7 ways agencies are using Supermetrics to win and retain clients

For an agency, data is an invaluable asset. It helps you prove the value you’re bringing to your clients. Without it, clients may wonder if their marketing budget is well spent—and it’s the last thing you want.

In this article, we’ll discuss different ways marketing agencies use data and Supermetrics to land, grow, and retain clients.

Here’s a snippet:

• Building that pitch perfect
• Automating client reporting
• Ad spend tracking
• Creative testing and monitoring
• Campaign-level reporting
• Streamlining data sources login sharing
• Storing data in a marketing data warehouse

Winning new clients

Use case 1: Building that pitch perfect

Pitching is incredibly time-consuming and, that’s why, costly work (some would even consider it a thankless job). There’s a chance that all your hard work will go down the drain, especially when you’re competing against another agency. You can use data as a competitive advantage and show your expertise and skills to win clients.

Pitching typically falls under two categories:

• Offensive pitching is about proving the agency’s value to a prospective client by
  • collecting and presenting data to show the agency’s expertise and success in similar industries
  • making realistic projections about what the agency can achieve for the client based on historical data and industry benchmarks
• Defensive pitching focuses on retaining current clients by
  • showcasing past performance and demonstrating already delivered value
  • presenting strategies and targets to continue growing the client’s business

In both cases, Supermetrics helps you get the data you need to craft your pitch. You’ll be able to automate the data collection process and the need for manual effort and minimize the chances of human error. You can use Supermetrics to show your past successes and future potential, which helps retain clients and grow your business.

Growing and retaining clients

Being able to provide reports for different use cases helps build trust and transparency with the clients. It shows that you know what you’re doing and have everything under control. Additionally, by looking at the same reports, you and your clients can discuss and work closely together to identify areas of improvement.

Read how Kameira automates reporting, boosts lead generation by 3-4x, and optimizes marketing spend by 22% for their clients with Supermetrics.

Use case 2: Automate client reporting

Manual reporting is inefficient and error-prone, taking away time you could have spent improving clients’ campaigns. Here’s how data-driven marketing agencies use Supermetrics to automate client reporting in a nutshell.

First, you can bring omnichannel data to a reporting tool or storage. Depending on your use case and data volumes, you may feed data directly from sources into a spreadsheet or data visualization tool. That is if you’re working with a management amount of data and want access to quick data for ad-hoc reporting. 

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with a larger amount of data that can’t fit in a spreadsheet, you can first bring it into a marketing data warehouse where you have more freedom to manage and transform your data. Choosing the right tool for the right job is the first step to improving client reporting and data-driven decision-making.

Once your data is in one place, the next step is to transform it according to your needs. Let’s say you want to see an overview of paid social performance. You need to blend data from different sources. There are many ways you can approach this:

• If you’re using Google Sheets or Excel, you can use different functions, like LOOKUP, to merge data.
• Looker Studio offers a simple data blending option, but beware of the limitations of data blending in Looker Studio. For example, you can’t blend more than five sources.
• If you’re using a data warehouse to store data, you can perform union and join on your data using SQL.
• Supermetrics Marketing Intelligence Cloud has a user-friendly UI and scalable way for data blending. It’s great for marketers who aren’t familiar with the join logic.

Next is putting everything together in a shareable and informative dashboard. Not all clients are into the behind-the-scenes of managing and manipulating data (unless they have great data literacy), but turning numbers into charts and graphs helps them follow campaign results and see the value of your services.

Use case 3: Ad spend tracking and budget pacing

Automating ad spend tracking helps you manage your budget effectively. First, you can use Supermetrics to bring data from different paid channels into Google Sheets. If you’re using Marketing Intelligence Cloud, you can blend paid ad data directly within the Supermetrics platform. Otherwise, you can do that manually in your Google Sheets.

Having one tab for one channel is better than pulling spending data from different platforms into one sheet. Then, you can set up your budget tracker in a separate sheet. 

