Nestlé: Improving decision-making based on data and saving 80% of time spent on marketing reporting with Supermetrics

Nestlé – the name says it all. Everybody knows this global brand and the biggest FMCG company in the world that spans multiple product categories.

From confectionary and beverages to baby food and pet care, Nestlé has brands like Maggi, Gerber, KitKat, Nescafe, Purina and many others under its umbrella.

Lyndsay Weir is the Global Data and Analytics Manager for Nestlé, and has been in the company for over four years. Prior to her current position in Switzerland, she was the Head of Data Analytics for the UK market. Lyndsay’s background is a mix of data, brand marketing, B2B, marketing and agency experience.

Nestlé’s marketing reporting challenge

A big part of Lyndsay’s job is to address how the organization collects data and how this data is used to personalize content and make it more relevant for Nestlé’s consumers.

One crucial area is data analytics. This includes analyzing the data to get meaningful information that can help in decision-making and guide future actions. It involves answering questions like: “What’s that data actually doing?”, “What are our consumers saying?”, “How’s our marketing working?” Data activation also helps build a “bridge” between marketing and sales to forecast patterns.

To succeed in all three steps, the data has to be collected and consolidated into a single place in a usable format. Supermetrics fits into the equation perfectly: it collects rich data from a variety of different data sources (be it an ad platform like Facebook Ads or a web analytics tool such as Google Ads) and seamlessly transfers this data to wherever marketers want to use it, in a user-friendly format.

Lyndsay discovered Supermetrics while she was still working in the UK.

The biggest challenge at that time was that brand managers often received siloed reports with the performance of their campaigns. The market was mainly relying on the agencies to give them visibility of their own data, which was just not good enough.

This was the point Lyndsay and her team started looking for a solution to their problem.

Step one of the team’s project was to get the data automated in real-time. In addition, the work focus had to be shifted from extracting and pulling together the data from different sources to understanding data patterns and improving.

The team decided to create Data Studio reports. They were able to pull data from Google’s platforms, but other third-party data was still missing.

“I thought that if I would’ve done the data extraction and automation part that would save the team 80% of time already,” mentioned Lyndsay.

She started looking for the perfect tool that would break down the barriers and came across a number of solutions.

The solution: Supermetrics for Data Studio

Lyndsay says that, “The team at Nestlé needed to make sure the solution provider was aware of all the complexities and could provide exactly what we were looking for. Supermetrics turned out to be perfect for this task as a friendly, adaptable and flexible company. Jouni from the Supermetrics team was not only able to react quickly and find a suitable solution for us, but also to continuously support our team throughout the project. I think we chose the right partner.”

Supermetrics allowed Lyndsay’s team to act local and think global: after all the needed, real-time data was brought into the dashboard the team could focus on the decision making for their campaigns.

The UK was a pilot market for the data automation project. At first, the team started with Supermetrics’ connectors and built a Google Data Studio dashboard for each of their brands in the UK market, one by one. This way, they did a warm rollout of the reporting solution.

Measuring the results: How Supermetrics allowed Nestlé’s team to save 80% of time spent on marketing reporting

The team was happy with the dashboards they were able to build with the help of Supermetrics connectors for Google Data Studio.

Supermetrics’ integrations allowed Nestlé to fetch the needed data from third parties to Google Data Studio directly. The team could specify the exact metrics and dimensions they wanted to see in their dashboard and get a complete overview of their marketing performance by not limiting themselves to just data from Google’s data sources. After the dashboard was built, the team could focus on analyzing the data instead of doing a great deal of manual work. This, in turn, allowed Nestlé to reach data activation more quickly and make relevant business decisions more timely.

Lyndsay shared that she will definitely continue using Supermetrics as the company takes on more marketing projects, sharing that, “We’d like to use Supermetrics to scale our data understanding, and ensure that more markets are able to report in an automated real-time way. Our teams across the globe are advancing towards more tangible and real-time analysis of our media campaign performance.”

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