
Data is useless until it has been transformed into something that can lead humans towards insight and improvement. Monro, Inc. owns eight brands and over twelve hundred retail locations. They needed complete visibility into how marketing efforts tie back to each individual store as well as into their custom sales territories.
Giving our client this visibility required Mason Digital to build custom software to extract, transform and store the massive amounts of data produced by our efforts. This data had to be captured at the most granular of levels, the actual physical location of consumers when they interact with marketing and advertising messages.
Mason Digital constructed systems to extract data from all of the various advertising, analytics and other data systems utilized. Using Tableau, we mapped custom geographic territories to build large datasets that are then used to categorize raw geographic data into the world the way our partner needs to see it.
We wrote custom software solutions in Python to transform this raw data. We then utilized flexible cloud data warehouses to store it. This transformed data is available in interactive dashboards where our team and our partner’s internal analysts can slice and dice information in ways that were previously impossible. This marketing data is matched to the rest of the company’s operations information and together they provide a clear understanding of what is happening.
As an example of the many ways we use this information, after a major overhaul of the company’s Google Ads campaigns we noticed average cost per call was rising. This led some to believe that all efforts were not delivering.
Looking beyond the average and applying frequency distribution visualized in a histogram, we saw that 60% of campaigns were meeting or exceeding the target. The problem actually lied with a small number of campaigns that were negatively weighting the average. With our focus on figuring out what fundamentally made some campaigns perform vs others in this new campaign setup, we were able to implement targeted optimizations leading to a 22% overall decrease in cost per call with an increase in call volume.

While we take great pride in our ability to build complex data collection, transformation, storage and visualization tools, our ability to analyze, interpret and actualize this data to achieve our partners’ goals is the mission that drives us.