Episode 17: Marketing Reporting: Why We Switched to Databox

Transcription:

Devin:

You’re listening to Digital Marketing Mondays. Each week, we bring you new and exciting content from around the marketing industry and help give you, the marketer, insights into what’s happening. We’ll offer our advice and share some takeaways to help you develop better strategies for your marketing. Ideally, this will also help you improve your ROI as well. So with that, let’s tune into this week’s episode.

Hans:

Hey, good morning, Devin.

Devin:

Good morning.

Hans:

Hey, I got a topic for today.

Devin:

All right, let’s hear it.

Hans:

This is kind of airing a little bit of our own internal laundry here, but for those clients who… Well for our clients, it’s not going to be a surprise. We’ve been using Google Analytics, obviously since, well, since Google Analytics came out. And I remember the days when we used to report on the results of our work to our clients using Excel sheets, and we’ve migrated to a number of different platforms over time. And so for the past, probably two years, we’ve used Google Data Studio, which is free, right? As a sort of visual presentation platform. We’ve been using that in conjunction with Supermetrics, which is a paid platform that pulls data from a variety of sources other than just Google sources. So if you’re, let’s say running ads on Facebook or something, you’d need something other than just Google.

Hans:

I mean, if you’re just pulling data in from Google ads, yeah, you’ve got everything there for free, but so we’ve been using this combination of Supermetrics and Google Data Studio. And for our non-client friends out there, this may come as a bit of a revelation, but we’re switching right now. We’re in the process of moving all our reporting over to a new platform. And why don’t you tell us a little bit about that new platform, Devin, and what prompted us to make the move? Is it a free platform? Is it a paid platform and why are we making the switch?

Devin:

That’s a good question. And yeah, so the tool is called Databox and one of the reasons really prominently, why we needed to switch is because we were running up against limitations with Google Data Studio and how it can present information. And I think the thing that we discovered is that these Google Data Studio reports that we were originally producing were good at just presenting some of the high-level metrics that we needed to report on for ads, website data, SEO; it got the job done. And as far as just the performance of the services that we were offering, it’s done an adequate job.

Hans:

Okay.

Devin:

I think what Data Studio brings and really what marketers have really been demanding for a long time, which is more systematic ways to evaluate comprehensively all marketing information that’s coming in and be able to act on decisions in close to real time. And what I mean by that is there are things inside of Databox like goal setting and tracking. So let’s say you’re B2B tech and you know that you want to drive X number of leads per month. You can actually set goals inside of this tool and then it will track in real time how your LinkedIn ads are doing against that goal.

Devin:

What’s also really comprehensive about Databox as well, is that you can bring in a lot more data sources than just ads, Google Analytics, and SEO, SEO reporting tools or SEO software. So you can bring in HubSpot, you can bring in Klaviyo, you can bring in all of your organic social media as well, Google Sheets, if you need to do some form of custom data lookups. You can also utilize MySQL, Amazon Redshift, all of these custom APIs, Zapier Integromat. You’ve got all sorts of different options to work with.

Devin:

So this is really shifting Market Vantage from just reporting on overall campaign performance to really heading into data analysis and almost data science in a way. This is going to provide a lot more clarity in terms of what marketing, all of marketing, is actually producing and be able to help make better, more quick informed decisions moving forward.

Devin:

So I’ve been kind of spearheading this project internally. I’m really, really excited about it because outside of just the tool itself, I think our initial findings so far are that clients love it. They want to get access into the Databox platform, their client accounts. They want to be able to really start customizing and playing with things because the end of the day, every client is just a little bit different. We need to look at things more holistically and Databox has really been able to help us kind of accomplish that.

Devin:

So to be clear, this is not an ad for Databox as a tool directly. More than happy to give a demo to show it. But at the end of the day, I think the most valuable thing that marketers need to be thinking about in 2022, especially now that we’re in the new year is really evaluating the right metrics and making real-time decisions based off of that.

Hans:

Right. So we should probably add a disclaimer here that we are a partner with Databox, but if you buy Databox through us, because you want our services along with it, we don’t mark it up. In fact, we don’t even get a commission on the product itself. Obviously we do charge for our time and our expertise. So if people want to acquire the product, they can do so through us and it comes with our support in terms of setting it up and configuring it and customizing it to your needs.

Hans:

But I just wanted to mention, we don’t mark it up and we don’t make any money on the product itself. So we don’t have an ax to grind there, but of all the tools we’ve looked at, this seems to be really filling a hole in our strategy. And so are we going to continue using Google Data Studio or are we going to basically do everything on Databox going forward, Devin? What do you think?

Devin:

It’s very unlikely that we will continue with Google Data Studio. I think it got the job accomplished for the last couple years. It’s a viable tool for a lot of people, but I think the reporting and the information that’s coming out of Databox is going to be far more useful moving forward. And what I’m actually realizing is that I think the reason why clients love it so much is because it provides accountability. There’s no BSing your way out of what the ads or the SEO did for you this past month or this past year. It’s really, really clear and upfront in terms of what are the activities that are driving your marketing results. You could set at the goals for it.

Devin:

You can also do customized metrics, which is not something that you could previously do inside of Google Data Studio. So if you need to see holistically, what were all of your impressions across all of your different ad campaigns within different platforms that you’re running, create it as a custom metric and combine them. And then you can do other things like your actual cost per acquisition. You can look at, if you were using HubSpot as an example, you can look at total deal values and attributed deal values based on marketing qualified leads that came in the door, or other sources that may be driving those MQLs. So really it opens up the doorway into much better, clearer marketing performance. And it really is trending very much closer to other data visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI. It’s awfully, awfully close, just slightly more geared towards marketers and much easier to use in my opinion.

Hans:

Wow. Wow. So I guess the bottom line is if people are interested, they can contact us. I mean, obviously you can contact Databox. But if you contact us, we’ll be happy to sort of talk to you about your specific requirements, and needs, and objectives, and even give you a demo if you want it. So, yeah, we’re pretty high on the product, aren’t we?

Devin:

Yeah, we are. And I mean, I think more so than anything else, if you do not end up looking at Databox or other reporting tools, I think the biggest opportunity that marketers have moving forward is being able to just take the time and figure out the metrics that are going to be most important to you in 2022 and find the best way to be able to evaluate that on an ongoing basis. And Databox certainly can get the job done, but there are other tools that can also do it. So knowledge is power.

Hans:

Yeah. All right. Cool. Well, thanks, Devin. Thanks for sharing that and I’m excited to see where this product takes us.

Devin:

Likewise. Thanks, Hans.

Hans:

All right. See ya.

Devin:

See ya.

Devin:

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