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The View From the Top Is Foggy: Why CMOs in Financial Services Need a Unified BI Stack Now

What’s our ROI on digital last quarter? The question cuts through the hum of the Monday leadership meeting. Everyone turns to you, the CMO. The charts are there. The dashboards too. But stitching together paid, owned, and earned media results? That’s a week-long project — and even then, the answer is half guesswork, half reconciliation.

In an era where marketing is expected to be both creative and accountable, this lack of clarity is more than frustrating — it’s a strategic risk. You can’t steer the ship if you’re reading yesterday’s weather report.


How Disconnected Data Clouds Decision-Making

This isn’t about the tools you don’t have. It’s about what your tools aren’t showing you.

Most marketing teams in financial services are already sitting on a hefty stack of BI reporting tools — Tableau, Excel sometimes even in parallel. But these tools were architected in a time when marketing data lived in a few silos and performance could be tracked in single-channel reports.

Fast forward to today:

  • Omnichannel journeys stretch across web, mobile, email, paid social, and partner ecosystems.

  • Attribution is murky.

  • Customer behavior is nonlinear and cross-device.


Legacy BI environments, like Tableau analytics and Excel, were built to answer static questions — not to serve as real-time, collaborative, self-serve analytics platforms. The result? Endless exporting, stitching, scripting, and second-guessing. You end up with more analysts doing manual work than marketers making informed decisions.

Looker: A BI Platform Built for the Way Marketing Works Today

Looker — a modern business intelligence platform that reshapes how data is modeled, accessed, and used across organizations. It’s not just a dashboarding tool; it’s a semantic layer on top of your data warehouse that ensures consistent definitions, fast queries, and secure data access across teams.

Here’s how Looker transforms the marketing analytics experience:

  • Single Source of Truth: Define metrics once (e.g., customer acquisition cost, multi-touch attribution) and use them everywhere — no more debates about whose numbers are right.

  • Live Data Access: Looker BI connects directly to your cloud data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift), so marketers see the latest numbers, not last week’s CSVs.

  • Self-Serve Exploration: No need to wait on analysts. With governed models in place, marketing teams can build and explore dashboards confidently and independently.

  • Cross-Channel Visibility: Blend data across platforms and campaigns to understand the full customer journey and how channels influence each other.

  • Collaboration-Ready: Embed insights into Google Slides, Slack, or your CRM, and set alerts when key metrics shift — making performance conversations part of daily workflows.


    A CMO stands beside a computer displaying charts and graphs. Background has growth icons, plants, and clouds.


And critically for CMOs in regulated industries like financial services — Looker offers enterprise-grade governance, ensuring data access and audit trails comply with policy.

More on Looker BI features: https://cloud.google.com/looker

Why SquareShift for Your Tableau-to-Looker Journey?

At SquareShift, we understand that switching BI platforms isn’t just a technical migration — it’s a strategic shift in how marketing drives growth.

We’ve helped financial service firms:

  • Transition from Tableau analytics to Looker in weeks, not months.

  • Rebuild their marketing models with modern best practices.

  • Integrate disparate adtech/martech sources into unified LookML layers.

  • Train cross-functional teams to self-serve and collaborate effectively.

Our migration pack isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s tailored to your current stack, compliance needs, and performance goals — ensuring minimal disruption and maximum impact.

Tableau vs. Looker at a Glance

Tableau vs. Looker at a Glance

For organizations comparing Looker cost vs. value, the operational efficiency gained often outweighs licensing fees when paired with a modern stack and guided migration.

Take the First Step Toward Clarity

If you’re tired of hearing “we’ll get back to you with those numbers,” it’s time to give your marketing team a platform that speaks their language — and lets them act in real time.

Let’s make your data work for you, not the other way around.

Book a consultation to see how SquareShift’s Tableau-to-Looker migration can unify your marketing view — and unlock faster, smarter decisions.




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