Mindstream Media drives smarter media buying decisions with Domo

Challenge: This media agency wanted to scale its analytics practice so it could deliver real-time, actionable insights to both clients and internal teams.

Solution: Mindstream Media used Domo to centralize reporting, standardize metrics, and build scalable, real-time dashboards for clients and internal teams.

Impact: Thanks to Domo, the agency improved its efficiency, reduced its QA complexity, and can now better help its clients drive measurable results.

As a media agency, Mindstream Media bills itself as a data-first, insights-driven agency capable of maximizing its clients’ growth. To do that, Mindstream Media relies on Domo to unify data across channels, streamline client reporting, and empower both internal and external teams with real-time information about campaign success.  

“With Domo, we’re able to show clients that being data-driven doesn’t just mean having numbers. It means using data as a kind of superpower,” said John McMurray, senior director of marketing analytics at Mindstream Media.  

Powering a decade of data-driven storytelling

Mindstream Media has been using Domo for more than 10 years as part of its growing analytics practice to help reduce manual work and increase access to insights across the organization.  

“Over the past decade, we’ve looked for the best challenges to solve at each moment. For me, Domo bridges the gap between the left brain and right brain to help highly analytical people tell a clean, concise story about really complex problems,” McMurray said.

Thanks to Domo, Mindstream Media has been able to automate its reporting process, standardize its metrics across channels, and dramatically increase its quality control.

“I manage 25 clients who leverage 10 channels each, so that’s 250 places where something could go wrong when pulling data manually. With Domo, we pull it automatically into one place, so instead of checking 250 places I can just check one thing,” said Ashlyn Wade, data operations manager at Mindstream Media.

“Domo has definitely helped us improve efficiency and speed,” said Jeff Keen, senior marketing analyst at Mindstream Media. “One of the things we commonly do is add dimensions to the data, which makes it easier to sort and filter. If the data comes in a way where it isn’t classified properly, Domo sends an alert. We now catch and fix those types of things before they ever get to a client dashboard.”

Turning insights into action and new business

Today, Domo is used throughout the organization across numerous use cases. Internally, Mindsteam Media uses Domo to track budgets and make sure its teams stay on target.  

“We have a pacing dashboard that shows media buyers the pace at which they are spending. Before, they were doing that all manually in a spreadsheet. It not only saves them a lot of time but also saves the rest of the agency a lot of time by putting this information in one spot that everyone can go to,” Wade said.

“We also recently built an hours dashboard to identify where we are spending too much time,” McMurray said. ”It allows us to be more efficient while also helping us communicate our business performance for our clients.”

Mindstream Media also uses Domo to help its teams make smarter, faster campaign decisions. For example, one team recently used Domo to optimize a search campaign by analyzing whether it should drive traffic to a trial page or a purchase page.

“We discovered that driving them toward a trial ultimately led to 300 percent more purchases down the road. For that particular client, it made a lot more sense to keep it mid-funnel knowing it would pay dividends down the funnel sooner,” Keen said.  

Another team used Domo to determine the most effective call to action for a search campaign for a new brand that was trying to decide whether to send traffic to its website or its Amazon product page. “We found that sending them to the website helped support the new brand launch and build customer confidence, which was more effective than just sending them straight to the point of purchase,” McMurray said.

In addition, Domo is used as a powerful differentiator when responding to RFPs. When presenting during high-pressure business pitches, Mindstream Media builds custom dashboards using anonymous client data to demonstrate their data approach. “We brand it with their colors and logo, and when they’re in the pitch they can play around with it and see what their reporting could look like with us,” Wade said.

“I've seen Domo time and again be a huge selling point. It’s like a mic drop in a new business pitch,” McMurray said.