How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Data
by Bryce Hamlin •
If you work in the digital marketing world, you know that data is king. Our metric-based, ROI-centric business would be nothing without the mountains of data that we sift through day in and day out. Whether it’s weekly reports, optimizations, or strategy analyses, data is the wind to our sails.
I’ll be the first to admit that the raw amount of data we deal with can get overwhelming. On an average day, I bet that you’re handling data from routine optimizations, weekly reports, information from prospective clients… I could go on and on. But the real question is: how do we intelligently and efficiently deal with this constant inflow of data?
Our answer: Supermetrics. I want to give their team a huge shout out here – their software has shaved a ton of time off of our weekly and monthly reporting processes. The Supermetrics tool allows users to pull advertising data from 20 different sources, whether it be AdWords, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc. As the person responsible for our department’s weekly client reports, I have to pull data for nine clients, with multiple sources for each client.
Introduction To Supermetrics
Supermetrics (specifically Supermetrics for Google Sheets) is a Sheets add-on that allows users to pull data from several different sources almost instantly. I’m talking anything from AdWords to GA to SEMrush… you name it.
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Supermetrics has 23 full data sources and 11 simple connections (social media data and posts from FB/TW/Reddit, etc.). I’ll be focusing on the full data sources since that’s where the bulk of my experience lies, but “simple connections” could be worth exploring for any Social team!
In addition to many sources to pull from, Supermetrics allows for (basically) any segmentation that’s available in the native UI of these sources. Want to pull daily click/imp/cost/conversion data for the last three months for your client Organic Food Supplier? Easy.
What if a hair product e-commerce client has a separate GA account for each of the six products they sell? No problem, Supermetrics will have that data near-instantly in one organized spreadsheet.
Next, a little insight into how we use it at Power Digital!
How It’s Helped Our Paid Media Department:
Integrating Supermetrics into our weekly and monthly reporting for clients has significantly cut down on time needed to fill these reports out. Our report for the hair product example (here on our referred to as Hair Styler) above is probably the best current example of this:
Pre-Supermetrics, the Hair Styler weekly report took our Strategist Ryan at least an hour to pull, sometimes more. The difficulty lay in the fact that he had to pull GA data from 6 separate Instyler accounts, an AdWords account, a Bing account, and a Facebook ads account. That is nine separate downloads, which then have to be combined into a raw data tab through some Excel wizardry.
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With Supermetrics, I was able to cut out the entire download process up to the point of the Excel magic (Supermetrics isn’t that smart). Instead of having to launch four different UIs, I only needed to “refresh” the Supermetrics sheets. All of the data appears virtually instantly! This report went from taking the better part of a Monday morning to maybe 15 minutes with the addition of this simple tool.
As you can see, certain departments will benefit more from using Supermetrics than others. I see the biggest areas of opportunities are in PPC, Paid Social, and SEO. Supermetrics can pull virtually any metric that you’d be able to pull manually, barring a few exceptions.
Onboarding a new client into the Supermetrics UI is nearly as easy as using it to pull the reports. Once you’ve installed Supermetrics, it’s as simple as navigating to the top bar, finding Supermetrics in the “Addons” tab, and launching the sidebar (example pictured below).
From here, it’s fairly intuitive. Work through these options from top to bottom.
- Select the service you want the data from, and log in with your MCC account
- Select the client account you’ll be working with
- Select the date range for the pull
- Select which metrics you want to see.
- Choose how you’d like your data segmented, or don’t segment it at all
- Set any filters you’d like to clean your data up
- Options has a few extra options to play around with, but none of them really worth mentioning here
…And boom! Click the big blue “Get Data to Table” button and your data should populate in about 30 seconds. Barring any edits to the data pull, this is the only time you’ll have to set this up. From here on out, it’s as easy as Addons > Supermetrics > Refresh!
Wrapping Up
Supermetrics has saved the PPC department hours of work every week since it’s implementation. We’re using it primarily to streamline our weekly and monthly reporting processes, but there’s potential for this tool to help other departments in many ways. I hope this write-up sparked some ideas!
Lastly, I want to ask you all a question. What tools have you implemented into your core processes that have been a big help? Comment below!
