You’ve heard it before: data is the most important commodity in business today. In no sector is this more true than in marketing. But even though experts in the industry have chanted this mantra for years now, many (or even most) companies still aren’t getting the data they need and leveraging it to its fullest potential.
Those shortcomings start at a fundamental level. With thousands of disparate apps and data sources to draw from, gathering, synthesizing, and storing your data ends up being an enormous first hurdle that many brands fail to fully cross. If you don’t start with a strong foundation, you’ll never be able to build a comprehensive data program atop it.
Earlier this month, Accelerated Digital Media joined up with the marketing data experts at Funnel for a productive webinar discussing how our two companies work to address this issue. Funnel’s Christopher Reed explained how marketers often turn to highly-manual and inadequate methods to try to synthesize their data—like manually downloading enormous spreadsheets to feed into their IT stack—and that simply won’t cut it, given the volume and complexity of modern data operations.
Start With a Comprehensive Data Hub
To deal with culling and analyzing all this data, Reed explained that companies need a data hub that can:
- Pull data from any source, app, or platform
- Store all of that marketing data in one central place
- Organize and transform the data automatically
- Be shareable across teams and digital tools
Thos four points are central to Funnel’s own technology, a user-friendly, maintenance-free data hub that can integrate with a growing list of over 500 different marketing platforms.
In the second part of the webinar, ADM’s Director of Data and Analytics, Mary-Catherine McCroskey, explained how our agency deploys Funnel to make data-driven decisions that produce real results for our clients. As a comprehensive performance marketing agency, it’s vital that we look at our clients’ SEM, paid social, and programmatic advertising data holistically to get the full picture of how their campaigns are performing.
Putting the Data into Action
Funnel allows ADM to construct previously-impossible reports that offer cross-channel views across various sources, including ad, attribution, analytics, and backend vendor platforms. This allows us to build custom dimensions and metrics, conduct audits, maintain account health and manage pacing and bidding with far less manual effort than was required prior. That means our team can spend more time optimizing accounts and seeking growth opportunities.
To illustrate how Funnel’s data hub helps ADM do more for its clients, McCroskey ran through three unique use case examples from ADM client accounts:
- Using Funnel to synthesize data from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, and a client’s existing data warehouse to create custom visualizations, which steered optimizations and led to better campaign performance
- Analyzing ad creative performance across a variety of social media platforms to determine which images/videos resonated with which audiences and quickly identify the most effective ad styles to deploy for the client’s business goals
- Getting granular, by-the-hour metrics to better understand Black Friday trends and make adjustments in real time—resulting in all-time-best performance for multiple clients on the biggest sales day of the year.
To get the complete rundown of these case studies, and how a powerful marketing data hub like Funnel helps ADM provide better results for its performance marketing clients, check out the full webinar below!
