Act-On Software today announced the release of Act-On Data Studio, permitted customers to take a deeper dive into all the data Act-On collected, and especially data on engagement touch-points. The SaaS-based marketing automation vendor hopes to provide increased accessibility to the large volumes of data aggregated in its system.
We spoke with Gal Josefsberg, Act-On’s VP of Product Management and Marketing. He said that traditional dashboards and reports were inadequate tools for configuring and visualizing cloud-based customer data. “We’re not replacing dashboards and reports,” he conceded, “but Data Studio is where you go to really start digging into the data to learn how to improve performance.”
Data Studio was inspired by ETL, he said, but with Dat Studio its not necessary to have developers involved in the extract, transform, load process. The UI is built for marketers, and tested on Act-On’s own marketing team in-house. Preconfigured templates as well as charts, graphs and heat maps, allow users to generate their own data packages, using data from any field, filter or log. Data packages can be downloaded or transferred and shared via SFTP, and customized reports can be scheduled: “For example,” said Josefsberg, “I can schedule an email every Monday morning giving me a deep dive into email performance.”
In testing, Act-On found that around 70 to 80 percent of Data Studio usage involved drilling deep into the data for insights into topics like the performance of specific assets with specific types of customers in varying contexts (like time of day). “We can already satisfy a lot of the simpler use cases within Act-On,” said Josefsberg. Although an analyst isn’t required to operate the Data Studio interface, Josefsberg said the tool was probably best suited to a business which has an analyst on staff to interpret and apply the results.
Like Act-On’s other offerings, Data Studio is entirely SaaS-based and can be integrated with any BI system. It will be available as part of an enterprise package, cost tiered by active contacts.
