If you work with a lot of digital marketing channels like Facebook and Google Ads, you might find yourself having to copy & paste a lot of your campaign performance metrics.
And if you have ever used multiple marketing channels at once, then tracking your digital marketing performance becomes a lot more complicated.
This is where Supermetrics comes in: Supermetrics brings in all your marketing data to wherever you need it to be.
Whether it is Google Sheets, Excel or Google Data Studio, Supermetrics works as a connector to bring all your marketing data in one place.
In this post, I hope to share some of my experiences working with Supermetrics and how I used it to develop a campaign tracking tool for our account managers.
Hope you find this useful!
Creating mini ‘Databases’
As a tool, Supermetrics pretty much does what it says on the box. It just brings in your data in one place.
What this means is that more complex operations like data blending, advanced filtering and any additional calculations have to be done after Supermetrics does all the data pulling.
This in and of itself isn’t really a big issue, as most people are already quite familiar with tools like Excel and Google Sheets.
So for my Campaign Tracker tool, it was a very similar process.
Firstly, I had separate sheets for campaigns running on Facebook and Google Ads, then one more for Google Analytics data. I used the Supermetrics sidebar to specify my ‘queries’, then set an hourly refresh.
I called these ‘mini databases’, as they were simply a constantly refreshing repository of raw information that we want to work with.
Pivot Tables and Data Blending
From this point onwards, we actually won’t be needing Supermetrics anymore. We’ve done the data pulling, so it’s just about working off those numbers.
In my company, we often have many ‘campaigns’ running at one time. In reality, all these campaign names actually refer to the same ‘Master Campaign’.
Mixing all these data together is what we mean when we say ‘Data Blending’.
So a solution for this data blending on sheets looks something like this:
In this sheet, I just make sure campaigns that need to be blended together have the same ‘reference’ tag. Additional parameters like country and platform just makes it easy to break down the data later on. The following illustration perhaps is more insightful:
What having this sheet will allow us to do is to use a simple Vlookup to tag our mini databases (i.e., our constantly refreshing raw data) as such:
Where each campaign entry now has a ‘tag’ for reference, country and platform.
To ‘blend’ the data, we can use Pivot tables by setting the Date and Reference columns as our ‘Rows’.
Ta-da, data all blended!
I do the same with all the databases, then just consolidate them into a dashboard sheet using a ‘=QUERY’ formula.
Connecting to Google Data Studio
This step is optional. For most users, having a Google Sheet with your key metrics all in one place is more than enough. But, if you deal with a lot of clients and need to make reports of marketing data often, Google Data Studio can be a handy reporting tool.
To set it up, we just need to connect our data source (i.e our Google Sheet):
Then, since we pulled in all the information we’re interested in, we can filter for any of the ‘tags’ that have been assigned! You would just need to use the Google Sheet as if it were any other data source on Google Data Studio!
I hope this has given you some idea of what my experience was like using Supermetrics to pull in all of our account manager’s marketing data.
During my research for the development of this tool, we actually found plenty of alternatives to Supermetrics – some were even free! But since my company already had a subscription for Supermetrics, it just made sense to ensure that we leveraged the tool as best we could.
Hope that was helpful. Feel free to share what you think about Supermetrics!
Aiman Fikri 