Garnier BBDO: saving time and improving client satisfaction with automated reporting and visual dashboards

Garnier BBDO is one of the leading marketing agencies in Costa Rica. Founded in 1921, the agency celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021. Since 1985, Garnier has been a part of BBDO, a global network of advertising agencies.

Lucas Fernandez heads the Integration and Amplification team at Garnier BBDO. His main responsibility is to make sure all the departments from technology to design and from digital media to strategy are working together. Andres Lapeira works as a Data Analyst at Omnicom Media Group and is responsible for building dashboards to different clients and client teams across the group agencies — including Garnier BBDO.

Marrying creative and data

The different teams at Garnier BBDO have been using Supermetrics for Google Sheets and Supermetrics for Data Studio since 2018.

Compared to many other agencies in Costa Rica, Garnier BBDO is among the most advanced when it comes to using data and analytics to grow their clients’ businesses.

The need to get automated reports came from coworkers who were struggling to manually compile reports for their clients. Andres says, “The team requested a reporting automation solution for their clients.”

Lucas continues, “Not many agencies in Costa Rica have a deep understanding of data. They rely more on the creative department to sell their ideas. At Garnier BBDO, we focus on not only data analytics but also teaching our customers about how to use and interpret that data. And in the beginning, we had to manually pull in the hard data to demonstrate its value to our clients.”

Before Supermetrics, many of Garnier BBDO’s client teams relied on manual reporting processes.

Andres explains, “For example, one of Lucas’ teammates had to invest a lot of time in making manual PowerPoints each week for her clients. She would go into all these different platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads and take screenshots of the data into the report.”

And as the Garnier BBDO team kept growing, manual reporting became a huge bottleneck. Lucas says, “We were growing very, very fast. We had 18 or 19 clients who expected their monthly reports on the first 10 days of the month. So we needed a method to reduce the time we spent on gathering data and creating reports.”

And that’s when Andres and Lucas started looking for a solution to automate their client-facing reports.

Automating manual processes with Supermetrics

Even before working with BBDO projects, Andres had been feeling the pain of copy/pasting cross-channel data into his reports.

Andres says, “Back in 2016, I was working at a different agency and I had to download all that data to copy/paste it into an Excel sheet and use Excel Macros. First of all, that took a lot of time but secondly, I had to be really careful to not mess up the spreadsheets. It was a difficult task to get right.”

Andres originally stumbled upon Supermetrics when he was looking for a connector that would help him bring cross-channel marketing data directly into Google Sheets. He says, “I started searching online, and quickly found Supermetrics. I also tried a different tool — I can’t even remember what it was called — but it was really bad compared to Supermetrics.”

A few months later, Andres started using Supermetrics for Google Sheets.

Lucas explains, “Before Supermetrics, putting reports together was a lot of work. Our BI department only has two people in it and they would have to extract data into Google Sheets or Excel from multiple sources like Socialbakers, Facebook page insights, and Facebook audience insights, and then process that into a single document. So we had to make three reports and merge them into one. And only then, we’d be able to interpret what happened over the period of time we were investigating. Overall, it took a lot of time.”

Saving time and improving client satisfaction with the help of Supermetrics

As for the benefits of using Supermetrics, the most notable change is the time Garnier BBDO employees are now able to dedicate to more important tasks than data gathering and report building.

Lucas says, “I would estimate that thanks to Supermetrics, one of the guys in the BI team now saves 45% of his time. Before, he had to gather all this information manually. And now, he and the rest of the team have more time to do more specific tasks for our clients.”

Lucas and Andres also agree that one of the best things about Supermetrics is the reliability of the automation.

Andres says, “For me, the best part is that we now have an automated process that actually works. Supermetrics is extremely reliable.”

Lucas continues, “I totally agree. The other good thing is that the product is really, really easy to use and so my whole team can connect data from different platforms and get really useful information out of it. Supermetrics makes all these complicated and difficult data connections seem easy.”

Lastly, the team at Garnier BBDO has also received a lot of positive feedback about their automated reports and dashboards from their clients.

Andres says, “BBDO clients are really happy with all the reporting and dashboard solutions we have implemented. They’re actually seeing the KPIs and metrics in a clearer and better way, since there’s more visual emphasis in the new reports. The PowerPoints were kind of old-school.”

Lucas agrees, “One of the greatest benefits of Supermetrics has been the client response to our reports. We can now give our clients a tool they can manage, use, and understand. Before this, they didn’t really have anything that would help them make sense of their own data.”

Lucas continues, “Here in Costa Rica, many client teams rely on their agencies for data and insights. And instead of just sending them static reports in PowerPoint, we can give them a live dashboard that they can use to analyze what’s going on with their business.”

Supermetrics has also helped the creative department at Garnier BBDO to more objectively analyze the success of their campaigns.

Lucas explains, “Instead of having an idea and thinking it’s cool, our creative department can now use data to evaluate how successful their ideas actually were. The data we connect with Supermetrics helps them understand how specific audiences received that idea, based on its performance.”