Measurement Platforms Full Review

HIVE9

www.hive9.com

Hive9 was founded in 2015 as a web cloud marketing solution aggregating marketing activities together into a platform for marketing planning and collaboration. The most prominent feature offered is a marketing calendar, allowing marketers to create a marketing plan and track their strategic goals.

Hive9 added a marketing attribution feature allowing marketers to track attribution.

Hive9 supports 9 attribution models, all based on cookies and web potential options (with cookie access).

For the sake of the review – we only focused on the measurement and attribution part of the platform.

Integration / Development Needed

Integrating with Hive9 is not an easy task. The platform offers very little documentation, and given the lean team – getting technical support to help took some back and forward.

To get attribution to work, we needed to integrate Hive9 with google analytics.

There was no connectors to mobile attribution platforms – so we needed to create daily exports from our attribution and email files to our account manager at hive9 in order to get our data visualized.

Hive9 was unable to use any of the attribution models for mobile apps.

Onboarding

Onboarding was not very easy with Hive9. we were handed with a project plan that took multiple stages and data upload.

we needed to pull in resources from all around to get things started.

Unfortunately we couldn’t use the attribution mechanics other than last-touch attribution.

Once we got live, we were able to create a marketing calendar within the platform.

This was a nice looking feature if you’re only operating offline marketing campaigns (typically time bound), but as most of us run performance campaigns – the calendar feature was not really useful – as it just showed all channels being live all the time.

The promise made by Hive9 is of a marketing planning tool, similar to MediaOcean (used by most advertising agencies around the world). It’s a cheaper alternative, but does not replace the need for a suitable marketing measurement and attribution

Support

Hive9 does not have a support team. This means that everything you need help with will go through a sales representative. This was a pain.

It sometimes took days to get an answer for even simple technical questions.

Hive9 only offers support between “business hours” (8am – 6pm Texas time) – so if you happen to be in Europe – prepare to wait at least a day before you get answers for anything.

Useful insights

Hive9 offers various dashboards. Note that you cannot make your own dashboard, but ask Hive9 what you want and within 2-3 weeks, they can create a dashboard for you.

Typically dashboards offered are email dashboard, finance dashboard.

The insights are not very friendly. It’s really hard to understand other than check out the graphs. To be honest – none of us understood what is the benefit in Hive9 when there are plenty of better bi platforms (google data studio, tableau, sisense) or plain old Excel…

Anyone with some experience in web development can design dashboards as the ones offered by Hive9 within a few hours.

Accuracy

The marketing measurement component within Hive9 was one of the least accurate reporting we’ve seen. Hive9 attempts to create a journey/path from various channels in order to visualize how much each channel contributed to the sales funnel.

The settings are completely manual.

For example – hive9 claimed that email generated the most sales, while our other marketing channels (desktop) had little to do with generating sales.

Mobile was grouped into one small bubble – even if all sales were generated by mobile app.

The marketing funnel visualization was random, and useless.

Secure

As we could not match any of the measurement data to other sources we used – it seems like hive9 placed no thought into security or anti-fraudulent technology.

If you use Hive9 – we strongly recommend to check your data and not make decisions based on it!

Privacy compliant

The platform supports 9 attribution methods but all of these methods depend on cookies. Yes – Cookies!

The platform is not compliant with web privacy regulations, and certainly not with mobile IDs regulations.

Unbiased vs. Biased

Hive9 is not biased at least. As an independent company, they are not connected with any organization that trades in media. As seen in the pricing model review – hive9 pricing is a flat fee and not based on media spend or revenues making it more unbiased than other platforms we tested.

Pricing Model

The good news is that Hive9 has a monthly flat fee. The bad news is that it’s super expensive.

Given that Hive9 measurement feature only supports web properties and you can basically get the same for free from Google analytics and arm yourself with one of 50 BI visualization platforms out there for a fraction of the price – we found that Hive9 pricing model is not justifiable for the return you could get.

Maybe agencies would go for this, simply because Hive9 could provide them with the service needed to integrate it all (for even more costs) – but to the advanced, performance driven, advertisers – Hive9 just doesn’t cut it.

Price

The price is flat. $25,000. Yes – you are reading it right. Twenty Five Thousand Dollars.

Hive9 was not the most expensive measurement platform we reviewed, but given that it only has one pricing model – that’s a lot of money to throw at such a limited platform.

Review Summary:

Hive9 is a marketing planning tool, allowing Advertisers and agencies to plan their marketing activities. As part of the platform, Hive9 offers nine attribution models, all suitable only for web advertisers: Last Touch, First Touch, MTA, U and W shaped, Custom attribution. The idea behind the platform was to offer advertisers with an integrated solution from tracking to attribution to goal settings and media planning. Some would refer to Hive9 as a “Meta DSP”.

Hive9 didn’t excel in any of the review parameters. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a good platform, but it seems that the focus of Hive9 is towards web advertisers.

Hive9 does have the potential of being a decent CFO / CMO dashboard (standalone), but their pricing does not justify using the platform only for the dashboard features.

Pros & Cons:

• Plenty of dashboards to pick from
• Starting price of $25,000 – yikes!!!!
• Exclusive for desktop channels – suitable for old school marketers
• An interesting attempt to mix marketing attribution and media planning into one platform
• Required heavy data & BI resources to integrate
• Our CFOs liked the dashboards. Marketing Did Not.
• Suitable only for marketers that work with quarterly / monthly planned budget.

Measurement Platforms Review for Hive9:

Support	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Onboarding	★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
No Dev Needed	★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆	Privacy Compliant	★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Accuracy	★★★★☆☆☆☆☆	Pricing Model	★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Useful Insights	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Price	★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Unbiased	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Secure	★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