Data Visualisation – Why we built our clients a proprietary data interface

Listen to article

No longer the preserve of statisticians, mathletes and assorted boffins – data visualisation is increasingly vital for everyone right across a brand’s business – but especially those in marketing

Data Visualisation and Advertising: Why Now?

Programmatic advertising – that is, media buying based on data and algorithms, with some level of automation thrown in for good measure – is eating digital display. By the last count, eMarketer says more than 80% of UK display will be traded programmatically in 2018. And increasingly, it is expanding to all media.

What does this mean for brands? First, a dizzying amount of data to get to grips with. But as we all know (or at least should do by this point) the biggest pile of data in the world is useless unless you know what to do with it. And more to the point, you can interpret what it means.

This is where data visualisation comes in.

Visualising Success

As with other areas of tech, data visualisation providers are in plentiful supply. Getting the right one is the challenge. Costs vary widely, and possibly even more so if your current media agency is just reselling third party software.

Beyond pricing, there are a few other areas you should pay extra close attention to:

  • Speed – it seems like a given, but fast loading and high performance can be the difference between a tool the whole team uses, or tires of and gives up on – and not all systems are created equal(ly fast).
  • Usability – does your dashboard look something like an airline cockpit? If so, see above – keep it simple.
  • Flexible, Exportable – does the tool do everything you need, and crucially, will it let you export that data back out as you need to.
  • Advertising-Native – much of the software out there isn’t built with a specific industry or use case in mind. Due to the specifics and peculiarities of advertising, that might mean extra development time or cost you hadn’t budgeted for.

The Addition Plus View: Benefits for In House Solutions, Customised for Campaigns

For our own purposes (and our own clients), licensing someone else’s software, created for general usage, was never an option. We have on our staff several PhDs whose daily work already includes helping clients get closer to their results data, as well as helping them get to the meaning behind them.

Those team members are also well versed in building data visualisation interfaces, so it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine building our own, advertising campaign-specific solution.

But rest assured: with an emphasis on simplicity, speed and ease of use, our platform is designed for everyone on your team to use, and not just the statisticians who created it.

Jacqui Wallis

Managing Director, Addition Plus