Gregory Welteroth Advertising Improves Marketing ROI With Alteryx

Given GWA’s varied client roster and stated objective to help those clients save money and gain a competitive edge, data analytics was always going to play an outsized role in their efforts.

The need for rich and varied data sources came early, according to Cory Hubbard, VP of Strategic Analytics for GWA. “Our founder started by working with lots of local retailers,” Hubbard says. “He began to grow beyond that, working with local John Deere dealers and then aggregating them into group programs, finding efficiencies through that. Then that exploded into working with them across the entire country.”

That strategy of finding efficiencies in media buys by aggregating clients would become a cornerstone of GWA’s growth. But they knew they needed as much data – and as much automation – as they could find if they were to maximize efficiencies for their clients.

Hubbard says the company has always subscribed to multiple audit sources for broadcast, digital and print. “But while we had access to them,” he says, “we weren’t really leveraging them and we were doing it all manually.”

The agency’s analytics team first came across Alteryx about seven years ago. “We’d been looking for a geospatial analytics solution,” Hubbard recalls. “We got on our first sales call, went through the Alteryx product demo and then saw all the other things it could do.” GWA bought one Alteryx license to try it out. Then another. Before long, they got full data licenses and a Server license. They were off and running. “We were building analytic applications and deploying them to the masses,” Hubbard says. “We were giving everybody the insights they needed.”

The team created automated reports for people with little data experience or understanding. “We had people who couldn’t even operate a pivot table in Excel,” joked Hubbard. They simplified it to the point of “Go click the run button,” he says. They started with the basics and built out their models from there.

GWA’s long-term goal was to be able to efficiently determine the right media mix for their clients and do so at scale. “All media still works,” said Hubbard. “It just absolutely 100% does not work for everything or everyone, right? You want to reach someone, and the reality is that a lot of companies have shifted over to being completely digitally focused. It’s not necessarily because digital works any better. In some cases, it definitely doesn’t. It’s just more trackable.”

Before long, GWA was using Alteryx to inform its data-driven decision making, expand its capabilities and take client sales and marketing efforts up a notch. The team refined consumer targeting and media tactics, reaching viable customers through an iterative process. This allowed GWA to enhance ROI for all parties, from manufacturers to individual retailers. They did this almost entirely within Alteryx, in some cases pushing data out to dashboard visualizations made in Tableau. And they did it in four distinct steps.

Step 1: Identifying the ideal target customer

The first thing GWA did for clients was to help understand who their existing customers were. They began by using consumer and business data feeds (from Experian, D&B, etc.) to enrich existing sales and lead data. Then they used segmentation analysis to determine which groups had the highest propensity for interacting with or purchasing from the brand. This helped GWA tailor messaging and target strategies around the most common customer needs.

Step 2: Finding more like-minded customers

You can’t grow a business without acquiring new customers. With that in mind, GWA helped their clients find more like-minded customers to sell to. How? By determining which markets over index in those key customer segments that showed a natural propensity to buy. This allowed GWA’s clients to efficiently plan and allocate their funds with confidence.

Step 3: Understanding how certain groups consume media
Having refined targeting and identified markets rich in potential customers, GWA then segmented consumers into demographic and psychographic clusters and paired these groups with generalized behaviors. This provided insight into media consumption, informing messaging strategies and delivery tactics for targeting at each stage of the customer journey.

Step 4: Determining how to effectively reach people

GWA used Alteryx to answer a critical question: Where are target consumers located in proximity to retail locations or distribution areas and how can we best reach them? First, they pulled in industry datasets like Nielsen, FCC, AAM and Geopath. Then they enriched them with consumer and geographic data.

GWA built numerous apps to ingest and clean up the different media audit sources, combining them in Alteryx to create a more valuable dataset. Finally, they performed geospatial analytics to determine which media properties would reach their clients’ target customers within their serviceable trade areas most effectively and without wasting excess media impressions.

Using computer vision capabilities in the Alteryx Intelligence Suite, GWA is able to automate the process of ingesting PDF media invoices, pulling in data, verifying against what was scheduled to run, and then renaming for cataloging purposes.

The time-consuming, tedious process was reduced to seconds with just the click of a button using Alteryx, creating an estimated time savings of 270+ labor hours in one year.

The Alteryx impact at GWA has been notable, Hubbard says. “When people ask what our methodology is,” Hubbard says, “Alteryx makes it a lot easier for us to explain it to people and prove it out. It makes it easier to walk them through what’s going on. There’s nuance with the data.” Hubbard also points out the value in having a clear audit trail every step of the way.

Time savings has been the big story, he says, but it goes beyond that as some people across the company are getting analyses they never would have been able to get before.

Hubbard cites data aggregation and automation as the two most impactful changes in GWA’s Alteryx era. Before GWA had everything aggregated under Alteryx, he says, tying things together and building out reports for different teams took three days or even a full week. “If you take three days per dealer down to a minute max of personal time,” Hubbard says, “and you’re working with thousands and thousands of dealers, it really starts to add up.”

GWA has had “insane amounts” of time savings, he says, actually saving “years and years of time.” He points to the broader impact: “Now it’s done on a schedule and on a cadence. It’s put together and shipped out in an email. Then it’s available on dashboards so we can walk people through it. It’s a couple of decades of labor that we turned into nothing.”

These days, when GWA deploys media for a client, they can carefully track which ads are performing and see how customers are reacting to both messaging and placements. They just gather lead and sales data in conjunction with when and where media is running in market. This allows them to go beyond simple first- or last-touch attribution modeling and get true insight into how ancillary media is impacting brand awareness and driving consumer action.

By measuring continuously and remaining open to constant optimization, GWA is able to improve marketing ROl for its clients through a continuous iterative process. It’s good when it starts and it only gets better with time.

Using this approach, GWA won a national award in conjunction with its agency partner The MX Group, B2B Marketing Elevation Awards’ “Best Use of Customer Insight,” for a joint client in the technology sector.

The iterative data-driven process using Alteryx has led to millions of dollars of net new revenue.  “Now every pitch and strategy begins with data and insights,” says Hubbard. “The media itself has become just another tool to activate upon it.”