Adlucent: Using AI to uncover new marketing insights from big data to better support clients

As consumer preferences, shopping habits, and privacy laws change, marketers must keep up to meet the expectations of their customers. That's why Adlucent , a performance marketing agency, is using technology to help companies accomplish just that. Gathering and acting on data that companies already own can have the most significant impact, and marketing teams deliver large amounts of data from their campaigns. From searches to clicks and conversions, marketers use this data to improve return on investment (ROI) from digital advertising.

Adlucent wanted to empower its clients to utilize their data to make proactive business decisions. To help clients uncover new insights from their data, Adlucent aggregates information from as many of its clients' systems as possible. This includes everything from customer relationship management platforms to ecommerce and analytics tools. Working with large clients means that the data files may contain hundreds of millions of rows of data.

Adlucent saw a need to reduce processing time and ingest massive client files much faster and more efficiently. Once the data was processed, there also needed to be a way to store these massive files. "We wanted to make these larger projects efficient for Adlucent and valuable for our clients," said Matt Zeiger, VP of Technology at Adlucent. The agency needed to securely speed up and unify these processes for its clients to deliver on its mission, while still scaling as a business. Looking for a solution, Adlucent turned to Google Cloud .

Making sense of millions of data points

The first step to analyzing and offering insight into client data is managing their datasets. To securely process them, Adlucent adopted BigQuery as its serverless data warehouse to scale as needed, whether the company is helping clients with thousands of data points or millions.

Adlucent combined BigQuery's computing power with AutoML and Vertex AI to offer new solutions to clients, such as predictive analysis, to inform fresh advertising and customer retention strategies. This opened access to novel information from the same data sources. "We've been able to connect all of these services to offer a new proprietary solution to our customers. This provides them with unique data, giving them a competitive edge," says Blair Mundy, Cloud Solutions Architect, Adlucent.

Adlucent team members have also benefited from the flexibility of their new tools. With Vertex AI Workbench , analysts and data scientists can work from Jupyter Notebooks, retaining the option to code in a familiar workspace and in their preferred language. "Google Cloud is a place where you can experiment. I don't have to be in dev-ops to go in and deploy my own models. At this point, I don't know how I would do it without Google Cloud," said Kelly Weeks, Director of Analytics at Adlucent.

Empowering clients to make data-driven decisions

With more flexibility and processing power, Adlucent was immediately able to offer clients increased value. "We use BigQuery to combine margins and returns data in one place for an ad ROI analysis. Now we can see if someone spends $1,000, and then returns $900 of it, whether or not that conversion was worth the money our client invested in ads," added Weeks.

The company also made rapid improvements to existing client services. " AURA ™," an AI-driven analytics platform, is using Vertex AI to make predictive churn analysis models even more accurate. With Vertex AI, Adlucent was able to improve the quality of its machine learning models to 90% and better inform clients about where to allocate marketing dollars. Vertex AI was able to train a model on more than 500 million rows of data, a quantity Adlucent's previous cloud processing would take weeks to ingest.

Managing client data with cloud native parallel processing with BigQuery is saving hours of processing time. Daily page-view level data reports that showed clients how customers were interacting with their websites once took 26 hours to process, which meant they were never fully up to date. With BigQuery, these same reports are now delivered on the same day and take less than three hours to process.

Building a community beyond the data

While Adlucent continues to grow its client base, it's also focused on fostering community and support for its people. The company has encouraged new growth opportunities through the Google Cloud community as Google Developer Group moderators and event hosts, as well as involvement with Women Techmakers .

With ongoing education and community, Adlucent is excited to continue improving martech solutions for its clients. "We're a performance marketing agency with our own proprietary technology solutions, so we have to focus on both the marketing and technology. Google Cloud has helped us grow the tech aspect of our business and is a differentiator for what Adlucent can offer over other companies," said Mundy.