Jacaranda Finance: Enabling full-funnel reporting through automated data integration whilst reducing reporting time by 95%

Jacaranda Finance is one of the fastest growing consumer lending Fintech companies in Australia. Jacaranda gives secured and unsecured personal loans to consumers with a broad range of risk profiles. They do this 100% online with the simplicity, speed, and convenience that today’s digitally-savvy consumers demand while adhering to their responsible lending obligations.

Nick Yang is Jacaranda’s Head of Marketing, and Henry Leung is the Optimization Owner (SEO & CRO). Their day-to-day work involves monitoring and analyzing their paid and organic marketing activities.

The Challenge: Creating a single source of truth

Jacaranda Fiance uses many different tools and platforms for marketing. Henry alone uses multiple SEO tools, while Nick, who handles all the paid activities, runs multiple campaigns across several platforms.

“We’re running so many different campaigns across different platforms. The majority are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads. Sometimes, we also run programmatic campaigns depending on the season, and we’re also running TikTok and display ads,” Nick says.

On top of that, they also have a lot of data coming in from their internal CRM system.

All of this data was siloed and difficult to integrate centrally. As a result, the team at Jacaranda Finance had to manually pull all this data together, which essentially meant downloading multiple files, manually mapping data points, and then pulling that data together in a spreadsheet.

The Jacaranda Finance marketing team was looking for a way to connect all their siloed data into a single central location, giving them instant access to accurate data without human error while eliminating the pain of manual data collection. They also needed a solution that would help them visualize their data and populate their weekly and monthly reports without spending time preparing them every week.

Why Supermetrics

To tackle these challenges and integrate all their data, the team at Jacaranda Finance decided to go with Supermetrics as their data integration tool.

“It’s just the industry standard. Everyone’s using it, so it was a no-brainer,” Henry says.

Henry and Nick were familiar with Supermetrics as they had used it in previous jobs. Still, several of their colleagues have discussed adding Supermetrics to their analytics stack.

“Supermetrics is to data integration what Tesla is to electric vehicles. When anyone thinks about electric vehicles, they think of Tesla. When anyone thinks of marketing data connectors, they think of Supermetrics,” Nick added.

Ease of use was another key factor in Jacaranda Finance’s decision.

“The interface is easy to use and simple for everyone to set up. You don’t need a technical background. You can just connect to one data source at a time before moving to the next one. Then when you want to combine the data, the processes and settings are pretty straightforward,” Nick says.

As the Jacaranda Finance team uses many different tools and platforms for marketing and sales, it was also important they go with a solution that connects with all the platforms they’re using or planning to use in the future. When looking at data integration solutions, Nick and Henry found that Supermetrics had all the connectors they needed.

“I know a few other solutions can connect to certain platforms, but not as many as you give. As a result, we didn’t spend too much time looking into other competitors,” Nick says.

“As Henry said, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”

After completing their free trial, Nick discussed their needs with an Account Manager before going with Supermetrics.

“When the trial finished, one of Supermetrics’ Account Managers reached out to me. We quickly jumped into the call, and he fully understood my requirements and tailored and personalized the plan for us. That was good. We got what we needed,” Nick says.

The Solution: Full-funnel model

Jacaranda Finance’s main goal was to allow automated full-funnel marketing measurement in three destinations:

• Data Studio: To populate their pre-built weekly and monthly reports that they use for their stand-up meetings.
• Tableau: For visualizing and analyzing all their marketing data in dashboards.
• Slack: For everyone to easily get the data points they need and monitor performance without downloading it. This secondary connection was made with Zapier.

Nick and his team mainly pulled their data from three types of data sources: SEO platforms, SEM platforms, and their CRM.

"We started by configuring the data we needed and set up daily triggers to automatically fetch it into Google Sheets. Straightaway this saved a lot of time and eliminated human error, which can happen when doing everything manually," Nick says.

"Getting CRM data into our integration flows was a challenge in the past as we essentially had to manually map the data points in a separate spreadsheet.

"But since using Supermetrics, it's become so much easier for us to do the job and get all our data organized in Google Sheets before sending it on to other reporting and analytics tools.

"We monitor our ad spend every hour. We use Supermetrics to automatically update our Google Sheet report, and we sync that to a Slack channel.

"Every hour, we ping the Google Sheet, grab whatever the latest amount is, and then send it to Slack. This means we don't have to go back to Google Ads to check how much we've spent so far. Every hour, we just get the data into Slack straight away."

The benefits: Better data accuracy, increased productivity, and faster insights

Better data accuracy

Since using Supermetrics, the team at Jacaranda Finance has achieved better data accuracy. This is primarily down to two reasons.

Firstly, Nick and his team previously had to collect data from each individual platform’s APIs.
“We ran into issues, such as getting sampled data from Google Analytics (GA), which isn’t what we wanted. Since using Supermetrics, we’ve found that it doesn’t matter how many filters we put on— it will always pull 100% of the data. Unsampled. Which is critical for us when it comes to GA in particular,” he says.

Secondly, Supermetrics has eliminated the need for manual data collection, which is error-prone.
“We also had to pull data manually from all those platforms, and we couldn’t be sure how accurate our data was. Since using Supermetrics, there are no errors. We can rely on it to get all our data together,” Nick added.

Increased productivity

By automating their marketing data integration with Supermetrics, the Jacaranda Finance team has saved significant time on their daily and weekly reporting.

“Before, we spent a lot of time, every day, creating our daily reports. When I calculated it, we needed about one hour each morning to make those daily reports,” Nick says.

“Then we’d spend about 10 hours monthly on our monthly reports. Now, we need to spend only 30 minutes just double-checking our reports, and that’s it.

“In total, that means 250 hours saved per person, per year, which is about 95% of the time saved compared to before. That’s a huge amount, and we can spend that time on something impactful.”

Faster insights

The new data stack helps the Jacaranda Finance team reduce time-to-insight and develop a data-driven culture.

Additionally, by centralizing siloed data, the team gained better visibility into their data and performance. As a result, communication is much easier.

They’re now able to build multiple dashboards that serve different departments’ needs.

“Between all these different departments, everyone needs slightly different data. For example, the design team wants to know how certain creatives have performed in ad campaigns. Now, they don’t have to come to us whenever they have a question because they already have access to the dashboard. They can just go and check it to see the performance in real-time,” Nick says.

In addition, the Jacaranda Finance team has created multiple channels on Slack — such as management, accounting, finance, executive leadership, etc. — where they can deliver the relevant information and updates for each group of stakeholders.

For the marketing team, it also made insights, understanding, and growth opportunities more available than ever before.

“Now we get the data much quicker. As a result, we can make decisions much quicker than before. We also know the data is accurate, which gives us the confidence that our decisions are the correct ones,” Nick concludes.

If you’re looking for an easy way to centralize siloed data and get better insights like the Jacaranda Finance team, start your 14-day free trial of Supermetrics.