Media Unleashed

Unleash your media. Run.

Data Visualization

By: Bridget Wilhelm    February 26, 2021

Running effective media is critical, but telling the performance story to clients and internal stakeholders can be a minefield. Choosing the best platform to aggregate and report on data and create efficient, scalable, and beautiful reports is one way to make a marketer’s job easier.

The analytics team at Marcus Thomas chooses a reporting platform by considering the data sources being reported on, the frequency of reporting, the size of the data set and complexity of any calculations, as well as the ultimate audience and visual needs. With these criteria, Google Data Studio, Tableau or Datorama are often the winning reporting platforms.

Google Data Studio shines for any projects with most data coming straight from another Google product, like Google Analytics or Google Ads. There are other connectors available that make it easy to connect to most paid media sources. Google Data Studio is our top choice for small data sets and simple visual executions.

Tableau is a great tool to visualize business data combined with marketing data, or to work from complicated SQL databases and other offline data sets. It is a great choice for technical analysis and teams that like having access to detailed data.

Datorama is a Salesforce product, which makes it a handy way to pull data from other Salesforce products. It also connects natively to hundreds of common data sources, and it has connectors built in to make it easy to automate other sources. This tool creates flexible dashboards that combine complex data sources in a simple, digestible format.

While training and cost for each of the platforms varies widely, and there is no shortage of other tools out there, Marcus Thomas has found great success with Google Data Studio, Tableau and Datorama as a means to tell client stories and analyze media data.