NCSolutions Harnesses Yellowbrick with Snowflake Marketplace for Comprehensive Ad Performance Management
Use Case Summary
Advertising performance management is vital for CPG marketers seeking to optimize media spend and enhance results. NCSolutions offers a comprehensive view of U.S. household CPG purchases, with in-depth insights derived from Yellowbrick AWS Data Warehouse and shared with customers through Snowflake Marketplace.
Background
To optimize ad campaign effectiveness, advertising performance management is crucial for today’s fast-moving consumer goods brands and retailers. It involves tracking and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like brand awareness, engagement, conversion rates, and sales impact to assess the success of marketing efforts. By utilizing data-driven insights from marketing channels and platforms, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies make informed decisions, identify opportunities for improvement, and allocate their advertising budgets more efficiently.
NCSolutions delivers a unique and differentiated service for ad performance management. Through Snowflake Marketplace, NCSolutions offers the CPG Insights Stream, a first-of-its-kind service, which provides a complete and representative projection of CPG shopping behavior for all United States households across all relevant retail outlets. Brands can leverage it to conduct deep customer analysis and improve campaign outcomes through audience targeting, optimization, and measurement. In short, with NCSolutions, CPG companies drive more revenue from advertising.
NCSolutions’ unique selling point is the deep purchase insights drawn from its comprehensive view of U.S. household shopping behavior, closing the loop from advertising to the point of sale to drive more return on ad spend and increased incremental sales. This insight is uncovered in Yellowbrick and shared with customers through Snowflake Marketplace in the form of the CPG Insights Stream. Doing so rapidly is vital, ensuring ad campaigns are optimized and actions are taken when they have the most impact.
An Engine for Data Engineers
NCSolutions uses Yellowbrick on AWS to extract valuable insights from massive datasets consisting of billions of rows of data. This involves ingesting data from multiple sources, performing deep analytics on billions of rows of data, and sharing this insight with subscribers as-a-service through Snowflake Marketplace. Beyond its advanced analytics capabilities, Yellowbrick provides the engine for data consolidation, storage, transformation, and ingestion, all while ensuring robust quality management, governance, and security policies are adhered to. The combination of NCSolutions’ domain expertise and Yellowbrick’s powerful platform empowers customers with accurate, timely, and actionable insights.
The brute force performance of Yellowbrick’s architecture and the efficiencies of Yellowbrick’s patented Direct Data Accelerator technology allows faster, more granular analysis of customer behavior data at a lower cost. Before Yellowbrick cloud, analyzing 5,000+ CPG products encompassing over 3 million UPCs simultaneously was impossible. Instead, NCSolutions previously did this as separate product groups, each taking up to an hour to run and requiring more management overhead. Today, NCSolutions can perform this analysis using large batches of product groups in minutes, dramatically lowering the SLA and AWS cloud costs.
Bringing insight to customers faster means a better return on ad spend (ROAS) and ensures NCSolutions continues to lead in advertising effectiveness.
Elasticity Drives New Opportunities
Advertising is seasonal, influenced by consumer behavior, industry-specific events, event-driven promotions, and weather-dependent factors. Ad campaigns peak during holidays, sporting events, and back-to-school seasons. New Year’s resolutions, holidays, and e-commerce events like Black Friday also contribute to these periodic fluctuations.
These ad spending spikes surge ad optimization requests and create more data that further empowers NCSolutions to leverage its unique purchase insights. This, in turn, opens more opportunities for NCSolutions’ clients to reach new buyers. This increase in data collection is easily catered for in Yellowbrick. Advertising seasonality also requires more historical data as insights are derived from past events.
During peak periods, the campaign workload can exceed NCSolutions’ existing subscription capacity, prompting the deployment of additional Yellowbrick nodes. On-demand services support this elasticity, with per-second billing helping minimize cloud consumption costs, keeping costs down even when demand spikes.
Secure, Hybrid Cloud Flexibility
NCSolutions’ data resources are powered by leading providers and combined with scientific rigor and leading-edge technology to empower the CPG ecosystem to use purchase insights for more effective advertising. The seamless integration of Yellowbrick on-prem and in the cloud facilitates rapid data movement with subsequent analytics performed by NCSolutions on Yellowbrick AWS.
The granularity of NCSolutions comes from online and offline point-of-sale data. However, these proprietary data sets require tight security. Loss of sensitive data from a data breach is unacceptable, directly contravening the trusted client relationships, but other compliance and regulatory concerns must also be factored in. With Yellowbrick, data is stored in AWS S3 in NCSolutions’ controlled virtual private cloud (VPC), never leaving their site or direct control. Only the insights derived from this are shared through the Snowflake Marketplace.
Workload Characteristics
- Transformation: Intensive multi-terabyte workload consists of correlating, aggregating, cleansing, and enriching transactional POS data from multiple sources. Multi-step, non-persistent aggregations using CTAS materialized tables.
- Query Profile: Hundreds of thousands of complex data engineering queries spanning billions of rows of POS data. Complex mixed read/write workload of short and complex queries with multiple joins.
- Concurrency: hundreds of jobs executed in parallel.
- Data Security: all commercially sensitive data resides in NCSolutions’ VPC for robust access control.
- Consumption: Projected dataset to Total U.S. households loaded to Snowflake for analytics and data sharing via Snowflake Marketplace
