Data dispersity, the next big challenge for data-driven organizations

Posted on by Petr Nemeth

A clear trend in today’s business IT is the proliferation of various cloud-based services that seek to lower operational costs, facilitate the adoption of new technologies and improve overall business performance. It has become common practice for businesses to use CRM for clients and lead management, business intelligence tools for financial analysis, Google Analytics to track online channel performance, Google AdWords for online campaign management and the list goes on. Having immediate access to performance information regarding various aspects of your business is always great. However, this is easier said than done. With and abundance of data coming from these services and with new tools and services appearing all the time, orchestrating the entire infrastructure for your organization’s data ecosystem can be a daunting task. To make things worse, many of these services don’t integrate with each other out of the box, creating major headaches for data analysts who want to look at the bigger picture regarding their company’s data. Businesses generally address this issue either by hiring staff to operate the various platforms independently, (The Login>Select>Filter>Download>Process-in-spreadsheet routine) or by paying for the costly custom development of various data bridges which can be chaotic and expensive as data sources from new services are continuously added to the ecosystem.

Businesses Crave Automation and Truly Seamless Data Integration

Dataddo is a universal analytics, advertising and customer data pipeline allowing data integration, automation and transformation. Our platform is designed to work with almost any online data service and already covers existing popular analytics platforms, CRMs, adtech solutions and social networks. Dataddo transforms and wires data to a wide range of databases, DWHs, cloud storages and dashboarding/BI applications allowing for smooth and simple integration with your existing IT and BI stacks. Dataddo creates simplicity for organizations in the expanding and increasingly chaotic data analytics ecosystem.

Openness and Flexibility are Crucial

We believe that the ever-growing dispersity of online data sources will eventually force most companies with considerable internet activities to deploy a data integration solution. We built Dataddo with openness and flexibility as our core driving concepts, leading to a solution that works even for organizations with legacy systems or proprietary solutions.

It is Not Just About Software

At Dataddo, we are all data-crazy. This mentality helps us understand the importance of being effective and efficient when it comes to working with data. Our mission is to help our clients use the ever-growing amount of data to their advantage rather than having it complicate things. For example, one of our clients is of the largest marketing agencies in the EU and they manage hundreds of Facebook, Instagram and Google campaigns on behalf of their clients. In the past, it would take two analysts and 4 full days of work at the beginning of each month to create performance reports for their various campaigns. The chain of tasks ranging from obtaining the data itself, through data transformation, to delivery to the client’s endpoints was automated by Dataddo saving them dozens of hours each month and obviously quite a bit of money. After deploying our software, the client can now dedicate those 8 saved man-days to more important tasks that will drive the development of its business.

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Challenges for digital media in the era of data-driven businesses

Posted on by Petr Nemeth

The rapid development of the technology is profoundly changing our society, businesses and even ourselves. Media is, without doubts, the sector that has been dramatically affected by recent advances in the technology. In the chronological order, there was a significant emergence of online news portals at the beginning of 21st century, ruining many newspapers and magazines. Followed by YouTube and other video streaming services, whose proliferation caused major headaches to all traditional TV broadcasters, killed brick-and-mortar video renting industry and turned the video-distribution market on the head. Seeking new revenue streams, many big media houses reshaped their strategies and adopted digitalisation policies and started developing own digital divisions. However, as social media emerged in late 00’s, Facebook and Twitter, in particular, the new challenges even for newly-coming digital media keep steadily rising.

Weak brands

Successful online media portals after its emergence gradually built strong brands and were enjoying a surplus of somewhat cheap direct traffic, as users usually had a couple of top-of-mind online portals they were regularly surfing at. Given the fact, that such traffic could be easily monetised via display advertising or paid press releases, investments into digital media promised substantial long-term profits. However, in the last couple of years, the trend somewhat turned around as online media brands are being weakened by an increasing number of gate-keeping services such as social media, news aggregators or recommendation engines. So, instead of accessing favourite online media brands directly, using such gate-keeping is leading to weakening the brands. Furthermore, as traffic distribution algorithms are rather obscure, digital brands are losing control on their audiences.

Loss of direct traffic audience

Weaker brand from the web analytics perspective is resulting in profound changes in traffic source distribution, shifting from direct – i.e. someone typing URL into a browser address bar – to referrals, social shares, organic searches or even paid promotions. As a result of this shift, online media are increasingly at to mercy of such gatekeeping services. Clear prove to this statement is a recent change in Facebook’s post display algorithms, causing a significant drop in audience reach for organic posts. To maintain previous reach levels, publishers had to employ paid promotion, which is indeed further jeopardising once-positive business cases.

Changes in content consumption

With more content, sources and channels available, the typical consumption behaviour is changing towards less-time-less-content pattern. Social media, in particular, get along with this trend as more news are consumed in the form Facebook posts, Tweets or even Instagram photos. For the media on the other hand, as more content is being consumed outside owned channels, it is increasingly difficult to reconcile even the basic performance metrics.

Proliferation and demand for data analytics

Expanding and increasingly diverse nature of data sources operated by digital media drives the demand for data platforms as well as the proliferation and demand for data analytics in the media business. Given the fact, that it is difficult to reconcile even the basic media performance metrics and the fact that digital media must quickly adopt data-driven business processes, the key component of such data platforms is flexibility, i.e. ability to accommodate all those diverse data sources. Moreover, with lagging revenues from online advertising and fierce competition, cost-effectiveness in another important factor.

Dataddo is helping on-line media with pursuing their data-driven decisions

In Dataddo, we built our data platform with a simple objective – being able to work with any online data source providing it has an API – regardless the shape or form on the one hand, and on the other hand is easily interoperable with any existing IT infrastructure businesses might have. This makes Dataddo platform suitable for digital media in particular, as we are able to accommodate the great diversity data sources, that digital media are usually working with and indeed have the flexibility to swiftly implement any newly emerging. Dataddo platform is operated in cloud ensuring cost-effectiveness and thanks to the well-thought user interface can be operated even by non-tech users.

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