Building a Measurement Solution In-House vs. Rockerbox

Let’s cut to the chase—there are a lot of digital solutions for marketing analysis out there. From measurement to metrics, there are plenty of tools and techniques you can use to capture the insights that your team or business needs to continue scaling. At a certain point of growth, most businesses are faced with an important question: is it better to build internally or use external resources?

The answer is usually dependent on a variety of factors, including what skills, time, and resources are available in-house. But when those assets are limited (or when you simply prefer the help of an expert), turning to external solutions may offer the best return on investment and allow you to achieve optimal results.

If you’ve been wondering whether the Rockerbox hype is real (and why you need it in your tech stack), this post is for you.

Let’s explore what Rockerbox does, how you’d need to solve similar problems in-house, and how real customers are leveraging Rockerbox data.

What Does Rockerbox Do?

Rockerbox is a marketing measurement and attribution platform that helps direct-to-consumer businesses and digital brands make data-driven decisions.

In short, our job is to sit across all of your marketing activities, and when we do our job well, Rockerbox serves as the single source of truth across your marketing. Rockerbox offers centralized reporting that provides attribution for your digital marketing efforts in addition to any offline channels you’re currently using. This scope of measurement includes:

• Search
• Display
• Social
• Content
• Email
• Organic
• Influencers
• TV
• Direct mail
• And more

Rockerbox eliminates disconnected marketing analysis and provides a cross-channel path to conversion. The result of this process is that brands have a deeper understanding of the complete buyer journey through every stage of the funnel and along each major marketing touchpoint. With Rockerbox, businesses can make more informed decisions in order to adjust, test, or spend accordingly.

Hundreds of Marketing Channels (Yes, Really…)

Sometimes prospective customers want to know if it’s really possible for Rockerbox to see and track all of your marketing activities. And while we can’t predict the future (no crystal ball over here), we can see quite a bit about your marketing touchpoints.

Rockerbox currently offers more than 75 integrations to gather insights from podcast platforms to social channels to direct mail—and everything in between. We have methodologies for measuring channels that are traditionally “harder to track.” For example, when we track direct mail, we work directly with vendors to get address lists that can be matched to real users that convert in order to understand the impact of that channel.

Now, imagine how much time and lift it would take to get the same results internally. Does your team have the bandwidth to follow up on hundreds of integrations around the clock? Will you maintain strong vendor relationships to ensure data accuracy? If these responsibilities generally fall to the back burner…it’s time to invest in an outside solution.

Requirements for Building In-House

As we take a closer look at whether it’s better to build similar marketing attribution and data solutions in-house, it’s important to ask two questions:

• Can we realistically do this?
• Do we want to do this in the first place?

Global brands that have the skills, resources, and time to devote to building in-house measurement solutions might be well-equipped, but they could also want to devote those resources elsewhere. If marketing attribution isn’t your team’s bread and butter, why spend months (if not years) focusing on something that’s not your primary business?

Moreover, just because a task or project is possible, doesn’t mean it’s realistic. Data mapping is an arduous process, and it involves lots of “nitty gritty” work that requires more in-depth building than first appears on the surface level.

And perhaps the most important takeaway is this—building your own internal models based on a data set that isn’t truly accurate is a shaky foundation, and it’s one that can’t lead to growth or improved decision-making. Rockerbox removes that doubt and builds using first-party data that you can trust.

Common Points of Frustration with In-House Building

Occasionally, we hear feedback from prospective Rockerbox customers about layering on too many options and measurement tools. We know that this is a valid concern for leaders and decision-makers who don’t want to stack on tools without leveraging them.

But when your Rockerbox account is fully optimized, it serves as the single source of marketing truth for cross-channel activity, spend, and advertising performance.

Rockerbox knows that customer interactions are complex and multifaceted, but we also know that brands need a way to demystify the buyer journey without feeling bogged down by the tools they’re using or by the data they’re desperately trying to interpret.

Additionally, customers turn to Rockerbox when they hit walls for capturing specific data points that are tricky (if not impossible) to manage in-house. A large portion of Rockberbox’s value is helping to capture non-click-based marketing events. Not every touchpoint has a physical click, which is why Rockerbox builds a user path based on multiple behaviors.

Actual Use Cases

Brands of all sizes and at varying stages of scalability are seeing success with Rockerbox.

• TULA Skincare – TULA has developed an entire budgeting framework around Rockerbox data. By leveraging Rockerbox insights in conjunction with lift studies and synthetic events, TULA gathers real-time data to make more informed decisions and to stop low or extremely poor-performing activities in their tracks.
• Mockingbird – Mockingbird pursued Rockerbox to help tackle some of the most bothersome attribution challenges associated with its brand, including the fact that most purchases were gifts (and not directly trackable). Rockerbox helped Mockingbird build a thriving data culture where team players have a single source of truth and increased confidence in specific channels.

Why Do Customers Turn to Rockerbox?

At Rockerbox, we value every single customer interaction and experience that we get to be a part of. Over the years, we’ve identified several big reasons why ecommerce businesses and digital-first brands are turning to Rockerbox instead of constructing their own in-house data systems from the ground up.

Deduplication

Duplicate conversions happen when more than one channel (for example, Facebook and Search) both claim credit for a single sale or conversion. Over time, these duplicated conversions wreak havoc on your marketing metrics and can influence your marketing decisions in all the wrong ways. Rockerbox deduplicates data so that you obtain accurate numbers based on your brand’s source of truth.

Data Warehousing Flexibility

As brands grow and expand, more key players and departments need access to relevant data. With our Data Warehousing integrations, Rockerbox makes it easier for data analysts to get the clean, updated datasets they need into the company data warehouse where stakeholders across the company can access it for more complex analyses. With our integrations, scaling brands do not have to continue to manage an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) out of Rockerbox. Instead, Rockerbox manages the entire process which requires no engineering resources from customers to transfer Rockerbox data into a warehouse of choice.

Identity Resolution Customization

Rockerbox’s robust identity resolution capabilities are powered by our first-party data foundation, and they allow users to connect conversions no matter where or when they happened. It’s possible to customize the order in which a customer’s identity is resolved, which can help with streamlining conversion across multiple devices.

Incrementality Testing

Incrementality helps measure the impact that different marketing actions have on particular outcomes, such as eventual customer purchases. Rockerbox provides the data needed to determine the incrementality of channels that are actively being tested.

Granular Performance Insights

Rockerbox gives companies a more accurate picture of their performance down to the ad-level, and they can use information about their CPA and ROAS to make decisions on which campaigns, tactics, and ads to cut or invest more in.

Let’s Get Started

As a growing brand, you’ve got options, and Rockerbox wants to be a part of them. We believe in empowering modern brands with the ability to focus on what truly matters for growing business. Let us dig into the data and serve as your team’s single source of truth for marketing touchpoints.