How Atomic 212 automated its reporting and delivers clients a faster time-to-insight

Atomic 212 is Australia’s largest independent agency with 150 employees spread across Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin and Brisbane. The agency operates in Australia and Asia-Pacific as their key markets. Atomic 212 offers a range of services to its clients, including traditional and digital media planning and buying, as well as data and analytics services.

We spoke to Will Ridley, Digital Client Lead at Atomic 212, about their journey with reporting and Supermetrics.

Manual reporting became a burden for Atomic 212

Before working with a reporting partner, Atomic 212 spent a significant portion of time on manual reporting. The search for insights included working with manual data dumps directly out of ad platforms. Repetitive reporting tasks, such as weekly performance reviews, were among the biggest pain points.

The reporting workflow involved navigating to each ad platform, segmenting a report with the required dimensions and metrics, downloading it as a CSV, and manually manipulating it in Excel. Reporting would take hours of time each week, and create backlogs in deliverables.

According to Will, "One of the biggest issues was that if you needed to drill down further into something based on a finding from the first CSV, you'd have to repeat the whole process again with the new drill downs you wanted. Our process lacked modularity and wasn't dynamic at all.” 

“Manual reporting was manageable when our agency was still smaller, but as we grew, the need for automation became imminent”, Will recalls. “We came to a point where the old ways of working weren’t cutting it anymore, and we had to take steps to overhaul our reporting practices.“

Automating Atomic 212’s client reporting

Atomic 212 now uses Supermetrics for Google Sheets to manage their reporting ecosystem.

The key requirements for a data pipeline provider were connector coverage, seamless integration, ease of use, and price. According to Will, "Ease-of-use was one of our key requirements for a reporting partner. If you look at other providers, like Funnel, they're harder for teams to learn."

"We found Supermetrics was easy and intuitive to implement. An important part of the onboarding was upskilling and educating the team," Will says. Atomic 212 now has standardized templates and best practices for reporting with Supermetrics.

"What made the biggest difference for us was anticipating what kind of data or insight we might need in the future and coming up with contingencies for those scenarios by pulling data we might need at the same time as data we need right now. Because we didn’t know what we didn’t know, giving ourselves dimension and data buffers did away with the need for repeated data drill-downs”, Will says.

Will says he finds Supermetrics especially useful for exploring and researching new client accounts. "Supermetrics is great for pulling the data from all of their marketing channels in a standardized way that allows us to quickly understand what's happening in the accounts," he adds.

In addition to moving data automatically to Google Sheets, Supermetrics also removes some of the manual work that often goes into making data usable. “One of the best things about Supermetrics is how it standardizes certain metrics. For example, I can pull in data from different sources, and I know the date formats will match in Google Sheets. I don’t have to manually edit the data, I can instantly pivot it up and get to work.”, Will says.

Atomic 212 also leverages Supermetrics for automated creative reporting. The team is always up to date on what creatives are performing well and most importantly why. This is especially useful when they're running many creative A/B tests and want to quickly aggregate insights from them.

The agency has also explored ways to make its shopping campaigns more efficient with Supermetrics. By pulling daily product performance data from Google Analytics, the team can categorize products based on revenue. As the data updates every day, trending products will automatically get filtered into a priority category. This way, the right products are allocated more budget.

Providing clients transparency and a quick time-to-insight

Shifting the team’s mindset around reporting has benefited both the agency and its clients. Automation and standardized reporting processes have cut a significant amount of time spent on reporting. Will estimates his team saves 20 hours per week using Supermetrics.

Will finds stability the most important attribute of Supermetrics. He can open up any report and know it works and is up to date. "I don't have time to constantly troubleshoot our reports, and with Supermetrics there's no need. I can go to any client meeting and be confident about the numbers," Will says.

With data instantly accessible, Will's team now spends more time putting that data into action. "At the end of the day, if insights aren't actionable, what difference do they make? We need to be doing things based on the findings instead of spending time pulling the same report every week.”

Clients have also noted the fast time-to-insight Atomic 212 now delivers. The team has received positive feedback about quick turnaround times.

Supermetrics also provides Atomic 212’s clients with a new layer of transparency. Many of the reports are shared with clients directly, meaning they have access to fresh data every day at the same time the agency does. If a client needs any changes to a dashboard, Will’s team can quickly take care of any requests.

If you’re interested in making reporting your competitive advantage like Atomic 212 did, start your 14-day free trial of Supermetrics.