Determining which online marketing channels work for a business – and which don’t – can be a challenge. Omaha startup Click Targeter has developed a comprehensive reporting suite and data analysis services to paint a more accurate picture.
“If you’re just doing one type of online ad, it’s not that tricky,” said CEO Chris Beecham. “With more than one type of advertising, it can become information overload.”
The Click Targeter reporting suite aggregates data from multiple channels into a data warehouse and generates reports in an easy-to-digest format. This allows side-by-side comparisons of performance from different sources like e-mail, social media and websites.
“You can get all the data in one place,” Beecham said. “How it becomes actionable is looking at spending for conversion. You can figure out what’s working and what’s not, drop one and double down on the other.”
The idea began to germinate during Beecham’s tenure as a digital advertising manager with a large database firm.
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“They sell the data, so I learned the industry from people who really knew what’s going on,” he said. “They wanted to know for each website what combination of marketing was most effective. My job was to spend their money for them.”
Beecham’s data analysis skills provided a solid foundation for marketing decisions at the firm.
“Ultimately it came down to one person justifying one thing versus the data analysis,” he said. “That’s where the core of the idea came from.”
After a short stint with another startup that didn’t pan out, an opportunity arose to work with a company that sold tickets on the secondary market.
“They were spending a considerable amount when I met them,” Beecham said. “You get burned sometimes spending that much.”
Beecham’s data analysis skills challenged some of the company’s assumptions.
“They thought concerts were the best events to promote, but when you look at the numbers, baseball was the best,” he said. “Smaller sales but higher margins. They also thought mornings were the best time for sales, but when you look at the numbers that wasn’t the case.”
Now Beecham is preparing to take all he has learned and apply it through the Click Targeter platform. After originally planning to sell the reporting suite as a product, market research led to a pivot. Now he plans to offer the suite for free as an introduction to his value proposition of data analysis services.
“I think it’s the best format for reporting out there,” he said. “It has a unique value. Give it away for free and have people test it out.”
Making the reporting suite freely available is also a way to give back to the startup community.
“It can help small startups by giving them the template and letting them customize it to their accounts,” Beecham said. “It’s my gift to the community in one package.”
Even larger companies are not always managing their online ad spending as effectively as they could.
“One of the really surprising things I found along the way is that a lot of people aren’t collecting the data they think they are,” Beecham said. “I can tell them that this is not working, stop doing that.”
And it’s not a static situation. Markets are always evolving.
“Once you set it up you have to adapt to changing markets,” Beecham said. “A certain ad channel may be good but then other people find out about it. It’s a constant battle, you can’t just do it one time.”
The target for revenue generation is larger firms with advertising budgets.
“My real goal right now is finding more paying clients by getting more people to use my reporting service for free and seeing the value,” Beecham said. “There’s no risk, really. If they like it and want to scale up their marketing, give me a call.”
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Rod Armstrong is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for AIM in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is a regular contributor to Silicon Prairie News.
