Accenture Interactive: Managing clients’ multi-million dollar media budgets & streamlining campaign analytics with Supermetrics

Accenture Interactive is a global marketing agency that designs, builds, communicates, and runs customer experience programs for their clients around the world.

Digital Media Specialists Patrick Siki and Alexandre Piron work at the agency’s Montreal office. In close collaboration with Accenture Interactive’s dashboarding team, they run, optimize, and report on their clients’ multi-million dollar media campaigns across search, display, programmatic, and video advertising.

Accenture Interactive’s marketing reporting challenge

Alex and Pat work together on the account of a Fortune 250 company. With an annual media budget in millions of dollars and channels ranging from Google Campaign Manager to Google Search Ads 360, and from Google Display & Video 360 to Facebook Ads, keeping track of the client’s total ad spend and conversions is not exactly an easy feat.

Alex says, “Because we have such a big media budget, we end up with a huge amount of data. Manually pulling this into a spreadsheet was a huge pain and it took our 3-person team an hour and a half each morning. And that was on a good day when there weren’t any issues.”

The manual process of copy/pasting data from each media platforms’ UI into a spreadsheet was also prone to errors.

Pat says, “Logging into each platform to manually pull the data we needed was slow in itself but what made the process even slower was when someone accidentally copied a number into the wrong cell. The team sometimes had to spend a full day on figuring out where the mistake was.”

Pat continues, “Our first goal was to better manage budget pacing, because the first and the last week of each month tend to spend more than other weeks. There’s also some daily variation between certain weekdays and weekends, which we need to optimize for.”

Pat and Alex also quickly noticed that a large ad spend warrants better client reporting.

Alex explains, “We send the client a weekly report where they can quickly see the results for the past week in terms of ad spend and conversions across different channels.”

The evolution of Accenture Interactive’s reporting process

Pat and Alex first started using Supermetrics at a Canadian agency called Konversion, which was later acquired by Accenture Interactive.

As they gradually transitioned from the small independent agency to serving bigger and bigger clients under the Accenture umbrella, their client reporting process also went through an evolution.

Phase 1: Reporting automation with Supermetrics for Google Sheets

At Konversion, Alex and Pat were working with smaller clients, which meant smaller budgets and a limited volume of data.

To streamline their clients’ budget pacing and reporting with automated data transfers, they chose Supermetrics for Google Sheets.

Alex says, “We chose Supermetrics because it’s a great tool that’s easy for anyone to use. Whatever you want to do in a spreadsheet, you can do with Supermetrics. Just add any formulas and run any queries that you normally would, but without having to worry about getting the right data into the spreadsheet first.”

He continues, “The way I see it, Supermetrics is the best tool for connecting data from different platforms. It’s versatile because it allows you to choose where you want to move your data. I happen to like spreadsheets but we were also considering using Google Data Studio at one point, and it’s great that I would’ve been able to use Supermetrics for that, too.”

With Supermetrics for Google Sheets, Alex was able to build a complex logic that helped the team manage the clients reporting.

However, as Alex and Pat transitioned fully into Accenture Interactive and started working for the large energy company, they quickly realized that their trusted Google Sheets set up would quickly burst from its seams.

Phase 2: Transfering the existing reporting logic into Tableau

Pat explains, ”When we took the Fortune 250 company’s project, we had already become Accenture Interactive’s media team. This meant that we could focus on running and optimizing the campaigns, while the dashboarding team would take over the dashboards.”

Luckily, though, the reporting logic that Alex had perfected in Google Sheets was not wasted.

Alex says, “While Google Sheets wasn’t able to ingest the huge volume of data we’re generating for the client, the analytics team has been able to use the same logic for budget pacing in Tableau. We’re now working closely with them to help optimize and finetune the new system.”
The result is an automated client reporting process that satisfies stakeholder needs with high-level data.

Pat adds, “As we got the Tableau dashboard up and running, we were able to focus on improving our internal reporting, which helps us better optimize our campaigns.”

Phase 3: Moving internal reporting to Google Sheets with Supermetrics

Instead of kissing Supermetrics goodbye, the media team at Accenture Interactive decided to turn their trusted Google Sheet into an internal campaign monitoring and optimization tool.

Alex says, “After moving our high-level client reports into Tableau, we decided to repurpose the Google Sheet into an internal report. We added more metrics, breakdowns, and variations to help the team better optimize the campaigns.”

The internal report has been broken down into smaller pieces to avoid any data limitations, allowing the team to access granular data from each advertising platform.

Alex continues, “This would have been very difficult without Supermetrics because usually the more granularity you need, the more manual reporting becomes. Some metrics are not even available in the ad platforms’ own user interfaces, and that’s where Supermetrics saves the day.”

Now that Accenture Interactive’s internal reports are consolidated, the final missing piece is importing offline data. While the team currently manages this process manually on a weekly basis, Pat and Alex are exploring the option of using Supermetrics’ JSON connector to import call conversions.

The impact of Supermetrics

Over time, Supermetrics has turned into a valuable client reporting and internal marketing analytics tool for the Accenture Interactive team.

Overall, the media team has seen four kinds of benefits from using Supermetrics:

1. Significant time savings compared to a manual data collection process
2. Eliminating human error by replacing copy/paste with automation
3. Gaining a centralized view into the most important data
4. Improving internal reporting

Pat says, “Every morning, I open the master dashboard that we built with Supermetrics. The main benefit is that it always has fresh and accurate data in a single view. It saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to log into all these different platforms.”

He continues, “Supermetrics also eliminates human error from our reports. When you’re in a rush to build a report for a client, it’s easy to accidentally paste a number to the wrong cell. Supermetrics doesn’t make those mistakes and now we can trust the data we report to our clients.”