What You Need To Know About NinjaCat Alternatives

NinjaCat has been helping agencies, media companies, and brands unify their data, unburden their analytics teams, and unleash their reporting potential for nearly a decade. And in that time, the martech landscape has expanded exponentially, producing many tools that might be considered NinjaCat alternatives for teams looking for a marketing performance management solution. 

Today’s marketing technology ecosystem offers so many products that agencies sometimes unfortunately feel forced to patch together their own solutions to solve the same problems. 

Let’s cover some of those common marketing data management and reporting pain points, learn how NinjaCat approaches them, and identify the ways NinjaCat alternatives attempt to address these issues.

Managing Marketing Reporting Manually

Many teams handle their marketing performance reporting manually, wrangling data from platforms, onto spreadsheets, adding calculations and cleaning up tables, and then cobbling it all into presentation format. For every account. Every time. 

With data ingestion, storage transformation, visualization, and automation capabilities built into one platform, NinjaCat empowers marketers to ship sleek reports and presentations at scale. To achieve this functionality via NinjaCat alternatives, a team would need to manually stitch together campaign data from ad platforms, social networks, web analytics, email and e-comm providers.  From there, they toss all the analytics data into a spreadsheet program like Excel, then fire up Powerpoint or another presentation app  to customize and visualize the report, and then finally utilize their CRM and comms channels to deliver it all. Or worse–simply hope the client will come and consume and understand a dense dashboard for marketing performance on their own time. 

If you love food, you appreciate the ‘hand-crafted’ ethos behind terms like farm to table, slow roasted, and small batch. But if you’re manually building and shipping marketing reports for scores of clients, while the technology exists for you to automate and replicate this process at scale, then ‘hand-crafted’ isn’t the signature of quality it should be; it’s the bottleneck slowing the whole operation down.

The ROI of DIY Data Management

There’s a strong perception of cost efficiency attached to DIY in popular culture, such that marketers can be forgiven for believing that DIY is the best way to approach their marketing data management. 

Regardless of the aspirations of DIY, marketing data management relies on a network of applications, so any budget-conscious data engineer realizes that off-the-grid independence is off the table. The real task is getting your modern data stack to work with you, not against you. 

Through our own integrative network of business intelligence and data storage partners, NinjaCat allows agencies to ingest, store, and transform marketing data for a single point of truth ready for analysis. 

Many agencies and teams, frustrated with the lack of comprehensive solutions in the market, have endeavored  to build their own “in-house” marketing data warehouse solution. They must be prepared to invest heavily upfront and ongoing in their self-built “Frankenstack” of multiple point solutions;  combining storage from Snowflake, AWS, or Google Big Query, with ingestion platforms like Fivetran or Airbyte, along with transformation tools like Alteryx or dbt. The result is a cobbled-together data homunculus that must be constantly upgraded and maintained.  

In-house and bespoke solutions can be built, with a lot of time and resources.  But the question remains: when it comes to the lemon vs lemonade paradox of DIY, is the juice worth the squeeze?

From Frankenstack to FrankenFamily

As more software and platforms enter into the modern martech ecosystem, marketers of all sizes and shapes understand that interoperability is more desirable than isolated pockets of integration. 

However, this holistic attitude toward integrated performance marketing data management rarely translates across departments, silos, and third parties, making it difficult to escape the shadow of the Frankenstack. 

NinjaCat’s data capabilities connect with tightly integrated apps to report, monitor, explore or ship your agencies marketing data. Without proper maintenance and implementation, the multi-varied point solutions that would need to be cobbled together to build a viable NinjaCat alternative could only end up as an unscalable Frankenstack, leading to a collection of Frankenstacks, which ends up as a FrankenFamily.

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It’s important to note that any and every SaaS product on the market is reliant on a network of services itself to maintain operations. Being effective with modern marketing technology means working toward solving your most pressing issues while embracing an “all-for-one” mindset, not Pyrrhically seeking an “all-in-one” silver bullet.

Is An End-to-End Solution A New Beginning?

The promise of finding an end-to-end solution for your agency’s particular marketing data management problems isn’t a matter of if, but how. 

If the technology and martech evolution stays on its current trajectory, marketers will continue to face data silos, proliferating platforms, complex models, and frustration in regards to aggregation and integration of business intelligence and campaign performance information. 

The persistent pace of change in marketing technology emphasizes that today’s kit and  kaboodle solution can quickly become tomorrow’s kindling. Teams hoping to be more effective and efficient with their marketing performance data management have to embrace adaptive, quick, and reliable tools, which deliver superior outputs that elevate expectations while managing resources. With NinjaCat this is an easy ask, but generating the same results through a collection of NinjaCat alternatives may be a more arduous task.