Rolling Up Analytics Rock Stars: Cardinal Path CEO Andrew Swinand (Part 5)

Sramana: Essentially you resell advertising technologies as well as ad serving technologies, and you provide the services around them to make it all work together. Is that correct?

Andrew Swinand: Yes. Clients have a hard time making heads or tails of all the available marketing technologies out there and can struggle to know which ones to use in their environments. Google is our largest client. Google pays us to consult with them on analytics and their SEO. We are second only to Google when it comes to Google Analytics Premium installations. Our point is that we know what to do, we have done it before, and we know how to integrate the technologies. We are going to get our clients there better, faster, and cheaper.

Sramana: Are you working primarily with larger enterprise customers?

Andrew Swinand: Yes, our typical engagement is with Fortune 500 marketers. We help them to determine what to strategically track and how to track it, and we scope it in terms of business requirements. That lets us provide insight that is actionable in terms of improving performance.

Sramana: You have named a few major vendors in this space. What are you doing to bring in the more innovative and emerging companies? A lot has happened in the past three years.

Andrew Swinand: Tag management is a very young solution. Kenshoo is a brand new bid management platform. There are actually a hundred logos on a Luna chart in this space. If you have a core implementation as your base, then the trick of the trade is to overlay and connect other pieces using APIs for clean data.

Sramana: I have to believe that you are experts at analytics and optimization. What are your observations in the industry today? What are the big trends?

Andrew Swinand: There are three things to highlight. One, we had a tool called the online analytics maturity self-assessment tool. We have 600 enterprise clients in the database, and we measured their analytics maturity across various metrics. As a trend, people vastly overspend on technology against huge project scopes without investing in the governance, business requirements, and processes needed to deploy the technologies. One overarching trend is that everyone wants to buy a Ferrari, but they don’t have a driver’s license.

Sramana: This problem has happened in every generation of technology. People buy expensive technology and they do not know how to use it.

Andrew Swinand: One example is Google Analytics. Only 18% of the functionality there is used on average. It is interesting because people do not know how to deploy it.

The second aspect is the ability to integrate clean data. We see a lot of data silos and function silos. Search agencies do search, and you have your sales data and your in-house analytics. There is very little integration, and as a result there is very little that is actionable. A lot of the work we are doing right now is creating and deploying attribution models.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Rolling Up Analytics Rock Stars: Cardinal Path CEO Andrew Swinand
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