How VodafoneZiggo migrated to Supermetrics for improved data management and marketing efficiency

VodafoneZiggo is a Dutch company offering communication and entertainment services to consumers and businesses. We sat down with Mick van Jaarsvelt, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, to uncover their journey with marketing data and reporting. Mick oversees the performance team’s data architecture and reporting processes, and enables the team to leverage data for optimal performance.

The performance marketing team is responsible for new customer acquisition and retention. Their most important KPI is CPO (Cost-per-Order), which covers both online and offline purchases.

Challenges with data access and inefficient reporting processes

When Mick joined VodafoneZiggo, the team had a reporting tool in place that didn’t cover all of their reporting use cases. They had started using Supermetrics for Google Sheets alongside the solution to gain flexibility.

The most notable data challenges the team experienced were:

• Inefficient reporting processes: Despite having a reporting tool, the team was spending a significant amount of time collecting, transforming, and piecing data together.
• Lack of flexibility and autonomy: The team couldn’t easily add new channels or fields, or change data in reports. All changes had to go through a dedicated platform specialist with the required edits rights, creating unnecessary dependency.
• Limited access to historical data: The cost of the tool was based on the amount of data reported through the platform, which was significant. The team had to confine themselves to one and a half years of data to limit costs.
• Unsustainable data storage: Storing data in Google Sheets was no longer sustainable. Mick recognized the potential benefits of storing marketing data in a data warehouse.
• Barriers to data access: Access to dashboards was problematic, as it required regular logins to keep the access valid. This made it difficult to share dashboards across the business.

After learning about the data transformation capabilities of the Marketing Intelligence Platform, Mick initiated discussions with Supermetrics.

Migrating to Supermetrics

The goals for the migration were to get more value from marketing data, gain autonomy and flexibility, and reduce data management costs.

According to Mick, “The initial setup of basic dashboards took more than a year and required effort from multiple teams within the organization. The platform wasn’t flexible enough to accommodate changing business demands, and only a few people had deep enough knowledge to implement changes, creating a high level of dependency.”

“With Supermetrics, we set up the data warehouse and migrated all dashboards in about two months. Since then, we’ve expanded the scope, the number of data connections, and the applications continuously”, Mick says.

Increasing reporting output and efficiency

Before Supermetrics, manual reporting processes were impacting the team’s reporting output.

“We used to have to download data from various platforms to combine online, retail, and call center sales data to report on Cost-per-Order. We’re now able to efficiently access that data and track our key KPIs in close to real-time”, Mick says.

“In the past, there were instances where we had to say no to delivering one-off reports because the time investment wasn’t justified. Now, with easy access to our data, we can deliver much more flexibly”, Mick says.

With Supermetrics, the team has access to more granular data faster. They can compare date ranges, add channels, and refresh reports when they want to without manual data pulls.

Storing data in BigQuery

The rest of the business was already using BigQuery to store data, but marketing data hadn’t been included prior to the migration to Supermetrics.

With BigQuery, the team now has access to historical data beyond platform limitations (for example GA4 stores historical data for only fourteen months). This has enabled year-over-year performance comparisons across all channels.

The team also benefits from lighting-fast Looker Studio reports as the data is pulled directly from the warehouse.

Enabling the team with new reporting capabilities

VodafoneZiggo’s entire reporting suite is now built on the automated data collection and transformation features of the Marketing Intelligence Platform.

According to Mick, custom fields and data blending have been integral in providing the team with new reporting capabilities.

Blending cross-channel data

The data blending feature automatically standardizes and maps fields across channels, no matter if it’s “cost”, “spend” or “total spent” you’re comparing. VodafoneZiggo uses the data blending feature to blend data across paid channels to get a unified view of marketing performance.

Creative performance evaluation with custom fields

“We use custom fields for cleaning, mapping and transforming our data. One area where it’s had a big impact is creative evaluations”, Mick says.

Previously, slow and manual processes limited the team to mid- or post-campaign creative reporting. The team had difficulty managing stakeholders who wanted regular updates on the best-performing creative variations.

Supermetrics automated the flow of creative-level data. “Now we can refresh the creative data everyday if we want to. The barriers to reporting were completely removed”, Mick says.

Custom fields normalize creative names and solve the problem of naming conventions not matching across platforms. The team can then link the creative data with conversions in GA4.

A well-oiled reporting engine

Reporting used to be a race against the clock to deliver numbers to all key stakeholders on time. With automated reporting leaving more time for analysis, the performance team can come into stakeholder meetings prepared with answers.

According to Mick, the team of 10 now saves over 30 hours on weekly recurring reporting with Supermetrics.

What matters most is how efficient reporting impacts the business. Making faster decisions based on accurate and more granular data is what makes VodafoneZiggo’s reporting engine powerful.