Conductor Insight Stream delivers plain-English advice to every marketer

Analytics is hard. With over 800 analytics products vying for your attention, the problem isn’t which platform to choose — it is what questions to ask, and how to interpret the data.

Content intelligence platform Conductor  has today announced the launch of Insight Stream, a solution that attempts to do away with this problem by surfacing real advice from your marketing data.

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In many ways, Insight Stream is similar to the recently added Assistant option within Google Analytics, but as it is a standalone product — able to integrate with many different data sources — it can go beyond the insights provided by Google’s product. Plus, Insight Stream has an extra trick up its sleeve: messaging.

“Insight Stream leverages Conductor’s search intent, content, and competitive intelligence data and also third-party platforms, including Google and Adobe Analytics, DeepCrawl, and Google Search Console,” Seth Besmertnik, founder and CEO at Conductor, told me. “We leverage data from Google Analytics, but all the insights are derived from our engines and do not use any of the automation Google already has.”

I’ve seen Insight Stream in action, and it couldn’t be simpler.

Upon loading Insight Stream, the marketer is presented with a list of insights. The tool will show you what happened with your campaigns, sales, product lines, and traffic. Rather than a dashboard with graphs, charts, and numbers that need interpreting, it offers plain-English summaries and advice on what to do next.

For example, it might inform you of current social or search trends and recommend that you write a blog post that allows you to ride the wave. Or it may explain that your competitor just gained a certain percentage of your market in a particular category and suggest strategies to combat the potential loss in sales.

Once you open an insight to gain further information and receive tactical ideas, the system allows you to share the results with team members and discuss options via a commenting and messaging system. By including messaging, Insight Stream goes beyond the likes of Google Analytics’ Assistant, turning insights into actionable tactics.

It also allows individual team members to hide alerts, or hide entire categories of insight, thus ensuring each person’s stream is as relevant to their role as possible. If you’re not interested in SEO, for example, you can easily turn those messages off.

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Insight Stream uses data found via large-scale web crawling, competitive intelligence data, web analytics systems, and search engine marketing metrics to feed its database, which then uses algorithms and machine learning to uncover insights.

So how does Besmertnik see marketing evolving in the face of machine learning and A.I.?

“At a high level, machine learning and A.I. will make it so marketers can spend more time executing and less time digging through data,” Besmertnik said. “With all the new technology and tools, marketers have more data than ever before. But almost all these tools provide information that is a step further than raw data — like dashboards, or a chart/data table — so you have to be an expert or have the time to get the value of this information. Marketers don’t want data. They want insights they can act on and make business decisions. A.I. and machine learning can do more of the analysis with data and predictively tell you what’s important and what you should focus on. It’s very exciting, and [there’s] so much opportunity for change, not just with marketing software, but all business software.”

But he cautions against using A.I. for everything.

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“While marketing is data-driven, it’s still a creative field, and people sit at the core,” Besmertnik said.

Insight Stream is available from today for existing Conductor Searchlight customers.