How PlanetArt reduced reporting by 20 hours a week and increased ROI with Supermetrics

PlanetArt is a house of ecommerce brands with various websites and mobile applications. They offer personalized gifting, custom photo printing, and other products and services to help customers preserve life's important moments.

Ryan Hubbard, Senior Business Intelligence Analyst at PlanetArt, has been using Supermetrics to fuel their media mix modeling (MMM) to optimize marketing spend and increase return on investment (ROI) across its diverse brands.

Wanting to move beyond last-click attribution

PlanetArt is managing multiple brands with distinct marketing needs. They use a mix of online and offline advertising channels, like paid search, paid social, direct mail catalogs, and podcast ads, to drive customer acquisition and retention.

The team had a limited view of which channels actually drove sales for two reasons. First, they had a lot of scattered data across 60 different brands in various channels. When Ryan first started, he had to manually copy the results from Excel and compile them into a centralized report. This was a very cumbersome process.

Second, they were looking at traditional last-click attribution models. The problem with last-click attribution is that it tends to overemphasize paid search, ignoring the impact of other touchpoints that may have influenced the sale before the final click. This resulted in:

• Misattribution of online sales: Offline marketing channels like catalogs or podcasts couldn't receive proper credit for influencing online purchases.
• Inefficient budget allocation: It was difficult to assess channel effectiveness, which led to the possibility of wasted marketing spend.
• Limited campaign optimization: It was challenging to optimize campaigns for maximum ROI without a clear understanding of each channel's true impact.

Using Supermetrics to enable MMM

Ryan wanted to find a better way to look at attribution. He started building an MMM model.

Supermetrics was chosen to streamline marketing data into one location, acting as the backbone for their MMM implementation. This way, they could:

• Automate data collection: PlanetArt uses Supermetrics to automatically move data from various advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, and Bing Ads, into an Amazon S3 bucket. This eliminates manual data collection, saving significant time and resources.
• Create a centralized data repository: The advertising data is then combined with internal data from Amazon Redshift, such as order data and estimated arrival dates for direct mail catalogs. This creates a centralized data repository for comprehensive analysis.
• Blend data: PlanetArt uses Supermetrics' data blending capabilities to combine ad impressions and spend data with internal order and revenue data. This helps ensure online sales are credited to the appropriate marketing touchpoints, including offline channels.
• Create better monitoring: PlanetArt has set up alerts if anything out-of-the-ordinary happens. This is especially important in business-critical seasons, such as peak, to prevent disruptions in ad campaigns.

The power of insights: how Supermetrics & MMM increased ROI

With Supermetrics providing clean and centralized data, PlanetArt leverages MMM to gain deeper marketing insights. They've already noticed some tangible results:

• Saving time and labor costs: Automating data collection with Supermetrics has freed up valuable resources previously spent on manual data collection. Ryan estimates that he used to spend about 20 hours on manual reporting, and now that process is fully automated.
• Identifying true channel impact: PlanetArt can now better assess the effectiveness of each marketing channel, including offline efforts, on customer acquisition and retention.
• Faster insights and optimization: Getting data faster to their internal systems has allowed Ryan and the team to iterate more on their marketing campaigns.
• Better budget allocations: They've been able to shift marketing spend to more effective channels, improving their ROI.
• Improved ROI & profitability: Optimizing budget allocation based on MMM insights has led to a significant increase in ROI, even with potentially reduced overall marketing spend.

Alerts have also become a must in a seasonal business like PlanetArt's. They help catch errors that might impact business results.

Ryan continues, "I hate to think if an error happened on a Black Friday in a seasonal business like ours, and nobody would catch it because we didn't have alerts or the data in our internal tools. Those are the types of mistakes that cost businesses millions of dollars. So we're glad to see Supermetrics help us better monitor our results."

This case study shows how companies can use Supermetrics to fuel their MMM. It can lead to optimized budget allocation, refined campaign strategies, and, ultimately, significant ROI improvements.

Want to see what Supermetrics can do for you? Get a free demo today.

If you want to know more about PlanetArt's case, check out the full story from the Marketing Intelligence Show.