Since Salesforce's acquisition of Datorama in 2018 and its rebranding to Marketing Cloud Intelligence, there has been little investing into the product. What felt like a pioneer platform in 2015-2018, now feels like a laggard solution that struggles to keep up with the advancements in the industry and marketing technology. As a result, more and more teams are speculating about Datorama going away, complaining about the platform and actively looking for alternative solutions.

Researching marketing analytics tools can be a learning curve in itself. But luckily, you found this article, where you can learn about common shortcomings of Datorama, possible alternatives and how to evaluate them.

Datorama: common challenges and shortcomings

Beyond minimal product development and improvements, there are specific pain points highlighted by Datorama customers:

1) Data ingestion

• Data reliability - broken connectors, outages and data issues often erode trust in data and in the platform itself

• Scale - dashboards often become very slow for large data pulls (e.g., long loading dashboard times)

• Integrations depth - key ad platforms or attribution channels (e.g., Google Analytics) APIs are not up-to-date and miss key dimensions and metrics

  
  

2) Data modeling

• Data joining and harmonization - manual, time-consuming process

• Custom integrations - require significant development

  
  

3) BI and self-service

• Data transformations require SQL knowledge and data engineering support, failing to enable self-service

• Visualizations and charts builder is very limited for marketers

• Dimensions and metrics builder has limited functionality that still requires SQL knowledge

  
  

4) Data sharing/exports - destination possibilities are quite limited, leading to silos and lock-in

5) Pricing - opaque model model with hidden fees - constraints on data volume (number of rows) and number of users. New integrations or something custom require expensive consulting fees

6) Support - limited support and long waiting times

In addition to these pain points, many use cases are not covered/possible on Datorama are not possible. Many teams are not even aware of this. You don’t know what you don’t know.

The hidden insights

Due to little investment into the product over the last 6 years, Datorama hasn’t kept up with key updates - be it Google Analytics integration, creative optimization or granular channel data.

These are the top 2 common use cases and optimization opportunities that Datorama customer miss out on:

1) Creative optimization

• Goal: uncover winning creative formulas and spot fatigue early on before it’s too late

• Limitations: Datorama doesn’t enable grouping of creatives based on naming conventions and doesn’t support ad previews (i.e., view the creative next to all metrics)

  
  

2) Granular channel optimization

• Goal: uncover optimization opportunities through channel deep dives and cross-channel insights

• Limitations: Datorama’s APIs don’t pull granular data from channels and attribution providers (e.g., GA) - such as auction insights, Google Ads - Google Search Console keyword analysis, etc. 

How to evaluate alternatives?

To overcome the challenges previously mentioned and unlock new growth possibilities, you should look into Marketing Cloud Intelligence alternatives. 

When assessing other marketing analytics solutions, these are five essential questions to ask:

1) Does the vendor have the functionality to support my team’s use cases, and will it scale with future use cases?

2) Will the platform support my various teams and stakeholders? Does it enable marketers to self-serve?

3) Is the pricing transparent, scalable, and value-driven?

4) Is the platform enterprise-ready?

5) Does the platform have a track record of exceeding the expectations of current companies using the software?

The best alternative for enterprises - Clarisights

Clarisights has established itself as the best alternative for enterprise teams, solving the challenges previously mentioned and enabling additional insights and optimization opportunities. It has been built with some of the most sophisticated teams in the world, such as Uber, HelloFresh and Delivery Hero. This is reflected in being awarded the #1 Marketing Analytics Platform for Enterprises for 4 consecutive quarters.

Companies like Universal Music Group have switched. 

Check our detailed comparison here and read more about the migration process on our website (spoiler: it’s much easier and smooth than what you’re thinking).