Call it the rise of TikTokalytics.
A group of young attribution and analytics startups, the newest wielding particular talent on TikTok, have inherited the Earth from multi-touch attribution (MTA) companies.
A couple are more experienced startups. There’s the nine-year-old Rockerbox, for example, that pivoted with the times. And Measured, founded by attribution industry vets from Visual IQ and Conversion Logic.
But the two newest and noisiest players in the category, Triple Whale and Northbeam, hit the market at just the right time with a pitch that advertisers and product sellers needed for this moment.
Marketers are reeling from the loss of social platform data at the same time that they’re trying to incorporate a rising star, TikTok, into their always-on media strategies.
“One or two years ago advertisers could trust Facebook Ad Manager numbers and didn’t need attribution tools to make sense of it,” said Rok Hladnik, managing partner of the boutique DTC ecommerce agency Flat Circle. “Now there’s less data and the data is delayed and modeled on Facebook’s side, so it doesn’t make sense.”
Since brands can no longer trust the platform analytics, they’re looking for vendors that can return that trust in the attribution reporting.
Investors are backing the category in a big way this year. Triple Whale raised $24 million in March. Measured picked up $21 million in May. And last month Northbeam announced a $15 million round.
Social savvy
Social isn’t just what these companies measure, it’s how they’ve gained traction in the marketing community. These TikTokalytics startups use social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok to gain customers. Think: DM’ing potential customers on Twitter. Influencers – who organically evangelize or have side gigs consulting for these startups – have created a very different approach to SaaS business development.
Northbeam and Triple Whale are deeply embedded in, let’s call it DTC Twitter, a group of vocal ad buyers and ecommerce entrepreneurs who post about social advertising dynamics.
It’s rare that brands are actually out in market evangelizing on behalf of their vendors. You also don’t see publishers touting their SSPs and doing real biz dev on their behalf.
But for these new measurement platforms, prominent ad execs lend their backing to their preferred platform on social media. David Herrmann, CEO of the DTC-focused agency Herrmann Digital, is a product advisor for Northbeam, for example. Alexandra Greifeld, who owns an ecommerce and retail marketing services company No Best Practices, consulted with Triple Whale.
Early Triple Whale proponent Cody Plofker, CMO of Jones Road Beauty, now backs Northbeam, where he’s an advisor. The social-based brand Obvi, which makes collagen protein, is a major Triple Whale advocate. As was Alexa Kilroy, formerly the marketing director of the vitamin brand First Day, who was poached by Triple Whale in May to inspire other brands.
All of those ad buyers and marketers are prominent voices on Twitter and active advertising players on TikTok. It’s a strange and unique fact of this analytics category that the marketers who use the products in turn become evangelists for their vendor tech.
Within this category, there are four key players to watch. Two, Rockerbox and Measured, were built before the rise of TikTok. And Northbeam and Triple Whale emerged after TikTok had risen to prominence, so they’re natives to the platform in a way that older companies just are not.
The old guard
Two more-established players in the category are Measured, which is all of five years old, and Rockerbox, which was founded nine years ago but pivoted to attribution services about four years ago.
The two companies stand out for the breadth of their offerings and data services: incrementality testing, geo-location control group tests, post-purchase surveys, MTA, media mix modeling, etc.
True Classic, a men’s clothing company that sells online, uses a number of analytics vendors, including Measured and Triple Whale, said co-founder and CEO Ryan Bartlett. “But Measured is the one that we really look towards, because they can do incrementality testing and holdout tests.”
Measured is an expensive piece of software, but Bartlett said that without the incrementality ratings pulled from its group testing “you really don’t have any source of truth.” He added that Triple Whale is a cheaper add-on for True Classic, and puts data into a more digestible dashboard with visualization tools.
“Measured is definitely not as sexy of a platform,” he said. It reports numbers, spreadsheet style. That data must be interpreted by a specialist in data science or analytics, or by Measured itself in a more consultative way. But he said Measured’s incrementality results are worth more than “how they group data and make it look better.”
The old guard also markets themselves differently.
