversation at Cannes this week, it’s important to consider some of the pre-requisites touched on elsewhere throughout the festival: getting your data in order, integrating the business to achieve new outcomes and ensuring you lead with authenticity with everything you do. The beautiful part? Once you’ve made a solid foundation on each of these, you’ll be prepared to fully unlock the potential of technologies like generative AI. 

That’s it for Cannes this year—and we can’t wait to see how AI, more intentional creative and greater diversity on teams will continue to influence creativity next year.

To overcome that challenge, wise marketers and data scientists resort to customer data platforms: software systems that allow businesses to collect, centralize, and manage customer data from multiple sources in one place. A CDP can help answer an abundance of questions by providing a single source of truth; though before you can get there, it’s important to understand how to handle the complexities and responsibilities that come with it.  

Not long ago, our Associate Director of Customer Data, Elia Niboldi, penned an article on how to leverage CDPs to their full potential. This time, we’re taking a step back with a new whitepaper that explores the key considerations when implementing a CDP. Let’s dissect some of the main takeaways.

With CDPs comes great responsibility.

To put it simply, CDPs aim to provide a comprehensive view of the customer across all channels and touchpoints, which allows businesses to make informed decisions and create better customer experiences. They are incredibly powerful tools, but that also means the data collected by CDPs can be sensitive and needs to be handled in a responsible and ethical manner, even if customers were happy to share it with the brand in the first place.

In other words, CDP data comes with the need for strategy and clear governance around a brand’s interactions with their customers. Having a robust consent management system in place is the bare minimum, an essential process for allowing customers to determine what information they want to share with a business—something that Salesforce Privacy Center handles very well. And this shouldn’t be limited to brands’ first interaction with a client: when changes in regulation occur or customers’ preferences change, they should be provided with an option to manage and update these preferences, and brands can keep track of those from a centralized location through a CDP.

Once the customer has shown interest in creating a value exchange between their data and the brand’s services, it’s important to set frequency capping standards that alleviate brand fatigue and ensure brand communications are effective and positive—rather than annoying and frustrating. The frequency send caps are usually reset daily, weekly or monthly, and can be adjusted based on customer behavior to optimize marketing campaigns and improve the overall customer experience.

Consider the role of CDPs in the CMO’s business.

Because they provide a unified view, CDPs are both a technical and organizational tool that can help break down silos. Traditionally, customer data has been fragmented across systems and siloed within departments, making it difficult for marketers to access that data in meaningful ways. At the same time, it’s naturally hard for technology teams to fully understand marketing needs or their specific use cases for the data they manage. CPDs bridge this gap, serving both the CMO and the CIO.

However, in order for CMOs to access the real value of CDPs, we need to remember they play three key roles: ensuring cooperation between teams, improving optimization use cases and offering better segmentation. A CDP necessitates cooperation between different teams because it’s meant to break down silos and provide a single source of truth that everyone in the organization can draw from. Through that source of truth, marketers can keep track of which channels and strategies are performing particularly well and optimize accordingly. Finally, CDPs unlock superior targeting capabilities that allow businesses to provide personalized experiences that resonate with their customers’ needs and interests. 

Salesforce Data Cloud, for example, combines the data from Google and The Trade Desk to activate audience insights beyond messaging, journeys and onsite personalization into a brand’s search and digital media campaigns. Plus, it funnels a nearly infinite amount of dynamic data to Customer 360 in real-time. This allows for deeper audience engagement, as customer data is continuously updating and feeding audio, OOH, app, web campaigns and everything in between.

Interested in implementing a CDP? Assess your readiness. 

So, you’ve installed clear governance standards around your interactions with consumers and aligned both the CMO and CIO on the importance of having one source of truth. Are you ready to start extracting meaningful customer insights? Not just yet. First, you’ll need to follow a few initial steps to ensure a successful implementation of the CDP:

• Outcome alignment: start by workshopping the priority use cases to deliver the minimum viable product. This needs to be a cross-functional exercise that ideates, quantifies and prioritizes use cases.
• Identity resolution strategy: build the identity graph that allows a customer profile to be stitched together to form a single customer view.
• Data model: design a consistent global measurement framework.
• Team vision: make sure the CDP is coupled with a clear strategic vision and the right team to extract its full potential. This team should include champions from different departments, system integration partners, executive sponsors and operational users. 
• Implementation plan: develop the operational model. For a customer data platform to be implemented seamlessly into a business, pre-built integrations are essential. Establish which integrations are required and use this to choose a CDP solution that suits your operational needs.

