How Philips Healthcare transformed digital marketing data in just 6 months and saved 40% of analysts' time

With large volumes of digital and campaign data globally, Philips Healthcare's analytics team needed to revamp data infrastructure to provide faster, real-time insights while eliminating manual work and errors.

Led by Martina Karakoleva, Campaign Insights Manager at Philips Healthcare, the team built an automated, scalable digital data infrastructure in just six months with the help of Supermetrics. They saved time, improved the speed of insights, and created one source of truth for digital data for stakeholders globally.

The challenge: Managing a large volume of global campaigns with manual processes

Philips Healthcare's digital analysts spent countless hours manually exporting data from multiple advertising platforms to spreadsheets. This led to several issues:

• Time-consumption: Analysts dedicated several days to exporting and reconciling campaign data.
• Fragmented data: Performance data was spread across multiple platforms, limiting overall visibility.
• Possible errors: The manual handling of large datasets increased the risk of mistakes.
• Evolving requirements: Teams required more detailed reporting, deeper insights, and greater automation.

Martina explains, “We had five analysts analyzing large amounts of campaigns and data, and they spent most of their time dealing with manual data, time which they could have used to generate insights.”

Why Supermetrics?

Philips Healthcare's digital data team set out to find a solution that was fast to implement, scalable, and adaptable to the evolving business needs. They had to compare multiple solutions due to internal compliance rules. Eventually, they decided to go with Supermetrics for the following reasons:

• Ease of implementation: Supermetrics' business model and how data pipelines work were easy to understand.
• Legal compliance: Supermetrics did not require storing data externally, addressing Philips' privacy concerns.
• Flexibility: The Supermetrics team provided guidance and support during implementation, allowing for quick scaling, easy onboarding of new data sources, and adaptability to changing campaign needs.

The solution: Building a flexible data infrastructure in just 6 months

The marketing analytics team had various goals for the project. They focused on automating data collection, establishing global consistency, and creating a scalable model to onboard new data sources seamlessly. Supermetrics was a core component of this transformation, powering various steps of the process:

1. Centralizing data in a new data lake

To solve the problem of scattered and manually collected data, the team automated data collection to a centralized data lake to unify digital performance data. With Supermetrics' automated pipelines, key performance metrics were pulled directly from each platform and automatically fed into the data lake. The data was then cleaned, structured, and made ready for analysis using automated rules.

This approach saved 40% of analysts' time, significantly reduced manual errors, and created a single source of truth that allowed stakeholders to access real-time and faster insights.

2. Naming conventions structure as a key enabler for the success for consistent data mapping

The team already had standardized naming conventions in place when they adopted Supermetrics. This enabled them to automate the extraction and structuring of key campaign data, ensuring consistency and fast scalability of the solution.

“Our naming conventions were key to scalability. Supermetrics pipelines automatically extracted key information from campaign names, ensuring consistent mapping and analysis.” Martina explains.

3. Designing a flexible, scalable data model

The new data model was flexible and could easily adapt to changes like platform updates, data structure changes, or onboarding new data sources. Supermetrics pipelines, combined with standardized metadata from the naming conventions allowed the system to scale quickly.

5. Real-time dashboards for strategic and operational insights

Martina’s team created two levels of dashboards for their internal teams: operational and strategic. Both types are fueled by data from Supermetrics. The operational dashboards use the plug-in Supermetrics templates, which made the process faster rather than creating the dashboards from scratch. Supermetrics automatically feeds cleaned and structured data into the real-time Looker Studio templates. Operational teams use Looker Studio to monitor day-to-day performance metrics per channel.

The strategic dashboards are built internally and used for accessing cross-channel reports to make data-driven decisions.

Measurable impact on time, costs, and performance

With the help of Supermetrics, the marketing data team delivered a fully functional, scalable data infrastructure in just six months. The project led to significant improvements across the board and gained positive attention within the organization.

Saving time and reducing costs with Supermetrics plug-and-play solutions

Using Supermetrics helped Philips Healthcare save valuable resources. Now, they don’t have to build and maintain connectors internally and worry about the impact and costs of API changes. This means they’re able to use analyst and engineering resources more efficiently.

40% less time in manual work and more powerful insights

Automating data collection and reducing manual processes freed up 40% of analysts’ time, allowing them to focus on insights and optimizations.

One source of truth

Philips Healthcare combined digital marketing and sales data into one view for the first time, giving teams a clear, holistic understanding of digital & campaign performance across regions. While the project is still ongoing, the team has already centralized 80% of their digital data.

Evolving the role of analysts

By freeing up 40% of analysts' time, the team shifted from manual data extraction to high-value insights generation. Instead of being data providers, analysts became trusted experts—helping marketing teams optimize campaigns and make strategic, data-driven decisions faster.

When Philips’ analytics team embarked on this digital data project, they believed it would be a stand-alone solution to their data challenge. But, the success of the initiative revealed that it was only the beginning of a broader data transformation. As the project scaled, it opened new possibilities for optimizing marketing performance and expanding insights across regions.

Want to hear more about Philips Healthcare’s success story? Listen to our episode with Martina Karakoleva on The Marketing Intelligence Show.