GroupM Case Study: Providing a world-class analytics experience to enterprise customers
How GroupM Indonesia provided a world-class analytics experience to their major client, using Holistics for dedicated analytics services and a white-label solution
Before, we used Excel sheets to report to the client. But now we have live dashboards… The client is excited [about this project].
Resa Prasetyo
Analytics Director, GroupM Indonesia
About GroupM
GroupM is a global media investment management group. It is the parent company of media and advertising agencies worldwide, and is the world’s largest advertising media company in terms of billings.
The company handles more than $113 billion in annual media investment through agencies such as Essence, m/SIX, MediaCom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, as well as the programmatic audience advertising company, Xaxis.
The Problem
Managing international campaigns on manual spreadsheets
Continuous development of apps, social networks, and websites in the past decade has made digital advertising a truly complex task. Companies need to create content customised for specific audiences and platforms, and make sure they’re displayed at the optimal time and spot. And with the advancement of data analytics technology, it has become imperative to track every single ad and closely assess its performance.
When you’re a large multinational fast moving consumer goods company, this starts to become quite complicated. Major international firms work with agencies to create, place, track, and analyse numerous ads, running multiple campaigns at once. In Indonesia, GroupM used Holistics to provide exactly such a service to a major client.
GroupM needed a way to track and measure the performance of all these ads while also providing their client with straightforward, up-to-date, and constant reports. Initially, the agency used spreadsheets to manually create reports. The process, unsurprisingly, took plenty of time and came with the risk of data-entry errors.
We have tons of data sources and we have to simplify it and make the data insightful. Holistics helps us to arrange data, [and] manage [it].
– Resa Prasetyo, Analytics Director, GroupM Indonesia
The Solution
White-label solution and analytics services for live dashboards and world-class analytics
GroupM launched Project Symphony for their client in November 2018. The project uses Holistics to track digital paid media across several digital platforms, such as social networks and apps. To achieve this, GroupM connected data from various sources to Holistics, such as:
- Website data - Google Analytics
- Ad data - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google AdWords
- Programmatic ad data - GroupM connects Xaxis, its in-house programmatic ad tool, to Sizmek, a digital advertising platform. A custom Sizmek integration was developed by Holistics to connect Sizmek to the platform
With these data sources connected to Holistics, GroupM is able to integrate the data to analyse ad performance, by tracking and measuring key metrics, including:
- Impressions and unique impressions
- Clicks and unique clicks
- Frequency
- Reach
- Click-through rate
- Cost per click
- Cost per ID
The data helps GroupM provide their client with data to evaluate ads and identify what strategies do and don’t work for the Indonesian market. It helps them identify channels, creatives, and placements that are not cost-efficient.
For Project Symphony, GroupM created customised Holistics dashboards for their client, with the help of procured Holistics analytics services. Their client would simply log in to their Holistics dashboard to see up-to-date reports on ad performance. This means the client did not have to keep asking GroupM to provide them with frequent updates.
The insights were also able to help GroupM with audience and campaign planning. Supported by Holistics, the agency incorporated the use of historical data to identify benchmarks to target for their next campaigns into the custom dashboards. For example, they identify how much it took to acquire views in past campaigns, and use that information to estimate the cost of the next campaign.
As a result of using Holistics, “we increased the quality of reporting,” says Resa Prasetyo, Analytics Director at GroupM, explaining that they used to have to perform manual spreadsheet reporting. He adds that their use of Holistics has helped them reduce errors and increase the speed and efficiency of their work.
It has also helped them improve their client services. “The client can access reports without asking us for numbers. The client is excited. They are involved in this project,” he adds.
Holistics is easy to use… they [also] have a dedicated team that will always help us to build the dashboard.
– Resa Prasetyo, Analytics Director, GroupM Indonesia
Killer Features
How GroupM uses Holistics
GroupM created not one, but five Holistics dashboards for their client. Each has a different objective. For example, one dashboard presents an executive summary, providing a helicopter view of the Symphony Project and of ad performance across all digital platforms.
GroupM offers its client Holistics’ business intelligence platform as a white-label analytics tool. That means that when the client looks at the dashboard, what they see is the Project Symphony label, while getting the full Holistics analytics platform experience.
The client’s dashboard landing page automatically refreshes whenever they login, to pull the most recent data. The ability to offer their client complete visibility into the data at any time, as well as the ability to view it with live updates in understandable reports and charts, is a value-add that gives the agency a competitive edge over its competitors.
Future Of Data At GroupM
Growing importance of data in advertising
In the future, GroupM aims to launch similar projects for other clients. “We can give clients ownership of the dashboard,” says Resa. Clients could customise the look and feel of their analytics dashboard, and design it according to the metrics they need to track.
Resa adds that in terms of the service they provide, “it will add value if we have a dashboard and the data is [near] real-time”. The agency will be focusing on implementing application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow them to seamlessly connect different data sources to Holistics, and make data visibility a key part of the value they offer clients as an advertising agency.
In fact, says Resa, data might just become the company’s most important department in five years’ time.
Using Holistics
Tips & tricks from the GroupM team
- Let clients control the look and feel of their dashboards, and have different dashboards for different objectives.
- Use live reporting by disabling the dashboard cache, or set an automatic schedule for the data to be refreshed on the dashboard. This way, clients can check the dashboard for important information instead of having to ask you all the time.
- Use the Data Transform feature to schedule the saving of data results of long-running report queries as a persistent table in your database, for an instantaneous reporting experience.
- Have a bit of fun! GroupM shares that its client loves the humorous, interactive loading messages on the Holistics software.