3 Ways to Extract Data out of FreeWheel's Strata Platform

FreeWheel's Strata platform is a great tool for media buying - particularly for TV and radio mediums - but sometimes you just want to pull the data out to do your own analysis.

While Strata has great reporting functionality built-in, here are a few ways that allow you to take your analysis to modern reporting tools like Tableau and Sigma Computing and combine other application data along the way.

1. Export out of SBMS Analytics Page
2. Snowflake Data Share
3. DataDrive's 'Analytics Accelerator' managed analytics

Let's take a closer look at each of these methods.

Export OUT OF SBMS Analytics Page

The Analytics reporting page in Strata allows you to quickly and easily export your data into a CSV (or other format) file. To do this, simply click on the "Export" button in the top right corner of the page. Then, select the "Schedule Export" option from the drop-down menu.

This approach is really easy to set up as the functionality already exists directly within FreeWheel's Strata platform. There are options to deliver the data via email, within an AWS S3 bucket (i.e. cloud storage), or via SFTP (i.e. secure file transfer).

The downside of this approach is that there is still quite a bit of manual report creation and building of technology to work with the data files that are delivered. Keep in mind that there is a limit to the data fields (columns) and granularity (level of detail) that can be selected. 

Not all complex calculations are able to be accessed via the Analytics page!

Snowflake Data Share

Snowflake is an industry-leading cloud data storage and analytics platform that provides a 'data-as-a-service' platform to integrate, model, deliver, and share data insights across organizations. DataDrive is proud to be a Snowflake Partner that has delivered cloud-based analytics to multiple organizations, including media and marketing agencies.

With Snowflake's Data Share, data can be securely exposed and shared with anyone, whether they're inside or outside your organization. Strata's FreeWheel platform delivers an option to access SBMS data directly in Snowflake. The biggest benefit of this approach is on-demand access to media purchasing data to support your team in near real-time insights on marketing spend and performance.

Accessing Strata's data through Snowflake's Data Share is by no means easy to implement. To be successful, someone in your organization will need to understand the SBMS data model which can be 20+ database views with complicated join relationships - depending on the level of analysis. This approach also assumes that your organization has a landing spot for the Snowflake data in the form of another data warehouse. An experienced full-time cloud data engineer would greatly expedite the speed to insights for your agency.

Leverage DataDrive's Analytics Accelerator

Our DataDrive team has successfully delivered interactive customer-facing reporting and cloud reporting platforms directly on FreeWheel's Strata data model. DataDrive's managed service 'Analytics Accelerator' delivers data-driven capabilities for agencies to make informed marketing decisions for their customers - without the hassle of hiring an expensive data team or managing complex data infrastructure.  

Additionally, DataDrive helps agencies pull together disparate data from social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to enable holistic reporting and Customer 360 views on marketing spend, performance, and results over time. Analytics Accelerator delivers a proven reporting platform in 3-6 months to support marketing agencies and their customers in making the most of their annual marketing budgets.

FreeWheel's Strata platform is a great tool for media buying and marketing operations, but often pulling data out to expose new insights for customers requires one of these three approaches.

If you have any questions on the best approach for your media and marketing agency, reach out to our team for a free analytics workshop to support your data-driven journey.