Metamarkets Inc. is attempting to solve one of the biggest challenges facing marketers who are actively incorporating data into their work with a new visualization engine for dissecting multi-dimensional information.

The company, which specializes in building real-time analytics platforms for digital advertising, is targeting a frustration that is familiar to any marketer who has run an ad campaign: High-level metrics such as clicks-per-ad are easy to get, but looking at additional dimensions such as clicks by campaign by location or time of day require custom queries, which can take days to get back from the IT department.

Metamarkets offers to help customers clear that bottleneck with its new Facet tool, which essentially exposes common query commands as interface elements that can be mixed and matched as needed. Facet is built to be a highly flexible front-end to the company’s Druid database, enabling a customer to filter data from a campaign by the location of viewers, narrow down that subset further based on some other metric and repeat the process with different operations until they find what they’re looking for.

Facet is currently limited to tabular data displays and only supports a maximum “depth” of up to five actions, but Metamarkets intends to add support for more advanced visualizations with future releases, presumably in the form of pre-built templates. The engine is available as part of Druid, the homegrown database that powers the startup’s ad optimization platform, and is apparently already seeing use with a number of customers including LinkedIn Inc. and the Financial Times.