NinjaCat is a reporting solution for digital marketing agencies. It allows users to track the spend and performance of Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Analytics, Facebook, and DoubleClick with call tracking in one interface, allowing users to monitor campaigns and deliver reports to demonstrate return on marketing investments. NinjaCat users can connect, clean, and transform marketing data in NinjaCat then ship it to any of the leading data warehouses via its API or code free replication…
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Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
NinjaCat has been great for getting clients quickly connected to popular advertising platforms like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google. It can blend data together easily to make overall data easy to access. The template designer is easy to use (though careful there is no auto save or undo button) and you can have a client ready report done easily with one of their premade templates or customize it for your needs. The fact that I can build any metric or pull in about any information with the Google Sheet data feature makes the product far and away one of the best products I've had the pleasure of using.
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
It automates Client Reporting for Digital Advertising -- it's time-consuming to set up, but once it is, you don't have to do very much after that.
Adding Data Sources to your reporting. NinjaCat integrates with most digital advertising platforms, in particular, Google Ads and Google Analytics.
It Manages Client Reporting in one place -- there's no need to send reports from different platforms and stitch the information together. NinjaCat pulls all the data and allows you to customize reports for your clients and send them concise data in an appealing format.
It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
I think the use case we described earlier about a non-technical user that was copying/pasting data into Word during emergencies is our best reason. This person had little technical ability, and the Tableau mobile solution powered by Tableau server completely resolved the issues. She has since become one of the most vocal proponents of Tableau.
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
The platform is in-depth and thorough. The support team is amazing. The ability to do automations and data visualizations are fantastic. However, it does lack integrations fore taking data to the next step. Other platforms let you integrate Python and R scripts for organizing data or even forecasting. If NinjaCat were to add this, I think it would be a 10/10 and best product on the market
I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
Google Analytics is raw data. Reporting has improved, but it is limited to the data available in Google Analytics Only. NinjaCat combines data across all the digital platforms you use. Acquisio and Kenshoo have similar capabilities on the reporting side but are cost prohibitive due to their pricing structure. You can't just us the reporting features of either of these 2 platforms as a stand-alone feature. NinjaCat does one thing and does it well -- Automated Client Reporting of digital marketing and advertising.
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
There are some significant setup for the server product.
Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
