Tune addresses marketers' pain points with new reporting offering
For marketers, getting and gathering data can be a love/hate affair. The love comes from the numbers that come in, clearly indicating where campaigns are performing and how budget can and should be spent. The hate? Intuitive, quick reconciliation and aggregation. Clunky spreadsheets and complex interpretations between ad and attribution providers is part and parcel. Mobile marketing technology company Tune, at their Postback ’16 event in Seattle, announced the release of Multiverse, to help address this and other marketer pain points.
“It's a really big deal from a workflow perspective. From a data perspective, the marketer already has access to all of this,” said Peter Hamilton, CEO of Tune. “It’s just really annoying to combine it all together and get the insights around, ‘What is my return from my ad spend?’ Marketers spend a lot of time swimming in spreadsheets, exporting from maybe 50 or even 100 different advertising partners, combining that into one Excel spreadsheet, pulling in all their mobile engagement data and attribution data. They're trying to normalize that data, and all that data's done on different time zones. The columns are sorted and ordered in different ways, so trying to get down to the accurate and granular result is really, really difficult.”
In its simplest form, the technology allows marketers to reconcile the cost of marketing campaigns for the results they are getting from web and mobile apps. By integrating over 100 advertising platforms, marketers get a much quicker and simpler view. The free platform more accurately assesses return on ad spend, normalizing the data, another marketer pain point, throughout the day.
“(Data normalization) is happening on an hourly basis and it's refreshing and normalizing throughout the day, so that the data is always accurate. Even if there are problems, maybe an ad partner has an issue with their API and it goes down for three or four hours, after that three or four hours, whenever we do get the data, we're going to backtrack and normalize and smooth out the curve, even over that blackout period,” noted Hamilton. “We’re managing even the risks of all these different data sources coming in and we're figuring out how to make them normalize together and work together properly to give accurate results.”
Accuracy is critical and avoids the unexplained data peaks and valleys, which can be frustrating.
“There has to be great data health and cleanliness in order to actually determine what the trends are, and especially if you're launching a brand-new campaign, you really want to be able to watch that behavior over these first few days,” said Hamilton. “If it's dropping or skyrocketing or even just plateauing for reasons that you don't know, then you can't really make a decision on whether you should continue to buy, whether you should change your targeting, whether you should change your creatives and improve the campaign.”
Again, what’s most interesting about the platform is its cost — nothing. Hamilton and Seattle-based Tune have identified that being the “system of record,” the central marketing stack for mobile marketing is part of their growth arc and that Multiverse, though a bit of a sampling of the offering, has a higher purpose and is of service to the industry.
“I really do believe that this should be a basic marketer right — to have access to this data and to be able to make decisions quickly,” said Hamilton. “You’ve already paid for all of the media and you've already paid for the attribution provider. You already paid for the Tune marketing console or you paid for Adjust or AppsFlyer, and you have access to all of this. Now, all that needs to happen is for it to be normalized and simplified and put together in a way that can actually be used. I think that's what every marketer already knows and is kind of frustrated about. They're tired of having to refresh this every day and every week, and this is something that can make their lives easier and hopefully help them really grow.”