Interactive Analytics Blog Series: Data Freshness

When put to good use, programmatic data can radically improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. But most of this data goes to waste today, due to outdated advertising analytics tools that can’t handle the volume and velocity of programmatic data.

As part of our commitment to put data at our users’ fingertips, we’ve created a three-part series about how marketers can make the most of their programmatic data by leveraging interactive analytics an approach to exploring and visualizing data that puts the full power of big data into the hands of the people who need it. To kick off the series, we’re focusing on the importance of data freshness.

Data Freshness: Your Real-Time Traffic App

As consumers in today’s fast-paced world, we expect that information from the various channels we consume is being updated in real-time. Imagine what the rest of your world would be like without that instantaneous access to fresh information: can you picture a Twitter timeline that only updated once an hour? Or a news site that could only post new stories once-a-day?

Data freshness is an accepted standard that we don’t think twice about, because decision makers expect and need to interact with unfolding events immediately. But for marketers  managing programmatic campaigns, the lag time they experience before key metrics on their online advertising analytics arrive is often days. That means they miss out on fixing a small issue before it becomes a larger one.

At Metamarkets, our interactive analytics dashboard is tackling that issue head on, providing data insights to marketers within minutes, not hours or days. This real-time data is overlaid with historical data, to provide context and identify trends.  

The power of gaining access to fresh data means that users can gain instant clarity into their business, helping them make informed decisions. When troubleshooting operational or technical issues with a campaign, determining problems and addressing them quickly can have an immediate financial impact. For example, campaign dollars can then be moved from under-performing to high-performing targets, raising campaign performance in-flight.

One of Metamarkets’ largest mobile ad exchange customers recently noted that its campaign optimization process before working with interactive analytics was laborious and challenging. The company had to formulate a theory about how to improve a client’s performance, convince them of it, and then wait for new results to validate or disprove it. Now, they can come to a client with hard data upfront, make immediate changes, and prove within minutes that it’s made a difference.

Interactive analytics let users analyze campaigns as they unfold through audience characteristics, sites, ad sizes, location, time of day, and other dimensions. The result is fewer errors, or errors that are addressed much more quickly, and reduced waste.

What’s Next and How To Get in Touch

If you’d like to hear more about how the interactive analytics and visualization Metamarkets provides can impact your bottom line – not only by providing data freshness but also for allowing instant drill-downs and creating a self-service user interface, stay tuned for more posts in this series coming soon. You can also download the full whitepaper on interactive analytics and connect with us here to learn more!