MacPaw is an international software development company based in Kyiv, and, recently, Boston that develops software for Apple products. It has 15 years of experience and more than 30 million users worldwide. Some of their flagship products are CleanMyMac, ClearVPN, Setapp, and The Unarchiver.
For this case study, we talked to Alyona Gorbatko, Eugene Kalnyk, and Oleksandra Lytvynenko. They are all part of MacPaw’s PR team but work on different projects and products.
Challenge
Before Determ, MacPaw was using another media monitoring platform that didn’t fulfill their needs completely, and they had to combine it with Google searches and other free alerting tools. When Alyona started working at MacPaw, her task was to find the right media monitoring solution for the team.
There were a couple of challenges they were trying to solve with a media monitoring platform. The first was to understand the impact of the publications they were getting, measure their progress, and plan some goals around that. The second was to understand what people are talking about and what they can do, especially regarding misperceptions surrounding some competitor products and their shady tactics, whose negative perception also impacts their product’s perception. The third was to monitor their competitors.
Another challenge was having all their data gathered in one place and reporting. Previously, they couldn’t report properly to the management and understand the impact of their work.
“One of the things that Determ did way better than other platforms that we checked was providing reach for the publications based on its algorithm and not just pulling it from a third party. You'll be surprised how many expensive top tools actually use third-party data with no statistics at all. They give you these crazy numbers of about 5 million views per article. And, of course, if you operate with such numbers, you can have a couple of publications a year, and you'll be done as a PR specialist, which we understand is completely wrong. We like the idea of the algorithm, which is not always 100% correct, but at least it gives you a little bit better idea.”
Solution
Various MacPaw teams use Determ, from the PR, sales, and support teams to the social media and affiliate teams. The MacPaw PR team uses the platform more often if an active campaign is going on to be on top of everything. Otherwise, they check their mentions daily through Slack integration.
“We use Determ to monitor the media landscape and analyze the impact of our communications. And also it's really helpful if there is a crisis going on, then we can quickly see who tells what.”
Aside from the platform, they use Determ’s API to download their mentions into their dashboard, and they’ve connected a Determ account with Slack so they can be up to date with their mentions.
“I like the API integration and integration with Slack because it's super convenient to receive mentions to Slack, so you don't have to go back and forth between Determ and your workspace. You just receive it into Slack, and if something is super important, you go investigate in Determ.”
“We have our own scoring system, evaluating each publication and assigning them a score. Our Analytics team used Determ’s API integration to automate the process of exporting data and save a little bit of time rather than just go through the manual downloading and things like that.”
When asked what they like about Determ, they pointed out:
“Determ has cross-platform mentions, and we see mentions not only from the web but also from social media, which is very important when we are launching cross-platform campaigns, and I can see the unified data in one place.”
“It has a simple and clean interface. That's super easy to use because we've tried many platforms, and sometimes the interface is very confusing. Determ has a super simple interface and clean design, and it's very logical to me.”
“The amount of benefit we receive for the cost we're paying is probably one of the best on the market.”
Impact
When asked how long it would take them to do all their work manually without Determ, Alyona, Eugene, and Oleksandra agreed it would be tough.
“I don't think we would be doing everything we're doing because we had this experience before when we were not using any of the platforms. Basically, we were just collecting mentions and then using a spreadsheet to copy and paste them there, which was already a lot of time to do daily and weekly. There were limited options to track sentiment or any other analytics. Also, for reporting, we would probably just use the number of mentions, and that's it. So, we would not be able to do more in-depth reporting.”
“Five years ago, when I joined the company, we could manually find around 50 mentions across all products and everything happening around the company monthly. Now, I think that for each entity, there are at least 200 relevant mentions, and there are many more that are irrelevant. It would be impossible for the team to process 1,000 or 1,500 mentions by hand, we would probably need a separate person to do that.”
Alyona, Eugene, and Oleksandra also shared their advice for users who are testing out Determ for the first time:
“Just to understand what your basic needs are or the requirements for the platform, like what metrics you need to track reach or which platforms you need to cover and test them first and see if they satisfy your needs. Then, pay attention to nice things to have. Maybe you didn't think you would need this feature, but it might be nice. Have a set of criteria, and in the demo process, ask the manager to address those criteria first.”
“Yes, I would definitely say to get a demo with the manager, and also, if there is something that you don't understand or something that's not working, go to your manager for help because you guys have been quite helpful and quick in terms of response, which is great.”
“On top of that, I would say that it is great to test any tool when you have a specific campaign or specific launch. It is great to compare different tools and how your campaign is going in real life, not just testing when you have nothing specific right now. But to see how the tool works in real life, to see all the capabilities of the tool.”
