Review of Pathmatics: Improve Your Digital Advertising with Just One Tool

Are you interested in learning about how other brands succeed with digital advertising? Would you like to learn how peers are gaining market share? If so, then you should check out Pathmatics.

Also, hang around here and learn a little more about the product by reading this Pathmatics review.

Pathmatics offers a holistic look at the digital marketing landscape. It harvests ad data with the aid of two technologies: a crawler and a panel-based solution.

Armed with that info, the tool aggregates, categorizes, and shares its findings so you can get the most out of your own online advertising.

Pathmatics gleans insights from popular ad platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Hulu, Tiktok,  and YouTube. It also scours cyberspace for video and display ads.

Even better: the tool captures various types of data, such as ad formats and sizes. You’ll also learn about IAB standard display assets, Rising Star units, in-banner video campaigns, and non-standard ad displays.

And you won’t be alone if you decide to sign on with Pathmatics. It’s a tool used by well-known brands including Target, Nestle, Kantar Media, GEICO, Tripadvisor, and Verizon.

In this Pathmatics review, I’ll go over the tool’s features. I’ll also explain how it can help you reach new heights in online advertising.

Review of Pathmatics: Three Solutions

Pathmatics offers three different products.

If you’d like to do nothing more than access insights from the company’s award-winning UI, go with Pathmatics Explorer.

On the other hand, if you need data integrated with some other business software, opt for Pathmatics Connect.

If you need your data organized based on some very specific needs, choose Pathmatics Custom.

In this Pathmatics review, I’ll cover each of these products separately. However, I’ll give the most attention to the first product as that’s your best bet if you’re just getting into digital ad research.

Pathmatics Explorer

Pathmatics Explorer is the company’s self-described flagship marketing intelligence solution.

With Explorer, you’ll gain insights into:

• Ads served
• Spend estimates
• Impression estimates
• Competitors’ digital ad strategies

And you’ll get that info from several different geographic regions, including:

• The United States
• The UK
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• New Zealand
• Australia

From each of those regions, the tool offers a wealth of data that will help you fine-tune your own online advertising campaigns.

Remember: never be afraid to learn from the success of others. Even (especially) if those others happen to be your competitors.

Pathmatics offers the following insights to digital marketers seriously about online advertising:

• Creative strategies – Learn what types of image and video assets other brands are using to connect with people online.
• Targeting strategies – See how competitors are reaching the people that you’re not. Find great targeting ideas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. Learn about how other businesses are targeting people based on gender, location, and even operating system.
• Device strategies – Track ad spend and impressions across multiple devices, including desktops, smartphones, tablets, and phablets.
• Messaging strategies – Gain insight on ad copies that resonate with a specific audience by following your competitor’s most successful ad campaigns.
• Buying strategies – Learn about how your competitors are purchasing their ads, whether it’s via direct buying or programmatic.
• Share of wallet – See which competitors are targeting your customers. Take action on that info so you don’t lose market share.
• Share of voice – Follow your competitors’ ad bandwidth to see how much more people in your target market are seeing their brand names versus your own. Adjust your ad spend accordingly.
• Social post strategies – Find out which posts are dominating on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Get some inspiration from other posts so you can reach people in your target market on those same platforms.
• Trends – Learn how advertisers stack up against each other. Gain insights on historical impressions and ad spend.
• Top sites – See which sites your competitors think are the most valuable. Adjust your ad spend as needed because those same sites might be more valuable to your brand as well.

And if all that isn’t enough Pathmatics Explorer also offers tools to make your digital marketing life even easier:

• Exports – Download your data into Excel format. Visualize it by creating infographics and PowerPoint presentations straight out of the tool.
• Ad Mocker – Check out your creatives before your customers see them. View your ads on the page of your choice before you launch a campaign.
• Customized alerts – Get notified when a brand makes a change in its digital marketing strategy.
• Report builder – Create your own customized reports.

According to the company website, users describe Pathmatics Explorer as simple, actionable, fast, and always improving. So it’s user-friendly as well.

Pathmatics Review: Pathmatics Connect

It’s likely that your digital marketing tools don’t all work in isolation. Some of them need to talk to each other.

The folks at Pathmatics understand that. So they’ve created Pathmatics Connect.

Pathmatics Connect is a collection of data feeds that you can export to other tools that you’re using.

Then, combine the power of your toolset to gain insights about multi-touch attribution, business intelligence, and trends in digital advertising.

Here are some of the data points you can export:

• Ad path – the number of hops an ad takes to get from advertiser to consumer
• Creative dimensions – the size of the ad unit’s image
• Creative text – the ad copy consumers see alongside the ad
• Creative type – various details about the ad itself (software language, ad format, page skin, etc.)
• Date – the date the ad ran
• Device – the device the ad appeared on
• Impressions – the number of impressions an ad received
• Purchase channel – the ad platform that brokered the ad
• Region – the location the ad appeared in
• Landing page – the URL that the ad pointed to
• Site – the domain where the ad appeared

It’s worth noting that the raw data isn’t itself an integration. In other words, whatever other tool you’re using will need to ingest the exported data and process it.

Pathmatics Custom

The folks at Pathmatics also realize that a “one-size fits all” solution rarely works. To that end, the company offers Pathmatics Custom.

Pathmatics Custom lives up to its name. It gives you a tailored solution that suits your business model and advertising goals.

With Pathmatics Custom, you’ll get:

• Custom reports
• Custom data feeds
• A custom dashboard

If you’d like to learn more than what you’ll read in this Pathmatics review, you can view examples on the company website.

Pricing

Pathmatics is one of those companies that doesn’t advertise its pricing. That means it’s expensive.

Word on the street is that it costs anywhere between $10,000 per year to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. So be advised that if you’d like to sign on with Pathmatics, you’ll need to open up your wallet.

However, it all comes down to ROI. If you think the insight you gain will give you more revenue than the cost of the tool, it’s a no-brainer. Make the move.

Wrapping It Up

There it is: a complete Pathmatics review.

Pathmatics offers competitive ad insights. You can use it to learn about how other companies in your industry are reaching the same people that you’d like to reach. Then, you can mimic their strategies for profit.

However, you will pay for the service. The knowledge it shares isn’t cheap.

If you like what you’re reading about Pathmatics, feel free to schedule a demo. You might like it even more.