All things considered, CDPs shouldn’t be thought of as “set and forget,” but rather “implement and optimize.” A CDP like Salesforce Data Cloud can provide a wealth of benefits for a business, from more efficient data management to improved customer experiences. By setting a clear governance process and taking into account key considerations before implementation, businesses can ensure that they are ready for both the benefits and the responsibilities that come with utilizing a CDP.

Working as a Senior Data Specialist, I’ve come across a series of common mistakes that prevent enterprises from leveraging this tool to its full potential—and consequently, accessing the true value of their data. During a series of panels at Melbourne MeasureCamp, I was lucky enough to host a session on these observations and some recommendations so that brands can bank on actionable insights into user behavior and application performance. If you missed it, continue reading for the main takeaways.

Learning #1: Only one Firebase project can be linked to one GA4 property.

An important thing to consider when it comes to integrating Firebase with GA4 is that only one Firebase project can be linked to one GA4 property. This means that if there are multiple Firebase projects, it’s necessary to transfer all applications—regardless of operating systems or development cycles—into one project and link it to the main GA4 property. 

This requires careful planning and a deep understanding of how Firebase projects are set up.  Keep in mind the potential technical challenges and limitations in migrating apps from one project to another. For example, certain app developers may have their own preferences in terms of project setups, so you need to talk to your development team and understand what that looks like. 

Also, be aware of dependencies such as Crashlytics or BigQuery exports setup when moving apps from one project to another. Each Firebase project can have multiple stack integrations, and we should be ready to reconfigure all of them. Make sure you have historical data and map out timelines for these app migrations.

Learning #2: Standard naming unlocks customer insights. 

The main reason why you’d want to integrate Firebase with GA4 is that it provides valuable insights about user journeys across web and app platforms. However, the only way to unlock those insights is by ensuring standard naming conventions for web and app events. 

First, you’ll need to create a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet to standardize the naming of events and parameters. Here’s an example:

As you can see, we recommend having standardized event names and parameters across web and app platforms in GA4. It may seem simple, but it's not uncommon for organizations to use different conventions on different platforms, making it harder to cross-reference the data.  

Other tips to make the process easier include:

• If you have a website, but no app implementation yet, rely on your web and GA4 Recommended Events to name the event and implement these for the app.
• If you already have an app implemented with Firebase, use the mapping sheet to understand which events from the app can be mapped to web. It is easier to rename web events with GTM than doing so for the app.
• Align with both web and app development teams for naming conventions. For example, using camelcase (e.g. SignUp) vs snake case (sign_up)

Learning #3: Be Aware of Data Collection Limits.

When you use Firebase to collect data from your apps, it’s important to be mindful of the data collection and configuration limits. Firebase Analytics does not log events, event parameters, and user properties that exceed certain limits—which means that the platform will drop the events and stop tracking valuable data even if you exceed the limit by a few characters. 

In my experience, this mistake is especially common among developers who implement the Firebase SDK without really knowing about the limits. These are some of the main caveats and my respective recommendations for them:

• Event parameters limits: 25 parameters per event may seem a lot, but it may add up if you’re sending ecommerce events. GA4 and Firebase will drop the events and event parameters if you exceed this limit.
• Be careful not to go over the maximum length of the event parameter value, which currently stands at 100 characters. Be aware of user-generated values (e.g. listing name in marketplaces)
• Remember that Firebase does not accept array type parameters.
• When setting up BigQuery export for GA4 (with both app and web streams), check the usage in advance so that you don’t get shocked with the cost for the storage and querying the data. Pro tip: Set up daily aggregated tables for important metrics instead of querying directly from raw export tables.

In conclusion, it is essential to be aware of limitations around linking Firebase projects with GA4 property and plan ahead for your migration. Create a mapping sheet to map the events across the website and apps and standardize app and web events naming. Take note of Firebase data collection limits and make sure you are not going over the limits and risk losing your data. Finally, learn how to debug apps using Firebase Debug Mode, a bonus tip that can save you time and headaches.