AdKaora used Flourish to dynamically power their live marketing platform

“Flourish allowed us to streamline the creation of our dashboards. From designers that created the look and feel of the chart to the developer that implemented the configuration, everything had its place.”

– Tommaso De Pace, CTO

Specializing in user-centric mobile digital advertising and proximity marketing, AdKaora turned to Flourish to leverage the power of real-time data via the Flourish API.

Their proximity marketing suite Circle combines dynamic, timely location behavioral data and powerful measurement analytics tools to grow user activation. It allows customers to log in and see real-time data on how their campaigns are performing.

A programmatic approach to creating visualizations

“In the past, we gave our customers a summary of how their campaign was performing after about a month. Now, they're able to log in and see what's happening in real-time through different Flourish visualizations.”

– Giusy Zaccone, Communications specialist

“We were interested in using the Flourish API because our data is dynamic – it changes every minute and we need to be able to display different data for our different customers”, CTO Tommaso De Pace says.

The Flourish API allows you to dynamically create and edit Flourish visualizations, rather than via a data upload or use of the settings panel in the Flourish platform. This means it’s not only great for creating dynamic visualizations and being able to combine settings directly in the code, but also that it allows you to work with confidential and live-updating data.

Getting their Flourish charts and datasets set up with the API is something AdKaora found really straightforward. “We’re able to set up our visuals with all the settings we’re interested in directly in the Flourish app and copy the configuration from there”, Tommaso explains. “From there, all we need to do is send the data in the correct format from our backend.”

More than just static charts

“Even if we were able to share a live-updating Excel file with each customer, it would never have the level of interactivity and ease of use of a Flourish visual. It really adds to the user experience to be able to interact with a visualization by zooming or hovering”

– Tommaso De Pace, CTO

What drove AdKaora to choose to integrate their platform with Flourish visualizations was the wide range of easy-to-read and interactive chart types. They enjoy the range of available visualization types to choose from – especially those that show things in a less conventional way.

They first came across Flourish visuals on the Italian news website GEDI during the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic. The interactivity and animation of the Flourish visualizations were impressive, but what truly convinced the team that Flourish is the right tool was the unlimited possibilities of the Flourish API.

AdKaora got inspired by this live and interactive visualization showing COVID data in Italy over time.

The prototype

AdKaora created an interactive dashboard-like platform where clients can track ongoing marketing campaigns in real time. Within Circle, advertisers can see their different venues’ performance and compare individual metrics such as number of visits and busyness rate. The result is an impressive combination of various Flourish charts that reflect not only key factors and findings, but also automatically update every minute.

Below, you can find a prototype of the agency’s internal dashboard. Please note that for confidentiality purposes, we used ficticious data.

Since they carry multiple different campaigns at once, the Flourish API is an ideal choice for AdKaora’s use case. As soon as they had created the desired layout for each chart, all they needed to do was pull data from various sources. As a result, the structure of each page looks the same but shows data only relevant to each individual client.

Driving engagement and a competitive advantage

The biggest advantage of incorporating the Flourish API alongside AdKaora’s proximity marketing suite is the possibility to check how each campaign progresses in real time, which significantly improves the communication between the agency and the advertiser. “Our customers can see how their campaign is going, and so they can ask questions, optimize their results and export the reports we generate,” says Giusy Zaccone, communications specialist. “It creates a continious conversation about the strategy, and it also gives clients transparency.”

Before incorporating the Flourish API, advertisers could see the progress of their proximity marketing campaigns after a period of time – for example, a week after their start. This led to a lengthy and time-consuming workflow – the agency had to manually generate weekly reports, and the client could not receive instantaneous updates. Fortunately, the integration of automated Flourish charts provided a solution to both problems.

Now AdKaora clients benefit from both real-time updating charts and ones that explore the overall performance of their venues after a campaign has ended. Here is an example of a finalized report:

An excellent user experience

Creating a user-friendly tool that helps advertisers truly grasp the performance of their campaign was AdKaora’s essential goal. A further benefit of incorporating Flourish charts was the interactive element that made clients happier and more likely to engage with the platform, in comparison with traditional spreadsheets or static graphs.

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