Digital-first organizations need to continually enhance their tactics to most effectively attract, engage, convert, manage, and retain their customers.
At Piano, we refer to the process of improving the digital business touchpoints as commercial optimization. Our tools are designed to help attract more users and then use analytics, testing, personalization, and other capabilities to maximize the revenue per user from each digital visit.
While there are many SaaS marketing tools that focus on one capability or a single point within this lifecycle, most buyers struggle to realize value from managing a large number of point solutions.
When data is siloed, inaccurate, non-compliant, or inaccessible by the organization, or when the company’s user experience takes too long to change to properly adapt to the market, opportunity is lost.
The Piano platform consists of four masterfully integrated products.
Analytics
Piano Analytics is a data harvesting and analysis toolset. While PA competes with other broad-based marketing and behavioral analytics tools, it excels in compliance-critical environments and differentiates itself with several unique capabilities and datasets.
Activation
Piano Activation includes Composer, the world’s most widely-deployed experience rules engine, and VX, our subscription commerce platform.
Amplifier
Our suite of audience development tools includes organic and paid social media campaign management, as well as newsletter and push capabilities. It is designed to merchandise content that drives traffic to owned-and-operated digital properties.
Audience
Our real-time customer data management system (CDP/DMP) enables sophisticated known and anonymous user segmentation as well as the output of customer segments to both Piano applications and external systems.
Piano’s product integration provides tremendous agility, completing the loop between segmentation, targeting, and reporting.
There are a variety of segmentation capabilities in Piano, each of which makes groups of known and/or anonymous users available for targeting and analysis throughout the platform.
That’s to say that you can, for example, create a segment of your visitors in Audience, then target them with an on-site experience in Activation, acquire lookalikes for them in social media through Amplifier, then report on them in Analytics. Or you can do that in reverse — you could identify a user cohort in the Analytics tool then, for example, target those users on your site within Activation.
Of course, all segments in Piano are exportable as well to external systems and tools as well. The immediacy of and agility of having these capabilities internally integrated, however, means that these day-to-day use cases do not need to create a burden on IT resources.
The Piano platform’s greatest strength is its ability to capture and synthesize massive amounts of disparate data.
Our primary data source is the behavioral event data we capture through a combination of JavaScript tags and server-side APIs. This data isn’t sampled, operates at massive scale, and is available in our platform in real-time. We support an unlimited number of custom events and properties within a flexible and consistent data model.
This data is enriched by proprietary data from Piano’s applications and custom tracking. Piano’s apps are aware of user data such as the user’s segment, A/B test group, and subscription status. Our in-page scripts capture information from sources like video interactions (e.g. play/pause/buffering information), and ads (impression-level revenue data, creative, etc.)
These data sources are then augmented with customer data that we observe or that our clients ingest into the system. That could be first or zero-party data such as customers’ content profiles or responses to data in online forms, offline data that is outside of Piano’s scope such as a customer type, or contextual data, like the temperature in the users’ home city.
We also use a number of algorithmic approaches to create synthetic data from those sources, including custom metrics, propensity scores, reinforcement learning models, and lookalike segments. These models can use any of the other data types as inputs.
Importing data into Piano, or exporting data to internal or third-party systems, is straightforward.
Many of our clients’ greatest success stories come from leveraging their engineering and data teams to build highly bespoke, highly relevant features on top of Piano. To enable this, we include ingestion and export points in every facet of our platform, including:
Data in
Custom analytics event properties
Data enrichment
Inline Javascript variables
User profile imports
External segment imports
Data out
Webhooks
Real-time customer segment exports
Analytics audience exports
Log files
Third-party identifier sync (ID5, UID2.0)
Data sharing, Data Flow
Platform architecture
Data in Piano resides in a number of data stores, geographically located in Europe, US, or Australia based on our clients’ location. The two primary data engines behind Piano are Snowflake, with whom we enjoy a close partnership, and our proprietary CX Engine, which is a real-time, high-availability, in-memory datastore.
This is what we mean when we refer to our platform as real-time: the synchronization of these two data technologies enables us to provide a loop from event to analytics reporting availability of one minute on average, and a segmentation speed (from event to the users’ presence in a segment) of 200ms.
