Supermetrics for performance marketing: 8 ways to overcome data challenges and drive better ROAS

Performance marketing is all about driving results—sales, leads, sign-ups, and more— as cost-efficiently as possible. When you get it right, you're spending your budget, no more or less, on the most effective ads.

It's not an easy job, and you can make things even harder for yourself by ignoring a few common data challenges.

A better alternative? Turn your precious data into your best ally in performance marketing optimization.

Let's cover the most common data and reporting headaches and explore ways to overcome them with Supermetrics.

Challenge 1: You're not comfortable with using data

Most performance marketers come from campaign-focused backgrounds. You know how to write ad copy, fine-tune targeting, and juggle multiple platforms.

But spreadsheets? Data models? Attribution logic? That's where many of us develop a sudden sweat. I've been there, too.

Because you're reading an article about data challenges in performance marketing, you should be more or less ready for a reality check:

The truth is that performance marketing today demands more data fluency than ever before. Whether you're optimizing search campaigns, running ecommerce retargeting, or handling B2B lead gen, you're expected to back up your decisions with numbers.

Before, maybe you could get away with the odd request to a data-savvy colleague, or manual reporting. But if you're serious about performance marketing, you'll eventually need to learn to love the data side of the work. Or at least to live with it.

Use case 1: Make data accessible to marketers regardless of data skills

There's no way around it: you'll need to get your hands dirty with data.

Fortunately, you don't need to be a trained data scientist, but more like a data-ready explorer who works like a data scientist.

Additional resource: 8 data principles you should apply for marketing

A good place to start is to understand your own data:

• where it comes from
• what it means
• what its limitations are

Another element in getting more comfortable with data is to have confidence-boosting tools connected to your daily analysis, reporting, and optimization workflows.

Supermetrics was essentially built for just this. The point-and-click interface makes it easy to choose exactly what you need without combing through rows of raw data.

With Supermetrics, you can:

• Fetch and combine relevant performance marketing data from all of your data sources
• Automate your spreadsheet reports to update and send notifications
• Speed up performance marketing optimization

For those who are fairly new to building reports, you can get started immediately with features like suggested queries or prebuilt templates.

A few clicks, and you're already wasting less time on painful manual tasks. Suddenly, the data part of the job doesn't feel so daunting anymore.

Challenge 2: You're dealing with siloed data

Maybe your data skills aren't slowing you down. But I bet data siloes and the sheer volume of data are making you gasp every now and then. After all, marketers are dealing with 230% more data compared to 2020.

Performance marketing data lives across dozens of platforms. To make it worse, each has its own naming conventions, attribution windows, and metric overload. From Google Ads to Meta, LinkedIn to HubSpot, GA4 to your CRM, the variety of sources makes it nearly impossible to get a consistent, trustworthy view of what's working.

It doesn’t help that every platform offers hundreds of metrics and dimensions. Most of them are useful, too. But when creating reports or analyzing campaigns, you often need only a few of them, and the rest can become distracting noise.

Stitching together screenshots, manually exporting CSVs, and copy-pasting views from platform dashboards. Only to realize the picture still doesn’t add up.

Demolish your data siloes: Take this mini course and learn to build your own marketing data warehouse.

Use case 2: Centralize your performance marketing data

You simply can’t optimize performance marketing if the data is all over the place. The answer to this challenge is integrated and reliable marketing data, living peacefully in one place.

With Supermetrics, you can centralize all your data in a data warehouse, data lake, or database of your choice. Using features like Custom Fields, you can make sure that the data from the sources follows your naming convention and structure before adding it to your data warehouse.

Alternatively, for teams who don’t have the technical resources and expertise to set up a full-blown data warehouse, you can take advantage of Supermetrics Storage.

Challenge 3: Time-consuming and error-prone reporting

Up to a certain point, manual reporting might seem manageable.

A little copy-paste here, a dashboard screenshot there. Before you know it, you’re drowning in repetitive tasks, fixing broken spreadsheets, or even rebuilding reports from scratch. Yikes.

As if the time-consuming manual work wasn’t enough, it also brings mistakes, which are the number one thing to avoid for any performance marketer. How will you ever optimize if your data is compromised?

This challenge is particularly painful for agency marketers. Every client wants something slightly different, and without a standardized system, your team ends up duplicating effort, introducing errors, and wasting valuable time that should go toward improving campaign results.

Use case 3: Scaling client reporting

Agency teams waste tons of time reinventing the reporting wheel for each client. A smarter approach is to build scalable reporting systems using templates, shared data sources, and automated delivery.

Here’s one powerful way to approach these without fear of losing your mind in the process:

1. Create a master Looker Studio template that includes key metrics (e.g. spend, CTR, conversions) with customizable filters by platform or campaign type.
2. Use Supermetrics’ shared data sources so you don’t need to reconfigure connectors for each new client.
3. Let clients authenticate their own data sources, removing access requests and streamlining onboarding.
4. Automate email delivery or Slack sharing of weekly or monthly dashboards, so reporting becomes a background task.

This setup means you can onboard new clients quickly, reduce manual work, and minimize reporting errors, while still delivering reports tailored to each client’s needs.

