Having access to high-quality marketing data to analyze performance and drive better decision-making is a key focus for modern marketers and data analysts. But building a solid datasets that covers the right changes and touchpoints? It’s not as easy as it may seem on the surface.
64% of marketing executives agree that data-driven marketing is the goal, while 87% of marketers state that data is heavily underutilized at their organization. The reason for these contradictory statements could be due to the messy state of decentralized data at many businesses. According to Inevsp, more than half (54%) of companies name “a lack of data quality and completeness” as the biggest blocker to achieving a data-driven marketing approach.
At Rockerbox we know that centralized, high-quality data is the solution for unlocking data-driven marketing insights, and we have the step-by-step guide to implementing this approach at your organization.
We’ll discuss:
Without critical marketing performance and spend data centralized across all channels, from paid social, to organic content, to CTV, to direct mail, it’s more difficult (if not impossible) and time-consuming for companies to look at their performance holistically and understand trends.
Health and wellness company Nutrafol compared their decentralized data approach previous to Rockerbox as an “old engine,” comprising disparate data sources across partner data, attribution, website data, promo codes, and beyond. Not only were data sources disconnected, they also resulted in duplicate conversions due to double counting. With Rockerbox's centralized data exported to their data warehouse and in the Rockerbox UI, they were able to build a custom model that centralized and deduped all their data and powered spend planning.
Read an excerpt below or watch the full clip:
“Rockerbox obviously brings all [our data] into one place to dedupe it across channels. But not just channels, but across data sources. For example, [a customer] came to us from podcast. They might have used a podcast promo code and [indicated that] in the [“how did you hear about us”] survey, but they might not have. If… we add up the promo codes and survey data, one plus one equals three there, [because we’re tracking the conversion and crediting the podcast twice]. So it was really great to have Rockerbox in that it deduped everything as well. As it's robust, it captures pretty much all of our media touchpoints, all of our channels, touchpoint types, clicks, views, survey responses, promo codes, and it's granular.”
Modern companies have the ability to collect large amounts of data, but without a plan to centralize and standardize the data for future analysis, they’re not getting the most out of it.
With a centralized view of things like ad spend and attributed conversions, companies are empowered to answer questions like:
When combined with other customer, commerce, and web data, companies can uncover even more insights that power smarter decision-making.
The best types of marketing insight come from combining multiple types of data at your disposal to answer questions like the ones we shared above. Some of the key types of data our customers collect to leverage for marketing and business reporting are listed below.
One of the key pieces to a data-driven marketing strategy is having high-quality spend and performance data for all advertising channels. Ad spend is actually comprised of data from dozens of disparate ad platforms and may change regularly depending on the overarching marketing strategy.
With Rockerbox’s Collect product, the work involved with consolidating, cleaning, and transforming this data into a format and state where it can be more easily leveraged is all taken care of by our platform.
Collect empowers marketers with:
Collect also removes the need for data engineering to be involved in:
To gain a full understanding of the buyer path to purchase, you need MTA. And moreover, you need MTA that can track beyond clicks, including views on content (such as on visual platforms like TikTok) and activity on digital and offline channels.
Rockerbox’s Track product enables this through creating first-party, marketing centric, user-level dataset—a task that’s more difficult than it sounds without the right software. Rockerbox’s user-level, first party dataset allows brands and marketing teams to:
In addition to these foundational datasets, brands often leverage other data sources alongside these to come to more nuanced and complex conclusions:
Now that you know the “what”—the next question is “how”. As in, how do you combine this data and get to the insights. There are options for brands that need a more basic view of marketing performance and brands that want to combine many data sources and get to advanced marketing insights. We’ll go through them both below.
Within Rockerbox’s Journey product, you can leverage the data provided by Rockerbox Track and Rockerbox Collect to get insight into the buyer journey, the overlap between channels, and the effectiveness of different marketing channels compared to each other. To easily answer these types of questions, Rockerbox offers pre-built UI views including:
Not only can you access insightful reports directly from the Rockerbox UI but you can also export data to your data warehouse to build custom dashboards, further manipulate, and combine with other customer and company data to produce even more detailed analysis like customer LTV, spend pacing, and more.
With Rockerbox not only can you access centralized data but it’s also reconciled back to your source of truth through a process of deduplication. To understand why this matters, you need to understand why different ad platforms take full credit for conversions that they touch.
Imagine a user that views three ads for a product from different platforms and subsequently purchases the product. The platforms would independently track conversions through their respective pixels, leading to a total of three reported conversions, while only one conversion really happened.
This occurs because advertising platforms have no ability to consider the influence of other platforms when reporting on conversions. Each platform takes full credit for conversions, making cost per acquisition (CPA) look stronger in platform reporting and encouraging increased ad spend on the platform. This is why relying solely on conversion counts from third-party advertising platforms may lead to over-counting.
With user-level tracking, Rockerbox is able to deduplicate conversions by giving fractional credit to each marketing touchpoint on a user’s path to conversion.
Hearing about the benefits of data centralization is one thing; it’s entirely different to hear the first-person experiences of brands that were able to bring together disparate data sources and gain more clarity into their marketing is something totally different. National University is just one of many customers who was able to leverage the benefits of data consolidation.
Before leveraging Rockerbox, National University struggled with consolidating all their data and getting a comprehensive view into how marketing channels performed individually and also worked with each other to drive intended outcomes (information requests). With Rockerbox Track and Journey and Rockerbox’s wide-ranging integrations, National University was able to assess performance for MNTN CTV within the context of other top-of-funnel platforms like Facebook and Acuity and centralize all data for more visibility and more performance insights.
“Integrating MNTN’s Verified Visits with Rockerbox’s precise measurement cross-channel measurement has been extremely effective in analyzing performance,” said Michael Rossini, Associate Director of Paid Media and Performance Marketing at National University. “We are now able to measure the performance of National University’s connected TV campaigns alongside our other marketing channels and use that unbiased measurement to better inform strategic decisions. The knowledge gained has enhanced confidence as we scale our CTV campaigns.”
Data doesn’t help you unless you know how to leverage it. Explore how Rockerbox helps you access foundational marketing data and combine it with additional data in your data warehouse.