Interactive Analytics Blog Series: Instant Drill-Down

Programmatic marketplaces are continuing to change the game in buying and selling of online advertising; the data from these marketplaces is enabling an even bigger transformation in marketing itself, fostering data-informed practices everywhere. That has led to increased adoption of a new breed of analytics designed for the fast-paced programmatic age.  

This is the second in a three-part series about how marketers can make the most of their programmatic data by leveraging interactive analytics, with today’s post focusing on the value of instant drill-down.

Instant Drill Down: Flexible Data Exploration

Any marketer can tell you that looking at static reports on a campaign can be a frustrating experience, because they often raise more questions than they answer. Sure, you may know the total number of video views, but what if you’ve seen an unexpected drop in views compared with the previous month?

With static reports, answering that question might require an entirely new request for reports, or it might be impossible to retrieve if not set up ahead of time. The inflexible nature of most reporting systems often forces you to accept incomplete analysis of your results.  

But what if you could go a level deeper and see which publishers were driving those views? Or a look at results sorted by audience segment? And what if you want to see which combinations of publisher and audience segments were most effective together?

Without these essential drill-down capabilities, marketers are missing out on deeper layers of insight that their competitors are jumping on to optimize their campaigns’ performance. An interactive analytics solution must enable fresh cuts of the data to provide instant drill downs and pivots on any combination of dimensions. Equally important, the solution must also take care of the necessary data ingestion “dirty work” to cleanse and structure complex datasets in real time, enabling users to explore any combination of dimensions in a dataset without any special efforts.

The Metamarkets dashboard is making this possible by deploying a new generation of underlying data storage technology designed for high-volume, high-velocity data. The power of Druid, our open-source streaming data store that queries billions of data points with sub-second latency, allows our users to receive instant answers to their customized questions.

Kevin Reilly, a senior vice president at Dstillery, recently noted that Metamarkets month-to-date reporting is the first thing he examines each morning looking for discrepancies from the norm. He looks at where spend is coming from and how it compares with the previous month across a number of key dimensions. If anything stands out for any of his clients, he wants to know not just that there’s a problem, but exactly which dimensions are creating the issue. Interactive analytics allow him and his team to drill down into the data to understand the underlying problem in minutes instead of waiting days for new reports to come in.

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, make sure to check out our first post in this series on data freshness, and stay tuned for an upcoming post about the importance of self-serve analytics that work for everyone in your marketing organization. You can also download our full whitepaper on interactive analytics and connect with us here to learn more!