How Bitmovin Uses HockeyStack to Answer “What’s Working?” for the CEO

The Who

‍

Bitmovin is the Emmy award-winning category leader in video streaming infrastructure. The company has been at the forefront of industry innovation and all major developments in the online video streaming industry.  Today, the company’s solutions are used by over 400 customers worldwide, including the BBC, ClassPass, Discovery, fuboTV, Hulu and many more. 

‍

The Problems

‍

Bitmovin has a marketing team like most companies do, structured with dedicated owners for specializations like Digital Marketing, Product Marketing, Events and Marketing Operations.  The owners have dedicated KPIs and are responsible for the outcomes of their channels and areas of expertise - none of this is the problem.  

‍

But, prior to using HockeyStack, the team was reliant on their Marketing Operations leader, Tirath, to perform some heavy-duty stitching between GA4, HubSpot and good old spreadsheets to run attribution models on their available data.  Most of the time and effort was spent on channel-level ROI analysis, and the team knew they were better together, but they couldn’t yet prove it. Not only that, once GA4 was live and we were all forced into the dreaded migration, lots of the anonymous account-level visit data was lost, as was much of the accuracy of UTM tracking.  This was happening as cookies were also disappearing via blockers and opt-ins were slowing or stopping completely, double whammy.

‍

So the team started looking for a solution to their prioritized challenges, which were:

• The inability to automatically capture anonymous activities and join them with known visitors at the contact and account level 
• A lack of reliable measurement, including attribution, and other forms of built-in analysis 
• Difficulty proving the compounding gains of multiple channels with out-of-the-box models in HubSpot or manual efforts in spreadsheets

‍

The Requirements

‍

The team investigating solutions was made up of three key team members at Bitmovin and led by their Marketing Operations leader, Tirath.  After several internal conversations, the team developed a must-have list in their next solution which included:

1. Complete data: Insight into anonymous users at the account level and the ability to aggregate that information and connect it with known data for complete buyer journeys
2. Flexibility and compatibility: The option to import data and integrate with existing systems and ad platforms natively
3. Multiple reporting types: The ability to use built-in attribution models on the entire dataset, along with reports that would show how channels or campaigns worked in comparison or addition to one another
4. Detailed analysis: Drilldowns for campaign types or channel types like all paid vs all organic or paid social vs organic social or paid search vs organic search
5. Priority account monitoring: Through the combination of anonymous and known visitors, the ability to see which accounts are visiting and have higher intent, especially for ABM targeting and measurement

‍

The Alternatives

‍

Building a custom solution internally (DIY)

This option was quickly dismissed as Tirath knew the overhead and maintenance of building an in-house solution wouldn’t yield good results.  The time commitment, the specialized knowledge and skills needed and the likelihood of building something worse than a vendor solution just didn’t make any sense.

Looker

At Bitmovin, Looker was already in use and was largely relied upon for last-touch attribution.  Getting KPIs and reports up required a cycle of requests that took up 20% of Tirath’s time, and the visualizations were relying on incomplete data missing the anonymous visits and ad impressions the team was looking for.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot was already in place for marketing automation, so it was an obvious choice for evaluation, as was Google Analytics.  The out-of-the-box reporting was a step up when the team had nothing else, but both were missing the anonymous data associations and were largely inflexible.

‍

The Insights

‍

Tirath worked with HockeyStack to get up and running within a few weeks.  After HockeyStack became the centralized data source for Bitmovin, insights around campaigns, web activity and the user journey quickly began to surface.

Multiple teams were able to get up and running and begin relying on HockeyStack on a daily to monthly basis.  Dashboards were built that spanned paid, organic, inbound, outbound and channels.  This is how Bitmovin now uses HockeyStack across teams:

• Quarterly - the team sets KPIs for their channels and campaigns and Tirath sets those parameters in HockeyStack to be monitored
• Monthly - the team gets a set of reports from Tirath along with analysis and updates on performance.  
• Bi-weekly (every other week) - Tirath meets with each member of the marketing team to review their channels and make suggestions for improvement that they will see reflected in the monthly update.
• Daily - Marketing team members monitor their individual progress to goal 

‍

“‍Our structure enables everyone to track their own KPIs and identify areas for improvement. It’s easier now to see what’s working and make adjustments accordingly.”

‍

Tirath and the team are also now moving towards launching consistent multichannel campaigns as they get more and more confident in their ability to measure outcomes. Currently, they have been freed from a single-touch model of attribution, or the need to construct models and analysis manually.  Content impact is also easier to measure and correlate to pipeline, which was previously a heavy ask and took a significant portion of Tirath’s time.

‍

“Now, using tools like Uniform and Lift reports, we track performance across all stages—from marketing leads and MQLs to closed deals. For example, we can see the impact of assets like website pages or webinars. Just today, our CEO reviewed dashboards to evaluate the effectiveness of specific assets, and he found the Lift reports helpful in seeing positive or negative impacts.”

‍

Key features used in HockeyStack:

• Lift reports for causal analysis on campaign and channel impact
• Dashboarding and reporting for all members of the marketing team
• Single and multi-touch attribution models for performance insights
• Account matching with anonymous activity for holistic buyer journeys
• Odin, the AI Marketing Analyst, for quick summaries and insights 

‍

The Results

‍

Tirath and the marketing team now make strategic decisions based on what they are seeing in HockeyStack. For example, Tirath and his team have:

• Cut ~50% of time spent on manually updating KPIs and managing spreadsheets to focus on analysis and improvement
• Moved from primarily last-touch reporting to a journey-based multitouch understanding
• Started monitoring high-intent accounts and passed AQLs to sales for follow-up - warm outbound!

‍

This ability came from a few different outcomes that HockeyStack enabled, like:

• Understanding campaign impact and influence on pipeline and doubling down on campaigns that are positively influencing revenue
• Keying in on what’s working and what’s not, especially for timed or one-off campaigns like events, where impact may be felt immediately or months later
• Understanding the why behind prospect behavior

‍

Tirath and his team have eliminated hours a week spent on what was happening (HockeyStack took care of that) and have shifted their focus to why it is happening.  As the team continues to track what is influencing pipeline (Lift Reports) and what combination of channels are resulting in positive conversions, a deeper and more complete understanding of the user journey is forming, along with some pretty cool future campaign plans.

‍

Learn more about how HockeyStack helps marketing, revenue, and sales teams surface and action insights like the ones in this template by playing with the interactive demo or booking a demo with our team.

‍