• by Laurie Sullivan , October 28, 2019

Merkle's latest analytics platform, announced Monday, is called Archie. The platform aggregates data across channels and gives marketers insights into performance across multiple platforms.

Nicole Gleason, VP of analytics strategy and development at Merkle, said the team wanted to move away from acronyms and use a humanizing name that people would remember.

“We had several internal candidates, including both male and female names, but Archie won,” she said. 

Archie organizes the data to customize reporting and marketing analytics for brands. It begins as a service, but brands can soon turn it into a self-service platform by logging into the web-based portal to interact with the dashboards.

Merkle also sets up support for the dashboards, so brands can produce their own ad-hoc analyses, using Tableau or analytics tools such as R, Python, and others.

“Merkle has almost a dozen clients currently using Archie,” said Gleason. “Some start with campaign insights, while others already use our advanced analytics extensions like Connected Attribution.”

Connected Attribution goes beyond channel measurement to evaluate the performance of individual campaigns within channels. The platform also goes beyond spend and conversions to evaluate revenue and the impact on return on investments.

Gleason said Archie solves the problem of a lengthy time period needed for accurate campaign measurement tools. For media and CRM campaigns, it provides visibility into performance metrics in weeks, rather than months. It also makes the data actionable -- something that most attribution platforms don’t offer, she said.

Archie can process data at a speed about seven times faster for reporting and insight -- with technical specs a contributing factor --  and requires 60% fewer resources to maintain reporting.

Gleason explains how the data is prepared on the Google Cloud Platform, where Merkle can leverage tools like BigQuery to support advanced insights. The user-facing dashboard is built on Tableau.

Archie uses artificial intelligence tools like WordSmith to auto-generate text descriptions of the insights presented in the dashboards.

Along with data layer and dashboard templates built by Merkle, a client can generate dozens of actionable reports across brands and campaigns each week that would have required multiple analyst resources to support manually.