Wpromote: Disrupting digital marketing with on-demand omnichannel insights and AI

As one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies in the U.S., Wpromote helps companies drive growth by transforming marketing data into tangible business intelligence. In today’s ultra-competitive marketing industry, actionable, trustworthy data has become the single most important competitive differentiator. To stay ahead of the curve, Wpromote recognized that it had to revamp its technology platform to deliver comprehensive insights, faster, to hundreds of clients across media channels and marketing platforms, including Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, Facebook Ads, TikTok, and beyond.

Wpromote's original technology platform was not 100 percent API-driven, which made it harder to build a single source of truth across channels, and required significant manual management, so every change involved custom coding. "People were spending a huge amount of time wrangling data and producing reports," says Paul Dumais, Chief Technology Officer of Wpromote. "Not only was every report custom-built, but people pulled different versions of data from ad platforms, our marketing data hub Funnel, and our data warehouse, so no one could really trust that reports were accurate."

To deliver a scalable performance advantage for every client, Wpromote decided to build its own technology platform called Polaris that would radically improve how it ingested, managed, analyzed, explored, and took action on data. Initially, Wpromote thought that they would build Polaris from the ground up but the agency decided instead to use ready-to-go services in Google Cloud because they're open, unified, intelligent, and cost-effective. Google Cloud also integrated seamlessly with Wpromote's architecture, including its custom data pipeline and third-party systems.

A Swiss Army knife of data-fueled tools

Wpromote built a trusted, flexible, and highly customizable data and BI platform as the foundation for Polaris using Google Cloud, including Google BigQuery and Looker.

A semantic data model built with Looker governs all agency data to ensure security compliance by creating one consistent data map including definitions, file relationships, and access control. To solve for the unique BI needs of each client, Wpromote built an app called Taxonomy Manager that the agency teams use to design custom segments into client data for reporting and predictive analysis across more than 400 clients. "Looker allows us to build the ultimate data model," says Dumais. "LookML plus Liquid together provide a flexible and expressive language for custom data model development. And powerful capabilities like LookML refinements and extends align perfectly with my designs for our Polaris platform because developers can easily reuse code."

Wpromote's developers leveraged Looker and Google BigQuery to connect more than 1,400 data sources in Polaris with the ability to extend client data modes to more than 2,000 additional data sources from Funnel. "When we built Polaris, we had to prioritize building new platform integrations, automating tasks to save time, and unlocking new business or marketing intelligence opportunities for more clients and teams," says Hammel. "By building the first useful thing and focusing on creating a simple, intuitive interface, Polaris dramatically reduced barriers to clean, comprehensive, and useful data that could drive better, faster client and business operations outcomes. This utility-focused development approach also reduced risk, improved quality, and sped up the pace of adoption."

Delivering day-one, multi-channel reporting for clients in minutes

Wpromote’s teams needed to be able to create dashboards in Polaris quickly and with minimal effort, so the product and engineering teams embedded Looker into Polaris Insights Explorer, a dedicated reporting app that is part of the platform and accessible to clients. They also embedded Looker Studio into Benchmark Explorer, another app that delivers privacy-safe, aggregated insights by vertical across platforms and KPIs.

On the first day of client onboarding, an account manager connects the client's ad and analytics platforms in BigQuery in just a few clicks. Adding the client's data sources is straightforward because Looker is 100 percent API driven. Within minutes, Wpromote's account teams can access the client's data from their accounts in Polaris. To ensure staff and customer teams only see the data that they’re authorized to view based on their role, Wpromote uses a semantic data model with single sign-on technology.

Wpromote's experts use Insights Explorer to deliver day-one reporting for clients for the most common media and analytics use cases; one typical client-facing dashboard maps media spend to media performance. From the selected master LookML dashboards in Wpromote's code repository and the client’s data in BigQuery, an automated workflow uses the Looker API to create the dashboards. Once teams have full clarity into the client’s reporting requirements, they can extend reporting customization through Looker Studio.

Empowering teams and leaders to boost profitability

Wpromote also leverages Polaris as the agency’s internal CMS, leveraging the platform to improve operational efficiency and streamline internal processes. To make this possible, Wpromote expanded access to Looker Studio and Looker dashboards in Polaris by enabling access from Google Sheets using Google Connected Sheets. "We partition data access by role and use Looker private embedding to deliver dashboards for our finance, sales, HR, and other teams so that everyone can access the specific business data they need to do their jobs," says Hammel.

From Connected Sheets and Looker Studio, teams can easily create reports for ad hoc operational data analysis using Explores in Looker. Nikki Greco, Product Manager at Wpromote, explains "C-suite leaders can connect directly with Looker from Connected Sheets to get immediate insight into agency KPIs like billable utilization and gross margin by client, and check whether teams are going over on billable hours for individual projects."

Identifying opportunities for clients instantly

Wpromote leverages Looker alerts in its Anomaly Detection app to monitor client KPIs and catch critical variance. Hammel says that "If a client's most important metric is return on ad spend and there's a sudden drop in value, we'll automatically catch that without having anyone manually monitoring numbers. And we can provide anomaly reports to clients using Looker that show them how much value we deliver by tracking how many things our app helped them catch before they became an issue or how many upside opportunities they were able to capitalize on when they saw that a particular KPI was improving."

The game-changing advantage of AI

Wpromote is now focused on scaling advanced measurement and multi-channel investment guidance capabilities across its entire client portfolio with new app releases, including those powered by AI. To make this possible, developers continue to integrate the Looker Extension Framework and Looker Action Hub directly with Polaris.

One of Wpromote's new apps, Growth Planner, uses AI and ML to help clients forecast how much money they're going to spend for the year and how much revenue they can expect to generate based on that investment. "In a matter of minutes, we can forecast revenue outcomes for a fixed investment, say $100 million, with up to 98 percent accuracy," says Hammel. "By building our Polaris platform on Google Cloud and using Looker, we can maintain one source of truth for every client, which takes into account all their variables and omnichannel data, and serve up insights that enable industry disruption."