The youngest companies in the mix, Triple Whale and Northbeam, are big self-promoters on TikTok and Twitter and advertise themselves on TikTok.
The duo “drive the conversation” on DTC Twitter,” said Ben Semmar, who was named CEO of the agency Rock City Lab a year ago. In contrast, Rockerbox is “doing a lot of great work but they’re quieter about it,” he said. Or, at least, Rockerbox CEO Ron Jacobson is more active and promotional on LinkedIn than Twitter.
Northbeam
Northbeam was founded three years ago by two people who were frustrated with the marketing analytics in their respective businesses and decided to build a solution themselves, according to Northbeam CMO Matt Kobach. Founder Austin Harrison owned a content production and IP business, and Dan Huang served as the lead engineer and data scientist at MTailor, which tailors clothing online.
“I would say the word ‘forecasting’ is the best way to describe the difference between what we do,” he said. Other services look back at campaigns with a post mortem approach. Northbeam, he said, is more focused on connecting first-party data like sales and site visitors to marketing KPIs, so the brand has a clear idea of what to do next.
Northbeam is also in beta with media mix modeling and incrementality testing products. Kobach said. Its bread and butter to date, though, is MTA.
As Northbeam expands its product offering, it will have to balance one of its competitive advantages: a lower pricepoint than the old guard.
Semmar said his agency evaluated Rockerbox and Northbeam late last year and now uses Northbeam. “Candidly, it was a price-driven decision.”
And Northbeam also has to work on improving its UX and data visualization tools.
“We’ll be the first to admit that we’re at kind of an ugly dashboard,” Kobach said. There’s a learning curve to interpret the reporting in Northbeam. “Our current efforts are focused on making this more usable for someone who is not an in-the-weeds ad buyer.”
Triple Whale
Triple Whale, the baby of the category having been founded last year, has a different perspective even than Northbeam, which competes in a straightforward way with incumbent marketing attribution and analytics.
For Triple Whale, the goal is to be more of an ecommerce operating system, said head of brand Alexa Kilroy (who joined in May from a DTC vitamin seller).
The two non-technical co-founders, CEO AJ Orbach and COO Maxx Blank, previously operated their own Shopify merchant businesses.
“We’re really built for Shopify businesses right now,” Kilroy said.
Triple Whale has attribution tech, according to Semmar, but the tech is more basic and less reliant on data modeling.
A relatively small ecommerce brand might use Google and Facebook, with perhaps TikTok and some email marketing. With those concise channels, a platform like Triple Whale is effective, Semmar said. But as the business and marketing grows into television, programmatic, retail and other channels, Triple Whale would lose the thread of those more involved customer journeys.
Triple Whale is also about half the starting price of Northbeam, he said.
Since Northbeam is itself a less expensive attribution option than the likes of Measured and Rockerbox, a brand like True Classic can carry Triple Whale as well as an attribution vendor they use as a source of truth.
Working with many smaller ecommerce sellers is also an opportunity for Triple Whale because that whole category – small, search-reliant ecommerce brands – is being forced to transition from the baseline Google Analytics product, called Universal Analytics, to an updated version called GA4.
“There’s a lot of reticence towards implementing the new newest form of Google Analytics,” Kilroy said. “I know a lot of people are dreading it.”
Triple Whale takes a different approach in terms of its simpler attribution and being known for a dashboard that can be used by more than just in-house ad tech and analytics execs. But it’s also got a very different, shall we say … vibe.
“When you pay for Triple Whale, you get more than just the beautiful dashboard and the aggregated data and attribution,” Kilroy said. “You’re getting all kinds of support along the way.”
The goal is to make “something that could be very unfun, enjoyable, and feel like more than just a transactional SaaS product you’re paying for,” she said.
Triple Whale hosts meetups for customers and people in the DTC space. And Kilroy said there’s an active Slack community of Triple Whale execs and DTC clients who bounce ideas off each other and help on support requests.
“The ecommerce business can be incredibly isolating, particularly if your team is remote,” she said. “We really value community and getting people together.”
