Friday, October 14, 2016

Datorama Applies Machine Intelligence to Speed Marketing Analytics

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been surveying the borders of Customer Data Platform-land recently, trying to figure out which vendors fit within the category and which do not. Naturally, there are cases where the answer isn’t clear. Datorama is one of them.

At first glance, you’d think Datorama is definitely not a CDP: it positions itself as a “marketing analytics platform” and makes clear that its primary clients are agencies, publishers, and corporate marketers who want to measure advertising performance. But the company also calls itself a “marketing integration engine” that works with “all of your data”, which certainly goes beyond just advertising. Dig a bit deeper and the confusion just grows: the company works mostly with aggregated performance data, but also works with some individual-level data.  It doesn’t currently do identity resolution to build unified customer profiles, but is moving in that direction. And it integrates with advertising and Web analytics data on one hand and social listening, marketing automation, and CRM on the other. So while Datorama wasn’t built to be a CDP – because unified customer profiles are the core CDP feature – it may be evolving towards one.

This isn't to say that Datorama lacks focus. The system was introduced in 2012 and now has over 2,000 clients, including brands, agencies, and publishers. It grew by solving a very specific problem: the challenges that advertisers and publishers face in combining information about ad placements and results. Its solution was to automate every step of the marketing measurement process as much as it could, using machine intelligence to identify information within new data sources, map those to a standard data model, present the results in dashboards, and uncover opportunities for improvement. In other words, Datorama gives marketers one system for everything from data ingestion to consolidation to delivery to analytics.  This lets them manage a process that would otherwise require many different products and lots of technical support. That approach – putting marketers in control by giving them a system pre-tailored to their needs – is very much the CDP strategy.

Paradoxically, the main result of Datorama’s specialization is flexibility. The system’s developers set of goal of handling any data source, which led to a system that can ingest nearly any database type, API feed or file format, including JSON and XML; automatically identify the contents of each field; and map the fields to the standard data model. Datorama keeps track of what it learns about common source systems, like Facebook, Adobe Analytics, or AppNexus, making it better at mapping those sources for future implementations. It can also clean, transform, classify, and reformat the inputs to make them more usable, applying advanced features like rules, formulas, and sentiment analysis. At the other end of the process, machine learning builds predictive models to do things like estimate lifetime value and forecast campaign results. The results can be displayed in Datorama’s own interface, read by business intelligence products like Tableau, or exported to other systems like marketing automation.

Datorama’s extensive use of machine learning lets it speed up the marketing analytics process while reducing the cost. But this is still not a push-button solution. The vendor says a typical proof of concept usually takes about one month, and it takes another one to two months more to convert the proof of concept into a production deployment. That’s faster than your father’s data warehouse but not like adding an app to your iPhone. Pricing is also non-trivial: a small company will pay in the five figures for a year’s service and a large company's bill could reach into seven figures. Fees are based on data volume and number of users. Datorama can also provide services to help users get set up or to run the system for them if they prefer.

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