Why Did We Build ChannelMix?

Because we (and every other marketer on the planet) needed a solution that made reporting on media data simpler, faster and more accurate. And, until ChannelMix came along, nobody had created anything that came close to meeting that need. We know. We looked. The Data …

What’s a Data Mart? A Quick Guide for Your Marketing Team

If you’re a data-driven marketer, you might already understand the concept of a marketing data warehouse — a huge, historical collection of all your organization’s marketing data. But that’s not the only option for storing your marketing data. You also should know about the data mart, …

Cheat Sheet: Questions Marketers Should Ask Before Investing in a Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is an essential piece of any brand or agency’s marketing analytics operation. With a warehouse, you can automatically gather your most valuable marketing data — from your web analytics, PPC campaigns, display ads, traditional media, social channels, CRM tool, email service provider …

A Peek Into How Alight Pulls Your Data

For marketers, there are a vast number of tools (media and ad management platforms, social networks, CRM systems, etc.) that can be used every day to make your life easier. That is until you actually have to go behind the scenes and get the numbers. Data collection can …

Excel Is Not a Database, So Stop Using It Like One!

Since its initial release in 1985, Microsoft Excel has grown to become a necessity for companies everywhere. It’s the most widely used spreadsheet software among the business community, and has been a robust tool for simple analysis and budgeting. The problem, however, is that a …

Smart Channel Mapping: Finding and Merging Similar Words

Analysis is hard. You have to formulate a question, find the data that purports to answer that question, slice and dice the data into something manageable, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll answer the question at hand. Oh, but if you mess something up or don’t answer …

How Can I Use Big Data?

The phrase Big Data gets bandied about a lot these days. A basic rubric, though, is whether you can query your data on one computer, or in a reasonable amount of time. But that’s still pretty vague, because while Excel can’t open a file with …

5 Things to Look for In DaaS Providers

In this November Simple Talk article by Robert Sheldon, he discusses an on-coming wave of “data as a service” (DaaS) which is meeting the growing demand for companies to use more data to make decisions. We agree that the wave is coming – we’re riding …

Create a Virtual Server Using EC2 on AWS

In this video, Alight Analytics’ Senior Platform Developer Caleb Hyde takes viewers through the experience of setting up a virtual server using Amazon AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).