Marchex on Tableau: "We can make better decisions"

Marchex, a publicly-traded mobile advertising technology company, delivers visibility to marketers by measuring inbound phone calls that result from mobile advertising. From its mobile analytics platform to its pay-per-call mobile advertising network, Marchex looks to data to drive better choices—and better results. We visited Marchex’s Seattle headquarters to speak with executives about why they use Tableau to save time, improve communication, and to simply see the data more clearly than before.

Pete Christothoulou, CEO: We manage probably half a billion phone calls that come into our network every year. So there are a lot of consumer calls that we're seeing. That means a lot of different data points that are at our fingertips. And so we were super-excited when Tableau came to us and showed us the benefit of what they've built. Showed how it could help us improve our productivity. And a lot of times when salespeople are talking to you, it can sound too good to be true. And I could tell you, for once, it actually was better than we expected. John Busby, SVP, Marketing & Consumer Insights: To be honest, at first I was—I was skeptical. And one thing that really changed my mind was the ability to collaborate across groups. One team can take what they've learned, teach how to interpret it to others, and then it spreads virally. With respect to my analyst group, we've definitely seen a return from Tableau above and beyond what we expected. If we didn't have Tableau, we'd be spending a lot more time stitching together data sets on an ad-hoc basis and not able to circulate and syndicate those across the company. Tableau has made it easier for my team to collect information, determine what's the most useful to analyze, and actually go analyze that data. So it's really improved the performance of my team greatly. Pete: I can actually see the data. We're really at this place where we can see the data and we can make better decisions. And those decisions are typically leading to improved client performance.