It's technical but possibly a gamechanger - for now. Marketers have found a new rainbow for their complex demands to integrate campaign performance data across multiple digital channels and even TV with other business intelligence sources like sales, CRM and Google web analytics.
So enthusiastic is L'Oreal Australia about the Israeli marketing analytics platform Datorama, which this week announced another round of venture capital funding from backers including former Google boss Eric Schmidt, that it has gone public in its praise.
“Datorama has drastically improved how we measure and analyse all of our marketing activities,” said L’Oreal Australia and NZ head of digital Christophe Eymery. “Before we started using them, there was no easy way to view all of our reports across our campaigns. Datorama is more than just a marketing data aggregation tool for us. We were able to define KPIs by activity, drop them in and set up alerts to better monitor our performance. It was pretty incredible.”
It’s rare and high praise from a high profile brand owner for a bit of tech kit, but indicative of the difficulty and complexity facing marketers in meshing disparate data feeds into a single dashboard view of channel performance and their relationships with sales and other key performance indicators for the marketing team.
How long Datorama will hold the high ground is anyone’s guess but as of now, all dashboards report to Datorama.
It also poses a challenge for media agencies, which have typically been locked into a laborious process where junior buyers manually extract data from varied API (application protocol interface) connections with a mindboggling array of data feeds from the likes of Facebook Insights, DoubleClick DCM, Salesforce, YouTube, AppNexus, YouTube, trading exchanges and a bunch of others. They then compile reports using mostly Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks. Datorama has found a way to automate the lot, while giving brand owners the chance to overlay proprietary data themselves, allowing internal marketing analytics teams to do everything.
It could be seen as a challenge to media agencies as the original source and compiler for campaign analysis, although it could also free up media agencies to work on the actual insights side of what all this data is throwing out.
Datorama’s local boss Mick O’Brien said the speed at which the platform automated an updated dashboard input meant brand owners could see results overnight rather than sometimes a week or longer.
“Marketers have so many different data sets and a lot are sitting in different divisions independently in silos,” he told AdNews. “The important point is it allows them to take ownership of their data from all the different marketing channels where it lives in external marketing platforms. Where your data lives in Facebook or Twitter or Google or Doubleclick DCM, it allows us to take a copy of that so that the marketer always has access.
“Everyone’s had all these different tools they’ve been using, namely Excel, and to be honest they haven’t been able to look across channels to compare and marry campaign data with sales channels very easily. It’s a very drawn out process and often nearly impossible to do.”
For now then Datorama is the hot bun for marketers and the tech venture capitalists. Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors was part of the crowd which dropped a $15 million series B investment round into Datorama on Monday.
“We believe the marketplace needs an infrastructure to improve marketing decisions,” Schmidt’s right hand man and managing partner at Innovation Endeavors, Dror Berman said. “Datorama provides it. That’s why Datorama has onboarded scores of agencies and hundreds of brands during the past year. We see foresee greater growth as more companies learn what Datorama can do.”
That’s a wrap. Stay tuned.
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