Check out a real-life example of how Web Profits, a growth marketing agency, created custom reports for every single client.

Challenge 4: Difficulty proving ROI and optimizing budgets

You’ve launched the campaigns, optimized the targeting, and fine-tuned the creatives, what’s missing? Time to show the impact.

Proving ROI across multiple channels and touchpoints is no small feat, especially in B2B, where long buying cycles and fragmented data make attribution feel more like guesswork than analysis.

Even in ecommerce, where the data is abundant and more direct, it’s easy to lose track of what’s driving revenue and what’s just accumulating ad spend.

Then there’s budget pacing. The silent killer of performance marketing efficiency. Overspend can tank your customer acquisition cost (CAC), underspend means missed growth (and smaller budgets in the future). Without real-time visibility to ad spend, you’re left reacting to problems after they’ve already done damage.

Use case 4: Ad spend tracking across platforms

When your ad budget is spread across multiple platforms, such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, it’s easy to lose track of how much you’ve spent, how fast you’re spending it, and whether you’re on pace to meet (or overshoot) your monthly targets.

You don’t want that. A simple way to stay in control is to build a real-time ad spend tracking dashboard.

Get this budget pacing template for Google Sheets >>

Here’s how you can tackle it with Supermetrics:

1. Pull daily spend data from all your ad platforms into one central view using Supermetrics.
2. Set monthly or campaign-level spend targets in a static column or sheet.
3. Use spreadsheet formulas or conditional formatting to highlight over/underspend by channel.

Bonus: Add automated email or Slack alerts when certain thresholds are hit.

A setup like this helps you catch pacing issues before they snowball, so you can reallocate budget in time to make an impact, rather than explaining overspend after the fact.

Ideally, your budget pacing dashboard should include 11 metrics to keep you on track:

• Month-to-date spend
• Month lapsed
• Spent of monthly budget
• Projected monthly spend
• Projected budget attainment
• Spend last 7 days
• Expected 7-day budget pace
• Current 7-day pace
• Spend yesterday
• Expected daily pace
• Yesterday’s pace

Find out more best practices and a cheat sheet for ad spend tracking in this guide.

Use case 5: Analyzing costs, performance, and channels in one view

Getting budget pacing right is one thing, but proving ROI also means showing where your money works best. If you’re juggling multiple paid channels, you need a clear view of how spend aligns with performance across all of them.

This paid channel mix template for Looker Studio is a great starting point.

It’s easy to work with, even if you’re not the most data-savvy person in the team. After setting up your dashboard, you’ll be able to dig up clear-cut answers to questions like:

• How's the cost split between channels?
• Which channel had the lowest CPC?
• Which paid media channel performed the best last month?
• How many times were my ads clicked?
• Which channel drove the most website conversions?
• Which channel got the most impressions from the ads?

Needless to say, this kind of analysis helps you go beyond isolated platform reports and start comparing performance at the strategic level.

Use case 6: Creative testing and optimization

You’ve probably been told to “test more creatives.” And sure, you do your best—trying out different headlines, visuals, or formats. But let’s be honest: without a clear process, creative testing can quickly turn into a lot of guessing dressed up as optimization.

What you really need is an ad creative testing and optimization process to determine what works and what doesn't.

And what do you know, Supermetrics can help you do exactly that.

• Pull performance data for each creative from platforms like Meta and Google Ads
• Combine it with GA4 and CRM data to connect engagement with real business outcomes
• Segment results by audience, placement, or asset to clearly point at what’s driving results
• Automate your testing dashboards in Looker Studio or Google Sheets to track everything effortlessly

You’ll then officially be running structured experiments—and getting smarter with every iteration.

Use case 7: Building last-click attribution

Multi-touch attribution can feel ideal in theory, but it’s often messy, inconsistent, or downright inaccessible in real-world reporting workflows.

For practical day-to-day optimization, especially for bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) campaigns, last-click attribution can offer a clean and stable view into which ads are actually converting.

Get this last-click attribution template for Google Sheets >>

Here’s how to apply it with Supermetrics:

1. Focus on last-click metrics when optimizing BOFU campaigns, like retargeting ads, branded search, or limited-time offers.
2. Use Supermetrics to pull last-click conversion data directly from your ad platforms or analytics tools (e.g., GA4).
3. Build reports or dashboards that segment last-click conversions by channel, campaign, or asset, so you can quickly spot what’s closing the deal.
4. Combine this with pacing data to prioritize spend on high-ROI tactics at the bottom of the funnel.

Challenge 5: Growing complexity and less control in ad platforms

Ok, one more thing on the data side that’s likely making performance marketing optimization a bit difficult.

You’ve probably noticed that different ad platforms may have different ways to name their metrics, for example, cost vs. spend, and/or different recommendations for naming conventions. Cleaning up all these fields can be quite manual, especially if you’re working with data from multiple platforms

Use case 8: Managing campaign naming convention

Using Custom Fields in the Supermetrics’ Marketing Intelligence Platform, you can break down campaign names into individual components for more detailed insights. For example, separating elements like "product category" or "country" allows you to identify which products or regions are generating the highest conversion rates.

Additional resources: Campaign naming conventions: The key to cleaner and reliable reporting [template included]