Consumer retail companies have an unprecedented opportunity to capitalize on the millions of brand impressions created every day by their own customers through social sharing. Yet few are able to measure the efficacy of this free digital marketing because they lack the tools and in-house skillsets to analyze the firehose of data.
Keen customer Pixlee TurnTo solves this pain point with its visual marketing platform that enables companies like Levi’s Jeans, Kimpton Hotels, and Converse to discover images shared by their most passionate customers and then deploy those assets in digital marketing campaigns. By doing so, brands are able to build more authentic marketing.
To help its clients truly understand the impact of this unique value proposition, Pixlee TurnTo uses Keen to provide a highly customized analytics dashboard with real-time, beautiful representations of end user engagement and conversion. The Pixlee TurnTo dashboard presents custom metrics like “lightbox engagement” alongside traditional metrics like pageviews and conversions.
Pixlee TurnTo delivers actionable marketing insights to its customers
When the Pixlee TurnTo team was building the platform, they knew real-time analytics would be key to their clients’ success. “Our platform enables our clients to find, curate, and publish their great user-generated social content,” said Jeff Chen, Pixlee TurnTo co-founder and Director of Engineering. “But our clients also want to see how that this content is affecting behavior. What kind of photos are customers clicking on? What do they seem interested in? If we can expose this data to our clients, they will have a deeper understanding of their own customers and take away actionable business insights on how to market, brand, and engage their target audience.”
To make this vision a reality, Pixlee TurnTo needs to track vast amounts of data aggregated from disparate sources and develop custom queries. “We are tracking anonymous activity data on every channel where clients embed user-generated content,” continued Jeff. “We are measuring what social content customers are clicking on and how this affects their purchasing behavior.”
Further, because Pixlee TurnTo’s clients would be the primary consumers of this data, the company also needed a solution that would track and display data specific to each client, without exposing other clients’ data.
Finding the right analytics for the short term and the long run
When Pixlee TurnTo began this initiative, they considered a variety of providers. “The problem with point solutions is that they aren’t so free-form. It’s a little bit funky to be able to get multidimensional events from them,” said Jeff.
Developing an analytics stack in-house was also not a viable option for Pixlee TurnTo. “Building a robust native events platform could have taken up to multiple months and been a poor use of developer resources.”
With Keen, Pixlee TurnTo found a solution that met all their needs: customizable data model, white-label native analytics, and quick implementation.
Keen also gave Pixlee TurnTo the flexibility to plan for the future. “Our whole philosophy in the beginning was: we might not need to unleash all of this data to our customers immediately but we better start collecting it earlier rather than later. This MO has worked out really well for us. Whenever we think, ‘oh what if we could get this data?’ We realized that we already have the data because we made the decision to pull it early.”
Keen’s platform enables Pixlee TurnTo to present client dashboards in real-time, no matter how big the data set. And they’re able to run complex funnel analysis in a point-and-click UI. “It’s great being able to run custom conversion calculations without having to build anything out on our own.”
Running conversion analysis using Keen’s custom funnels is amazing. I wouldn’t be able to get this level of granular insight anywhere else.
Proving out the value proposition with a 20% boost in engagement
Pixlee TurnTo’s largest client segment is e-commerce, where metrics are critical to business growth. “Our clients care about the raw numbers,” explained Jeff. “What’s my conversion? What’s my AOV (average order value)? How much am I selling at any given time? We’re able to measure the conversion and say with Pixlee TurnTo on these particular pages, people are converting at this better rate. We’re able to tell our clients the exact amount of money we helped them make.”
Keen’s cloud analytics platform helps Pixlee TurnTo optimize the content they display on their clients’ sites. “We collect data on the engagement rate of all the photos, combine that with data on which ones are causing conversions and then run a multi-banded algorithm to send the best stuff to the top. The engagement is based purely off of custom funnel analysis run on Keen.”
With this approach, Pixlee TurnTo delivers an 8-to-20% increase in engagement over a purely randomized approach.
Beyond the numbers, Pixlee TurnTo uses data to demonstrate that they care about their clients’ success.
We want to show that we can grow with our clients. They’re able to continuously use us to magnify their fan base. These benefits stretch beyond existing clients as well. We consistently receive referrals from our clients. Part of the reason they recommend us to other people is that they are able to visualize the value. Keen makes that possible for us.
