A skeptic's guide to marketing analytics from Coalesce 2023

"What do you do when the best practice is no longer a best practice for your business? If you're us, you make up something else entirely."

Amanda Fioritto, Analytics Engineer at Hex, discusses the creation of a new marketing analytics framework at Hex. She focuses on the limitations of traditional marketing attribution models and the need for a more flexible, comprehensive approach that meets the needs of Hex's business.

Exploration and flexibility take precedence over hard and fast attribution models

Amanda highlights the need for a more flexible approach to marketing analytics, especially when dealing with attribution models. Traditional models often don't fit the unique needs and contexts of different businesses. According to Amanda, "Just because someone has a data request doesn't mean that there's a need to fulfill this request. Or that, even if there’s a need, that it has to be done immediately...If that were the case, data practitioners would be short-order cooks." Instead, Amanda stresses the importance of understanding the underlying need behind a request and crafting solutions that align with broader visions and goals.

Amanda encourages data practitioners to clarify their "why" before undertaking big projects. In her past experiences, she questioned whether the business was well-suited to the requested attribution framework and whether the timing was right for such a project. "The question that we were facing is, ‘Is this how Hex works?’ And the reality here is that Hex doesn't quite work this linearly. We have a ton of different ways that people interact with us on a day-to-day basis.”

She also stresses the importance of involving the whole team in the process and creating a model that tells the unique story of the company. Amanda explains, "Once you've understood your ‘why,’ you can go further and faster by pulling your team into the process and having them create this world with you. It will be a lot easier if you've all agreed upfront about what this world is going to accomplish and what it's not going to accomplish."

A symbiotic relationship between data and business operations can lead to more effective marketing analytics

Amanda discusses the symbiotic relationship between dbt and Salesforce within Hex's operations. dbt provides complex data modeling and rich context from other data sources that Salesforce wouldn't typically have, while Salesforce provides a CRM's worth of data to tie in with other data sources.

Amanda explains, "dbt gives to Salesforce a lot of things that Salesforce cannot do on its own, or cannot do very well on its own... Salesforce in turn gives stuff to dbt: a CRM's worth of data to tie in with other data sources around your company and democratize across your company. It also serves as a home for data that isn't easily captured anywhere."

The importance of building a marketing analytics framework that works for all stakeholders and is easily accessible

"Campaign impact’ is just as made up as ‘attribution’ is. I made it up. I can tell you that it's not real. I made it up, but it's helpful for our team."

One of the key points Amanda makes is the importance of making data accessible to all stakeholders. She discusses the “Campaign Impact Dashboard,” built in Hex and designed to be flexible and interactive. This tool allowed users to choose where to start their data exploration and set their own attribution window, depending on their specific needs.

Amanda explains the concept behind the dashboard: "It's flexible. It's very interactive. You get to choose where to start... Once you've set your parameters, you can start to dive into this data. We start folks off with a high-level overview, some very basic summary statistics... and we can begin to break this down by ICP, ideal customer profile, to figure out who within this campaign is most likely to derive value from Hex…”

Emphasizing the importance of bringing data to the people, Amanda says, "There's nothing more unsatisfying than building a dashboard or a model, and then it just sits and doesn't get used... You have to make sure that it's delightful and sticky for your stakeholders, such that they're actually using it, reacting to it, and helping you improve it."

Amanda’s key insights into marketing analytics

• Traditional marketing attribution models may not fit the needs of all businesses. They often lack flexibility and do not account for all types of customer interactions
• Hex's new marketing analytics framework was designed to be flexible and to account for both online and in-person customer interactions
• Using a combination of tools, including dbt, Salesforce, and Hex, the team was able to create a single source of truth for all marketing efforts
• The Campaign Impact Dashboard, created using the new framework, allows for a more comprehensive view of marketing efforts and their impact on customer behavior
• The new framework and dashboard have been well received by Hex's marketing and sales teams