Principia Analytics

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior director of social media at Lamark Media, a full-service agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with Principia Analytics?

For a while now, attribution has been a hot topic in digital media, so we’re trying to figure out not only the multi-contact attribution, but also the true impact of the media we're running for our clients on various platforms.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Principia provides us with a platform where all of our media is tagged with both impressions and click tags. That allows us to see all of our media and its results in one place, along with incrementality and causal attribution reports that really help us identify which channels and audiences, even keywords, are truly having an impact on customers' decision-making.

The attribution platform gives us the data to optimize and modify our strategy to get the most bang for our marketing dollars — the more data it collects, the better insights we garner from the reports.

We have onboarded additional clients because of the success we had with the initial one, so we still use the same product and service.

What is the team composition?

We worked with a couple of people while onboarding. I currently have contact with Fred (Director of Analytics), who has made it very easy to funnel everything through him. He’s really the only one I have to deal with at this point.

How did you come to work with Principia Analytics?

Our CEO was familiar with the company. We obviously saw multiple different attribution platforms, but we made the decision to go with Principia because they were very unique in the sense that they provided actual incrementality and causal effects of media.

All other attribution platforms were really multi-content distribution platforms where it didn’t really tell us if it impacted the person’s decision making; it just told us that that particular channel was in the consumer journey.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent close to $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Principia in March 2019, and the relationship is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

As an agency, we’re ultimately looking at client results and performance, so revenue is the main KPI that we measure. As we’ve continued to use this platform and model to make our media decisions, we’ve been hitting client goals, so they are happy.

The data is very insightful as far as how we look at our marketing mix. Every platform takes credit for every conversion as long as it was in the past conversion, so optimizing off that could help, but you could essentially be wasting dollars on media tactics that aren’t necessary to ultimately drive that conversion. This service helps us mitigate what we spend and where we allocate budgets toward channels, tactics, audiences, and creatives that truly make an impact on that incremental lift.

Therefore, if we’re hitting client goals, the platform is helping us to make smarter decisions on what audiences, platforms, and tactics to invest in. It’s a useful service, and we’ll continue to utilize the data to improve upon our client results.

How did Principia Analytics perform from a project management standpoint?

We honestly couldn’t be happier. I send emails, requests, and questions, and they’re very responsive. If I ask them to jump on a client call with me, they’re more than willing to do that — they always go above and beyond. As far as turnarounds, they’re pretty quick. They deliver anywhere from the same day to a few days, which is normal for that sort of matter.

We don’t have any set meetings. As long as their platform is functioning and there aren’t any issues, we don’t really have a need to communicate with them. As marketers, we’re responsible for analyzing the data that’s provided through the platform and making the decisions. I do communicate with Fred probably a couple of times a month, whether it’s just for asking for additional tags, change our creatives, or more, because we do facilitate and take care of all the ad server requirements for us as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s the uniqueness of their platform. I haven’t seen any other that offers an incremental piece; all of them are about multi-touch fractional attribution. On the other hand, Principia's platform goes a step further into the entire incrementality and causality of data, and we get the best value from it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

As marketers, we can garner our own insights and forecasting, but I think the next evolution with attribution is being able to forecast or generate insights based on data. However, that requires some sort of AI and an input from us to understand the marketing strategy and what we’re trying to accomplish, so I don’t know if that’s going to be possible or not.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It’s not for everyone. You have to have a healthy marketing mix to really take advantage of this. If you’re only running 1–2 channels, it might not be the best fit for you.

For clients that are running five or more channels or tactics, it certainly gives you a lot more insight into what’s working and what’s not. If you’re running that many channels, you probably have a pretty big investment in media anyways, so it will definitely help lower your expense in media.

Just from agency experience, there is a lot of waste in media going on out there. You’re getting impressions, in front of customers, and recording conversions, but you might not know if you had an impact or if the person would’ve converted anyways if you weren’t running that media.