A few years back, when more and more marketing channels started coming up, marketers saw the need to save time on data reporting tasks by aggregating data from all their channels.

Simply because, instead of focusing on improving campaign performance, they were spending most of their time exporting performance data to create reports for their clients or bosses.

As a solution, Mikael Thuneberg founded Supermetrics to act as a data connector.

A pipeline that helps marketers effortlessly gather data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other platforms. 

Into destination platforms like Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Excel, and BI tools.

Making it easier for users to create multi-channel performance reports.

Data aggregation, dashboards, and reporting - is where Supermetrics shines.

But for businesses interested in understanding how they can leverage their data to improve performance.

Such reports will not tell you enough about your customers, how to attract more of them at a reasonable cost.

For that, you will need a more advanced analytics solution to analyze your data and deliver insights into how you can improve campaign performance.

Humanlytics is one of such solutions, used by eCommerce businesses to integrate their marketing channels, use A.I to analyze data and generate actionable insights.

Platform integration, actionable insights generation, and action tracking - is where Humanlytics shines.

This post is a comparison of the value a user can generate from using Supermetric versus Humanlytics at the different stages of the analytics workflow:

• Data integration

• Data reports

• Data analysis & Insights generation

• Action tracking

Let’s get started.

1. Data integration

Supermetrics:

Supermetrics can be integrated with more than 40 platforms including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Insights, Bing Ads, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

But as a data connector, Supermetrics can only pull granular data like Ad cost, clicks, and impressions that have already been aggregated by the source platforms.

To generate end reports like this:

As much as this makes reporting easier, there two main issues we have to consider:

• Supermetrics doesn’t have customer data

The data collected by Supermetrics doesn’t include customer data. 

You’ll have the total number of clicks generated by your Facebook Ads and Google Ads in one sheet but that doesn’t tell you anything about the people who engaged with your Ads.

Therefore no further analysis can be made on this data other than monitoring Ad spend and conversion rates.

• Attribution errors

Supermetrics aggregates data from various platforms that use different attribution models to credit conversions.

Pulling Ad cost and conversion data is one thing, knowing which Ad cost is responsible for a given conversion is another.

Facebook Ads uses a different attribution model specific to its platform, just like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Twitter.

So when you pull all this data into one sheet/report without considering the attribution models used by the different platforms, you end up with inaccurate metrics.

We have created a comprehensive guide to data-driven attribution models.

We also publish a series of weekly videos on LinkedIn which you can follow to more about attribution models. 

Humanlytics:

Humanlytics performs deep integration between marketing channels.

This is to make data reporting across channels a seamless experience for the user while collecting in real-time, all the data needed for analysis.

For eCommerce businesses, deep integration can be with:

• Facebook Ads

• Google Analytics

• Google Ads

• Shopify and other platforms used.

With deep integration, the data collected includes the multichannel campaign performance data like clicks, costs, and impressions.

As well as customer data like pages visited, channels used, frequency of purchase, cost of acquisition, revenue generated, etc. 

 This is to ensure that you have all the data about your customers and marketing campaign performance in one platform - A single source of truth.

It’s from this complete customer view that meaningful analysis can be done to generate actionable insights. 

Data-driven attribution model

Humanlytics use of the best data-driven attribution models on the market. Where all channels in the customer journey are credited based on the customer experience delivered.

This is the only way you can ensure that:

• Every channel that contributes to revenue in your business is recognized and accredited based on their contribution.

• You don’t over or underestimate the numbers of conversions generated

See how fast-growing eCommerce businesses like RealEats are using data analytics to grow even faster. Download here.

2. Data analysis and insight generation

Supermetrics:

Supermetrics only connects data from different platforms and then visualizes that data in the form of reports or sends it to another destination platform like Google data studio. 

The data pulled by Supermetrics from different channels includes the cost of Ads, link clicks, and CTR. 

This data is not enough to analyze and generate meaningful insights into how you can:

• Optimize your marketing campaign 

• Improve campaign performance

• Improve customer experience across channels

That is why the best use case for Supermetrics is monitoring and reporting Ad spend across marketing channels - not analytics and insight generation.

Humanlytics:

Humanlytics use it’s A.I. engine DataSlinger to analyze multichannel data and generated action recommendations you can take to achieve a business goal. 

Humanlytics takes a goal-first approach to analytics.

Whereby instead of showing you a bunch of data points, users set marketing goals they would like to achieve within a specified time.

