“It’s expertise in a box,” is how Leah Pope, CMO of New York-based marketing intelligence platform Datorama, sums up SmartLenses, a product released yesterday.
Datorama’s central proffer, as described to us by CEO Ran Sarig in a DMN podcast last year, is to put all an organization’s marketing data, whatever its source, in one place, thus making it actionable. Organizations, of course, have copious, varied, and complex data. Pre-SmartLenses, Datorama customers were responsible for creating their own custom dashboards within the solution. This gave flexibility, director of product marketing Jay Wilder says, but marketers were always asking: What should I measure? What’s the right set of info I should be looking at?
SmartLenses answers that question by providing “one-click dashboards,” ready out of the box, loaded with KPIs, performance metrics, trends, and campaign analytics for commonly used platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google AdWords and Analytics, MailChimp, MediaMath, Moat, and so on.
But wait: Isn’t this a kind of Datorama Lite? What happened to the comprehensive view of the data? I asked Mollie Parker of DWA Media, a Datorama customer for about two years, whether this was a concern. DWA Media, which provides marketing services to the tech sector, hasn’t yet deployed SmartLenses, but Parker has been looking at it in preview. “I’m not concerned,” she said. “The [SmartLens] dashboard looks very similar to the dashboards we have been creating for our clients. It’s taking some of the thinking out of the process, and going straight to insights and actions.”
Parker, DWA’s associate director for web analytics and data insights, does plan to onboard SmartLenses. From what she’s seen so far, “It can be for the most advance user or the most elementary user of Datorama.” The benefit to advanced users comes when “time is of the essence.” For example, when planning a three to four week social media campaign, it’s a drag on resources when development issues can take as long to resolve as the campaign does to run. SmartLenses, in Parker’s view, “will reduce time to development for our clients heavily. I’d rather have my team focus on driving insights and getting results to a client.
It’s also helpful, said Pope, for advanced users of Datorama who simply be new to a channel or platform.
Wilder showed me some examples of SmartLenses dashboards. Typically, for the platform of interest, they show the main KPIs, supported by visual displays of trends, then more detailed campaign analysis. Not only can a user drill down into the data displayed, it’s also possible to customize the display. Doesn’t that take away to the main point of an out-of-the-box dashboard? “Marketing is an evolution,” said Wilder. “It’s a journey. All of these dashboards are customizable at the widget level.”
Determining what metrics to pre-load for each platform, however, is based on conversations with thousands of different enterprises, including publishers, Wilder said. “We leverage all that expertise from working with our customers, and embed it.”
SmartLenses instantly supports some 20 widely used platforms, and development for additional platforms is underway.
