| | May 201619CIOReviewAlight AnalyticsUnveiling the Potential of MarketingWith the recent explosion of available marketing tools, agency and brand marketers are constantly challenged to demonstrate value. However, the sheer amount of time and effort required of marketing analysts to manually centralize, clean and aggregate the resulting data leaves many organizations internally strained. It's something Alight Analytics Co-Founders Michelle Jacobs and Matt Hertig are acutely aware of. "As a full-service marketing analytics firm, we understand the pain marketers are experiencing, because that's what we did for our own clients when we started Alight," says Hertig. "To provide our clients with better reporting, we knew we had to break down those disparate marketing channel silos to create a centralized data repository. That's why we built ChannelMix - a data centralization platform specifically for the marketing vertical - to automate an all too manual process," Michelle adds. Alight's platform, ChannelMix, is built on top of Google Analytics, a key tool in the marketing ecosys-tem. Google Analytics pro-vides consistent campaign measurement for the marketing tactics driving to a website and is the first step in enabling true measurement and multi-channel attribu-tion. However, Google Analytics isn't a data man-agement platform and isn't equipped to connect and consolidate all sources of marketing data. That's why ChannelMix delivers a single source of truth for insight-seeking marketers to understand cumulative performance, enhance and optimize campaigns, and accurately attribute success to specific channels. It's a solution that completely transforms how organizations view and manage their customer decision journeys and overall marketing. "Customers to-day utilize multiple marketing channels in their decision-making journey," adds Hertig. "With ChannelMix, we help or-ganizations more effectively use Google Analytics, as well as their other market-ing channels, to better understand their customer decision journey to drive leads, sales, and brand engagement."As Michelle explains, "the platform's uniqueness exists within its ability to solve the complexity of an organization's data ecosystem and its flexibility to fit unique business rules." This flexibility happens at the data layer. As every client has different data sets and tools in their own data ecosystem, Alight custom configures not only the data inputs entered into ChannelMix but also provides integration with any business intelligence (BI) tool. "The beauty of ChannelMix is that it's built to fit the exact goals of your marketing and, moreover, organization," adds Michelle. "That means if you already use a particular BI tool for reporting, ChannelMix can interface with it for a seamless transition."A leading jewelry retailer was using multiple marketing tools and web analytics software which lead to conflicting metrics, hours spent gathering and consolidating data and a manual reporting process. The partnership with Alight helped them to standardize their entire website tracking strategy with Google Analytics, increasing data confidence. ChannelMix was implemented to ingest all of the Google Analytics data alongside media and sales data, normalizing and creating a new data asset for the client. Today, after the integration of Google Analytics with ChannelMix, the client has experienced an increase in their overall marketing spend efficiency by more than 40 percent. For the future, the company will continue to invest in their unique platform, releasing a customizable user interface that will allow clients more visibility and control over their data and reporting. "There are a lot of one-size-fits-all solutions available out there, but we want to give the clients a different experience that will make them market leaders," concludes Hertig. SOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2016Matt Hertig Michelle Jacobs
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