Polymer Partners With a Leading Digital Marketing Agency

Executive Summary

This paper illustrates Polymer’s integration with a leading digital marketing agency. Starting as a method to empower account managers, they quickly found that Polymer’s visualization capabilities not only gave account managers more autonomy to explore their data, but that clients took note of the impressive data presentations & agility of answering key questions. Their account managers love using Polymer. Now, their data and technical teams have used Polymer’s API to automatically send data into the Polymer system & embed white-labeled reporting into their own internal platform for their clients to login & access. This is currently undergoing an expansion.

About the Agency

This agency provides programmatic solutions across a variety of channels including audio, video, native, & tv. They have a team of digital marketing experts who bring a human connection and a great customer experience. 

Their organization self-reports to generate millions of conversions each month and billions of dollars in annual sales for their clients. Their client list includes high profile names in retail, telecommunication, sports, & politics.

The problem we’re solving

Reporting inefficiencies

‍Large agencies are typically composed of account managers, data analysts, and an IT team who each play an important role and contribute to satisfying the clients’ needs. Account managers handle client relationships and oversee project execution, ensuring alignment with client goals. Data analysts analyze campaign performance to provide insights and optimize towards those goals. Meanwhile, the IT team ensures smooth operations and security by managing technical infrastructure and data storage.

Typically, the IT team pushes data to an analytics layer where there is some separation between the analysts, who dive deep into the data, and the account managers, who dive deep into clients’ goals. In an ideal world, these two roles are seamlessly connected, but what often happens is that the analysts and account managers have siloed work where one owns the insights & the other owns the presentation of those insights. Iteration towards a finalized client presentation requires a long back & forth as account managers don’t have access to or are unfamiliar with how to use the analyst’s tools and analysts aren’t as connected with the client’s desires.

When clients have follow-up questions about the data, the process repeats: analysts answer queries and account managers present the answer to clients. This inefficient process doesn’t benefit anyone involved. Improving collaboration between analysts and account managers can streamline this process and enhance agency efficiency.

Client demands

‍In addition to ensuring that their ad budget is well-spent and business goals are met, clients value timely, easily digestible, transparent, and personalized information. Adding screenshots of charts to a slide deck limits client interaction with visuals, preventing them from diving deeper into insights. Moreover, this data becomes outdated until the team manually updates it. To keep up with client demands, teams spend hours each week tediously updating slides - time that could be better used optimizing the client’s budget or strengthening relationships. 

By implementing more dynamic and interactive presentation methods, agencies can increase client satisfaction and retention.

How we solve it 

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Seamless data integration:

‍The technical team makes use of Polymer’s API to connect their Snowflake database. To do this, they point to the URL of an S3 bucket where their Snowflake data has been loaded. Polymer’s API supports passing public URLs, however, this workflow implements a pre-authenticated URL with a short expiration window for increased data security. There are incremental updates sent like this daily & weekly for various datasets across their clients.

As the data is ingested into Polymer’s system, it can be passed to designated workspaces. A workspace in Polymer represents a unique group of datasets and dashboards with unique access permissions. From there, a JSON with specified board structures can be applied to new datasets with some table-stakes insights like total spend or average CPC to help speed up the analytics process for their team down the line.

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Collaborative data exploration

‍Now that data is accessible in Polymer, analysts and account managers are able to explore an agile & easy to navigate environment. All of the necessary data is available to both parties without any back & forth. Analysts & account managers are able to collaboratively discover insights & address core client needs. The same people responsible for understanding & presenting the data can take part in the exploration process or even answer questions on the fly in client presentations.

In this step, the team engages heavily with Polymer’s UI using various visualization options to understand performance patterns, how they may optimize performance, and then share that story with the client. They can lean on the PolyAI chat to help answer questions or provide additional inspiration at this step as well. Boards are customized with themes, imagery, & context relevant to the client, helping to engage & form stronger relationships. Finally, depending on the client, account managers can enable guest permissions for the appropriate level of access on filtering and natural language chart explanations so clients are able to engage with their data in a way that informs without overwhelming.

Client satisfaction

‍Bringing the effort together, agency clients access real-time reports by logging in to their existing interface. Dashboards that the team of analysts & account managers collaborate on are readily available to check into progress and understand how they are tracking towards their goals at any time. Updates made to the underlying dashboard are published to the client so follow up questions can be answered immediately & on the spot. 

This outcome has been so strongly recognized, especially by the account managers, that Polymer has several internal champions. A big realization to the monetary benefit of excellent client reporting came after a successful presentation to a big box retailer at the end of 2023. In addition to the agency’s top-tier services, this retailer noted their delight with the performance dashboards that were presented via Polymer. Several similar interactions built strong support that helped bring Polymer organization-wide.

Design partnership

As the agency’s usage of Polymer expands, we get more insight into greater depth of their workflow. This has led to improvements across our API and UI that benefit all of Polymer’s customers, specifically other agencies and marketers. 

Some recent improvements inspired by our partnership include a new map visualization, a presentation mode with the ability to export presentations, advanced controls for guest functionality, and account wide templates that can be reused across clients.

As our solution becomes more refined to fit this agency use case, we see increased traction with other similar clients. And increased traction with them as well - having a tool that directly addresses their greatest pain points & provides hands-on support has strengthened our relationship with their team!

Conclusion

What began as a few account managers seeking a way to improve client presentations and engage with data without a steep learning curve has evolved into an organization-wide partnership. This collaboration has created a positive feedback loop, leading to continuous improvements for both parties.