How Data Speaks scaled its technology with Supermetrics and grew to over 100 customers

Data Speaks is an attribution platform that helps ecommerce brands understand the return on investment (ROI) of every marketing channel. We caught up with Zeke Camusio, CEO of Data Speaks, to talk about impact-based attribution and how Data Speaks uses Supermetrics to scale their technology business.

Data Speaks' foundation relies on data, and it trusts Supermetrics to feed all their customers’ data into one place, BigQuery. This has allowed Data Speaks to scale their business faster without additional headcount.

Building a machine learning model to solve the attribution mystery

Attribution is one of the biggest headaches for marketing professionals all over the world. You need to effectively allocate your budget, but at the same time, it's difficult to know which campaigns and channels are driving the best ROI.

Marketers often rely on platform-reported revenue or return on ad spend (ROAS). But, that data is based on a flawed assumption: that if you saw an ad for something you bought, the ad drove the sale. That's simply not true. Zeke explains, "If your ice cream shop gets 80 customers daily, which increases to 100 when you hire someone to hold a sign outside, the promoter drove 20 incremental sales, even if 100 people saw the sign."

For most digital businesses, advertising is one of their biggest expenses. Zeke understood the magnitude of being unable to track its ROI and set on a mission to solve this problem for digital marketers. Along with a team of fellow machine learning engineers from Stanford and MIT, he built an attribution platform that allows marketers to predict the expected return of every dollar they spend on ads so they can make informed decisions with confidence.

The tool has a measuring device in all 50 states in the US and it helps ask the question: as you increase and decrease advertising spend in one state, in all these campaigns and channels, what happens to your sales in that state?

In addition, Data Speaks also makes predictions about what will happen the next day. It compares the new data against the predictions and finally adjusts the predictions as the business grows and the world evolves. While one person could do this manually for a few accounts, Zeke knew the only way to scale his business would be to use a tool like Supermetrics to automate all of his customers' data into a single location.

How Data Speaks found reliability, flexibility, and affordability with Supermetrics

Data Speaks started by connecting 3-4 customers with the Supermetrics for Google Sheets solution. This helped Data Speaks automatically gather the data they needed to build their machine-learning models.

But they quickly outgrew Google Sheets and needed a more robust product. This is when Data Speaks moved to Supermetrics for BigQuery.

Zeke also tried Fivetran and Airbyte but said they couldn't match Supermetrics' value. When choosing his ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool, Zeke was looking for three main things:

1. Reliability: How well the tool recognized errors and was able to backfill data without needing additional engineering resources.
   • Transfers might not always work for a number of reasons. What Zeke liked about Supermetrics was the automatic backfills whenever an error occurred.
   • Supermetrics allows users to define their own look-back windows that prevent 1 day of outage resulting in missing data.
2. Flexibility: How freely could Zeke choose what data to bring into his data warehouse so that it would not slow down queries or use a tremendous amount of unnecessary data.
   • Zeke found that with Supermetrics, he could build his own queries with the Table Manager, using only the metrics and dimensions he needed. He can quickly pull everything to BigQuery and clean and prep the data before it goes to the machine learning models.
3. Pricing: Zeke needed a pricing model that made sense for his business to scale. Since he couldn't see the amount of data a customer had before onboarding them, it was impossible to build a pricing plan that made sense for him and the customer.
   • What Zeke loved about Supermetrics was the flat and transparent pricing model. Unlike some competitors, there are no surprises, and Supermetrics doesn't charge by usage.

Data Speaks scales to 100+ customers with Supermetrics

Using Supermetrics has allowed Data Speaks to scale to more than 100 customers without increasing headcount. Zeke was able to do this by relying on Supermetrics to do the heavy data lifting and API management so he could focus on building more comprehensive machine learning models.

Spending more time on these models has given Data Speaks' customers a whopping 20-40% increase in revenue per ad dollar spent. Zeke explains, "We usually find that most brands' media budget allocation is 20-40% suboptimal. That means that by properly allocating the budget in the most optimal way, they can get 20-40% more revenue without increasing that spend, just by putting their money where it's yielding the best results."

Zeke also estimates that Supermetrics has helped save at least one data engineering resource from manually exporting and importing customer data, which he estimates to be about a 6X return on investment.

Want to see what Supermetrics can do for you? Start a free trial or get a free demo today.

If you want to know more about how Data Speaks uses impact-based attribution to measure and improve advertising ROI, check out our full conversation with Zeke Camusio from the Marketing Intelligence Show.