Datorama

As a small- to mid-sized, full-service advertising agency, we consume enormous amounts of data daily—monitoring, optimizing, analyzing, aggregating and measuring to maximize our clients’ investments. While increased data means increased insights, it also consumes a great deal of manpower.

So when a Datorama sales team promised the platform would capture, organize and manage myriad media streams of data, we were sold. This meant our teams at Brogan & Partners would have more time to analyze and optimize media performance. (This is the essence of the Datorama sales pitch.)

Eight months, 80+ internal and external meetings, hundreds of manhours and tens of thousands of dollars later and the platform couldn’t generate a single, accurate report. We’re not talking meaningful or quality insights either. We’re talking about basic reports—i.e. impressions by media source. Meanwhile, we received a constant drip of warnings that our storage limit was nearing capacity. “Danger! You need more rows!” We soon learned that this was Salesforce speak for “more money, please.”

We reached out to the sales team and our implementer partner in earnest throughout the ordeal. We repeatedly asked for sample templates to expedite the taxonomy process. Surely there must be many agencies like us in the Salesforce universe that we could model against? (No dice.) We provided assorted dashboards and Tableau generated reports. When they went missing, we sent them again and again. We cajoled and cheerlead our vendors to be patient. We offered to surrender internal processes to accommodate the platform. Apart from the rare guest appearance from our account manager at the implementation agency and apathetic email response from the Salesforce sales team, nothing moved us forward.

When considering the hundreds of dashboarding tools available on the market, Datorama stood out to me because it's a database/data manipulation/data visualization tool all in one. It's taken the pain out of organizing many systems to constantly monitor all marketing data (i.e. from platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google DoubleClick and Seach Ads 360).

The price point. If you're lucky enough to work for a firm or advertiser that can afford this tool, you'll be in analytics heaven. It's clear that it's a premium price point for a premium marketing analytics tool.