Aran Hamilton, President & Co-founder, Brandon Kane, CTO/Co-Founder You’d think that Vantage, one of the top retail analytics solutions, would champion the value of data. You’d be wrong. “Data isn’t valuable until you can turn it into insight—and insight is only powerful if you can turn it into action,” says Aran Hamilton, President and Co-Founder.
Vantage is the first of a new breed of analytics platforms, one that breaks down corporate silos and allows clients to work faster and smarter. “We are increasingly flooded by data and that there are still too many barriers to realising real benefits,” said Hamilton. That’s why Vantage built the world’s first fully integrated go-to analytics, forecasting and marketing platform – now used by over 5000 brands and retailers in 99 countries around the world.
Vantage ingests and analyzes retail data quickly and easily. The data is then used to generate a dashboard that tracks a the heartbeat of sales and operations, not only to identifying the challenges and opportunities that retailers are facing, but to actually helping action them.
Vantageliterally offers data-driven intelligence and real-time marketing, at the push of a “single” button.
“If you want a system that can draw you a pretty picture of last quarter’s sales, there are plenty of companies out there that can try to help you,” asserts Brandon Kane, CTO and the other Co-Founder. “Vantage will tell you where you’re headed and why. More importantly, it will help you change direction if things aren’t going right.”
Action for the “all-in-one” Vantage platform means automatically building marketing campaigns. Directly integrated with Facebook, Vantage takes all of the guesswork out of deciding which products to promote, to whom, and when?
Data isn’t valuable until you can turn it into insight—and insight is only powerful if you can turn it into action
Vantage recently ran a campaign for Firebrand Live – a power user who is using Vantage to grow sales for 50 online merchandise shops for major musicians and bands like Foo Fighters.
Combining images from top selling products and many versions of copy, Vantage deployed over 100 variations of ads for a single store, a technique called Multivariate Testing. Then, rather than spending hours analyzing the response rates, Vantage deployed it’s artificial intelligence and automatically optimized spending: culling non-performing ads and redeploying budget into successful ones.
Sales jumped as ad engagement took off. Vantage continued to refine the budget allocations unburdened by human preferences for particular ads. Click through rates and conversions of repeat customers grew. Vantage’s campaigns also helped identify a bigger customer base. “We were able to automate Firebrand Live’s growth and raise their customer life time value by delivering 8x the benchmark Return on Ad Spend,” points out Kane.
John Wannamaker is said to have remarked “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That would never have happened if he had Vantage.
Vantage saw much of it’s initial adoption come from e-commerce retailers using platforms like Magento, Shopify, and Bigcommerce. That’s really changing. “It’s gratifying that so many different types of organizations are finding that Vantage really works for them,”says Hamilton, “The challenge of transforming data into action affects everyone. Human’s aren’t great at identifying the key trends and they sure aren’t great at immediately responding and then optimizing spending. The good news is that there’s Vantage.” grins Hamilton.
