Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Claritix Assembles Marketing Data for Analysis: Maybe That's Enough

Most of the work in any marketing analytics project is integrating data from multiple systems. Claritix carries this insight to one logical conclusion by offering a system that does data assembly, basic reporting, and little else.  No fancy attribution methodologies or custom journey maps here (although they’re on the way). I’m not fully convinced this is enough to justify using Claritix but am open to the possibility. Here’s a deeper look.
 

As I just said, Claritix’s chief function is assembling customer data from multiple sources. The system has prebuilt connectors to import data from popular vendors including Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot, SAP, SugarCRM, and Facebook. It can connect with others through standard APIs. The imported data is loaded into MongoDB, a NoSQL database that offers great flexibility and ease of deployment. Claritix applies sophisticated algorithms to cleans the data and match contacts based on similarity.  It also uses matches created elsewhere such as lead IDs used to synchronize CRM and marketing automation data or cookie IDs imported from Google Analytics. The matching happens at both the contact and account level. Imported data includes contacts, funnel stages, campaigns, channels, revenue, and content.


Users can access this data through dashboards, charts, and views. There are different dashboards for the main data types (campaigns, funnel stages, channels, etc.). These provide basic information such as impressions, engagements, visits, deals and revenue by campaign, or sources, stages, conversion rates, and average duration by funnel stage. The specific measures depend on the data type. Users can drill into details down to the contact level. Views can show results for user-defined segments.

Claritix also lets users assemble information into binders, which are contain pages that are snapshots of dashboards, charts, and notes. These can be exported to PDF or slides or viewed directly within Claritix. Binders can update themselves at regular intervals. Collaboration features let users attach virtual “sticky notes” to screen images and share these via Slack or Claritix’s own communication channels.

So far as I know, that’s pretty much all that the system does. There is no capability, for example, to write the assembled data back to source systems for their own use.  Claritix tells me this has been quite sufficient for their initial clients, who have liked the fact that set-up is virtually all automated or handled by the vendor.  This has let them assemble data across multiple systems in ways that would otherwise have been impossible or hugely expensive. Certainly price is an advantage: Claritix starts at $1,000 per month for up to 10,000 contacts in the database, with the cost per contact decreasing for higher volumes. A system with more advanced reporting, such as Brightfunnel (which I reviewed in December and has been a consulting client) starts at $3,000 per month or higher. Still, you have to decide whether you’ll need the features that Claritix is missing; if so, you’ll end up missing many of the beneifts that good marketing measurement provides.   As Captain Planet used to say, the power is yours.

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