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Streamline your agency

Tyrell Downer

Tyrell Downer

6 min read

An opinionated approach to how agency data should work and how to set it up in less than a day

When you scale your agency, your tech bloat and operational overhead disproportionately scales with it.

At 5 clients, a manual, small data infrastructure is not an issue. There’s not that many moving parts and one person can manage it. But by nature as an agency scales they collect more data per client - as they should. And they have more clients to track.

It’s safe to say an agency with 20 clients will have 20x the data an agency with 5 clients has. It doesn’t scale proportionately. The problem occurs when you scale and keep the outdated manual tracking approach.

I’ve spoken to many agencies with 50+ clients, and all of them have some data horror story where they had a broken integration, or lost multiple clients to reporting or lack there of, often costing them $10,000+ in missed leads or lost clients.

It’s not your fault. You’re working on getting clients and providing the important service of advertising. That environment of rapid growth doesn’t lend itself to taking a 3 month pause and spending $40,000 to build a custom, perfect data solution.

What if you didn’t have to?

This is an opionated solution to agency data and seamless scaling.

Track

First and foremost, the data collection and data visualization must be automated. Why? Because the more manual steps, the more time it takes. Which means you have to be less aggressive on new client acquisition and less time can be spent on service delivery. Most importantly for data integrity - the more manual steps the more likely a horror story error will be made.

Without Supametric

You can setup automated data collection using multiple softwares and automations. The problem is:

  • - There’s many manual steps to setup per client. This creates a foundational vulnerability everytime you onboard a new client.
  • - The data sits in a google sheet, which is very flimsy and error prone for long term data storage.
  • - The data visualization disadvantage is crippling.

With Supametric

  • - You setup a new client with 3 clicks.
  • - The data lives in our secure database and cannot be just deleted or accidentally tampered with.
  • - Visualize all your clients metrics across platforms in a single sheet.

All your data is automatically pulled into the Supametric platform. And you can see all your clients and campaigns in a sheet that updates autonomously. As well as data visualization tools like the Agency Dashboard to breakdown metrics by team or at the agency level.

To onboard just use Supametric’s AI to automatically build your client list. Client platform accounts (Meta, HighLevel) are automatically matched with AI (97% accuracy on our benchmarks). Then you simply verify the connections. That’s it. All your data is pulled in and kept in sync forever.

If you have more custom needs, like tracking novel call center workflows or specific metrics important to your clients like “Sales over $10k” you can use custom metrics and formulas.

You create custom metrics in just a few minutes, and it’s very important to note they’re workspace scoped - they’re not tied to any specific client. Each client get’s it’s own webhook or a snapshot webhook url for HighLevel. Once created they’re available in every tool inside the platform.

Manage

Knowing what’s going on with all your clients when you have 20 is not possible. You check in, but you cannot check every day, every hour, and certainly not every minute.

That’s 20, what about 400?

But what if you managed by exception? What if you had a dashboard that showed you all clients that’s KPIs are in the danger zone?

KPI management must be outsourced. For example you need to be able to say “If CPL exceeds $35 for this client, I want to know”. You must be able to set a threshold for a metric and you must be able to set different thresholds for each client / campaign. Because there will certainly be a case where one campaign has a target CPL of $35 and another $135.

And what you want is to be able to get notifications, or if your operating at scale (say 100 clients), you want to have your team get the notifications and a dashboard that shows you these client issues that auto-resolves. Meaning when the metric falls out of the danger zone, it moves to a completed task and is still stored for your records.

Without Supametric

I’m not aware of any softwares that do this, but you can create SOPs and manage it inside of Google Drive. The problem is:

  • - This wastes the team's time that could be spent on media buying / service delivery.
  • - It’s not going to be real time - the team has to scan all the ad accounts and CRM 1 by 1, every day.
  • - As people we’re prone to error when we have to perform 100 repetitive tasks each day, every day.

With Supametric

  • - Your team is empowered to do less management and more effective service delivery.
  • - Supametric checks your KPIs every minute.
  • - The platform has all the data in your workspace and uses standardized algorithms to get it right every time.
  • - The reality is most agencies aren’t going to do this manually (and they shouldn’t).

You setup alerts at scale very simply in Supametric. See the alerts page. To create an alert you simply pick a KPI and use the bulk editor to quickly set thresholds for all your clients. Then you create notification settings - you can tell Supametric to notify the media buyer assigned to the client via Slack in one click for example.

Now the team starts getting alerts and each alert becomes an issue in the smart issue board.

You can do this for all your KPIs, at which point your whole team is empowered to spend less time managing and more time producing. And you have the peace of mind from knowing what’s going on in your agency.

Report

The last thing is client reporting. I’ve heard many stories of agencies losing clients simply because they couldn’t see the ROI - even though it was there.

That’s where client reporting comes in.

I wouldn’t call it a must, but it will increase the LTV for a percentage of clients.

Without Supametric

There are many tools for creating client reports. There are some issues from my perspective:

  • - The client reporting is not the same data platform you house all your data in. This can cause inaccuracies.
  • - The report builders are ‘open layout’ - providing tons of customization options. The problem is this increases creation time at least 4x. The lack of opinion leads to reports that take way to long to build - and your not guaranteed they look good or professional at the end of it. It’s sort of Apple vs. Android. While having millions of customization options looks good on a landing page, the reality is most people want a beautiful phone that’s easy to use.
  • - You want to be able to make your own templates so that you can easily use the same exact layout for other clients reporting. It’s not clear that any products support this - and this is a massive waste of time for the team.

With Supametric

  • - Build your reports in the same data platform you use for tracking and managing.
  • - Use a streamlined, opinionated report builder to create stunning reports in a few minutes.
  • - In the bulk client reports editor, just select the report you want to copy, the clients you want to copy it to and in a few clicks they’re all ready to share.
  • - As a co-founder, perhaps I’m biased - Supametric has the best looking, most professional client-facing UI of any product, the other products are so far behind we could not see them with a telescope.

You use any metrics in your workspace to create reports with Supametric’s proprietary report builder. Start with a ready made template or use one of the pre built layouts. See how they work here.

Build your report in a few minutes, click share, paste the link in a client email or Slack message, done. Then turn that report into a custom template by simply selecting the clients you want to apply it to and clicking a button.

Conclusion

The right data workflow can make or break an agency as it scales. It doesn’t have to take weeks, months, lots of meetings and big investment to setup.

You can be up and running in less than an hour.