These goals can be as specific as:

• Increase Product A sales by 15% in 2 months

• Improve Product C add to cart rate by 20%

• Reduce CAC for Facebook customers by 10% in 3 month

• Increase LTV for customer segment F 

With your multichannel data deeply integrated and standardized, the Dataslinger is then used to analyze your data.

And generate actionable recommendations you can take to achieve the set goals.

3. Data reports

Supermetrics:

Supermetrics offers pre-determined reports which include:

• Paid acquisition dashboard

Connect Adwords, Facebook and Twitter ads to view campaign data inline with where copy + creative are drafted.

This report is mostly useful for monitoring the daily ad spend across channels, It comes with all comparisons, charts and Advertising data in the same place to make comparison and analysis easy.

• Social Media Reporting

Supermetrics can collect social media data from Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other platforms. 

With these metrics, you can create a personalized social media report that includes engagement statistics, follower growth, and other engagement reports.

• SEO Reporting

SEO reporting connects with Semrush, Google Search Console, Moz, and other SEO tools from which you can visualize SEO performance over time.

• Content operations dashboard

Connect Mailchimp, Facebook, Twitter, and GA to view content results alongside a content plan. This is a report you can use to plan blog / social / newsletter posts and ads supporting them.

Basically showing you how content is performing while helping plan new posts.

• Web analytics dashboard

Connect Google Analytics to view data in a spreadsheet. With Supermetrics, you’re able to create more customized reports than with Google Analytics.

Humanlytics:

• Goal performance reports

With a goal-first approach to analytics, one of the most important reports a user gets is the goal performance report.

This is a report that shows you how the actions you are taking are helping you move towards your goal.

For example: If setting a goal like a 10% increase in sales for product A. The goal report shows how well the actions you have taken to achieve this goal are doing.

If the action you took was increasing Google Ad spend, this report will show how effective this action is in terms of your goal.

• Key metric reports

The other crucial report is about your key metrics.

For most eCommerce businesses, these usually are CAC and LTV.

The key metrics report helps businesses determine the accurate figures of their metrics. 

Due to attribution complications involved in running multichannel campaigns, many businesses end up with wrong CAC and LTV calculations. 

The Humanlytics team works with its users to determine the accurate calculations for key metrics for their multichannel campaigns and create reports to help them keep track.  

• Customer journey reports

This a report generated to show you how customers are engaging with your brand across channels from the first interaction to purchase conversion.

The multichannel path to purchase is more complicated and many businesses fail to understand how every channel in their strategy contributed to the conversions generated.

With this report, you can easily identify:

• Channels with the highest contribution to conversion

• Stages in your customer journey where users are experiencing the highest friction

• Stages/channels associated with poor customer experience

All this is to show areas where any improvement will yield the highest impact on your revenue. 

• Customized reports

With A.I powered analysis, there is no limit to the number of insights and reports users can generate.

That is why Humanlytics provides reports and insights relevant to your goals but if you want any custom report from your data, it can be generated.

From custom analytics reports like cohort reports, attribution, and predictive reports to multichannel reports like Facebook Ads performance vs Google Ads performance report.

4. Action tracking

Supermetrics:

At the end of any analytics value chain is Action taking.

It is the reason businesses are interested in data - so that they can take data-informed actions instead of gambling.

If your goal is to improve the performance of your Facebook ads campaign and at the end of the analytics process, you don’t take any action to improve performance.

Then your entire analytics process is a waste because data is not helping you take informed actions to improve campaign performance.

Some analytics solutions realize how crucial action taking is and provide users with a framework to take actions from the insights generated.

Unfortunately at this stage, Supermetrics is not one of those solutions.

Humanlytics:

Taking action is something most marketing teams struggle with, even when equipped with the right insights.

Humanlytics provides a framework and dashboard you can use to monitor how effective each of the actions you take is in terms of moving you towards your set goal.

This is to show you in near real-time whether you will be able to achieve your goal given the actions you have taken or not. 

Humanlytics team also schedules timely meetings to ensure that users are able to take action, track performance, and achieve goals.

Conclusion:

Each of these tools presents a unique value to businesses that want to better leverage their data.

As a level one analytics tool, Supermetrics makes the most sense if you’re interested in pushing data from a source like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads or Moz, to a spreadsheet or a BI or visualization tool.

As an advanced analytics tool, Humanlytics makes the most sense if you’re interested in generating actionable insights from all it’s marketing data. 

Set goals and get data-backed action recommendations you can take to achieve those goals.

If you have any challenges with analytics or just want to know how you can use marketing data for your business growth.
We are offering free analytics consultation to help solve such challenges and offer you personalized insights into how you can grow your business Book your free consultation today.