Once you have your spend data, use Google Sheets functions and formulas to create custom metrics, such as:

• Month lapse
• Spent of monthly budget
• Projected monthly spend
• Project budget attainment
• Expected 7-day budget pace
• Current 7-day pace
• Yesterday’s pace
• Expected daily pace

When you’re done with setting up your budget tracker, you can use Supermetrics to set up conditional alerts for specific metrics. For example, if your expected 7-day budget pace is greater than or less than a certain threshold, you’ll receive an alert through email.

Use case 4: Creative testing and monitoring

Creative testing often involves rapidly launching new assets and pruning poor-performing campaigns. Since performance data is scattered across different views in ad platforms—campaign, ad set, ad—it’s hard to quickly see what’s happening with your creatives.

With Supermetrics, you can consolidate creative data into one single report. You can pull the creative thumbnails with all the copy and performance data. Additionally, you can use conditional formatting to build a heatmap to make it easy to quickly identify high and low-performing creative.

Pro tip: Different metrics show conflicting results. For example, optimizing for the cheapest cost per view (CPV) may not necessarily lead to the best completion rates or click-through rates (CTR). That’s why you need to define campaign goals and choose the appropriate metrics to optimize.

Use case 5: Campaign-level reporting with Custom Fields

Something you can only do with Supermetrics is using Custom Fields to categorize and group data according to specific criteria—platforms, geos, audience segments, etc.

Typically, your campaign name includes details about your audience, goal, and geo. For example, Video_Brand_Reach_US. You can use Custom Fields to extract and group campaigns by geo to identify which market performs the best.

This helps you analyze performance at a higher level rather than looking at each campaign individually. Additionally, you can drill down into the data to see how specific regions or platforms are performing better.

Keeping the wheels turning smoothly

As your agency grows and acquires more clients, you’ll need to improve your operation to make sure the collaboration with your clients runs smoothly—whether it’s managing different ad accounts and credentials or preventing dashboards from crashing.

Use case 6: Streamlining data sources login sharing

Shared connections allow you to connect to a data source once and make that connection accessible to anyone on your team who needs access. This means that team members won’t have to log in to marketing platforms using their own credentials, improving their efficiency and collaboration.

For a client project that involves multiple departments—SEO, content marketing, and PPC— shared connections allow all departments to access the necessary data sources. It makes it easy to onboard new clients since you can share an authentication link and ask your clients to log in to the platform they’re using. This way, no credentials need to be exchanged via emails or other communication channels, keeping your client’s data safe. 

Managing all the connections in one place ensures that all team members are working with the same data, facilitating better coordination and more integrated strategies.

Additionally, by centralizing data access through shared connections, agencies can better manage and monitor who has access to sensitive client data. This enhances security and ensures compliance with data protection regulations, as there is less risk of unauthorized access. For example, if someone leaves the agency, you can easily remove their credentials.

Use case 7: Storing data in an operational marketing data warehouse

When your dashboards crash or your spreadsheets reach row limitation, it’s a sign to use a marketing data warehouse. It’s a faster and more reliable way to store and manage big data. Especially when there are issues with the platform’s APIs, your reports won’t be affected since the data is already backed up in your data warehouse.

With Supermetrics, you can bring data into any data warehouse. This will help you:

• Speed up your reports significantly
• Have more freedom to enrich and transform campaign data
• Benchmark your performance using historical data
• Add advanced analysis on top of your data warehouse, for example, trend analysis or marketing mix modeling

Let’s say your agency is fairly new to data warehousing and lacks the in-house technical resources. You can still benefit from having a data warehouse through Supermetrics Storage. It’s fully set up and maintained by Supermetrics for you. It’s designed as a turnkey solution for storing large amounts of data and to speed up dashboards and reports that would otherwise take a long time to load. The solution is for marketing teams to level up their reporting and centralize their data without needing an in-house data engineering team.

Share your favorite use cases

We hope you’ve discovered some new Supermetrics use cases today. How you’re using data and Supermetrics differs from one agency to another, and we’d love to hear from you. Join Supermetrics Community to connect with other users and share how your agency is using Supermetrics to win, grow, and retain clients. If you’re not yet a Supermetrics user but would love to improve your agency reporting, start a 14-day free trial.