“The integration with Funnel has allowed us to seamlessly complete our tech stack that supports client-facing reporting, and our proprietary media planning technology.”
– Alysia Ehle, VP Media Management at Arm Candy
Key results:
- With Funnel, Arm Candy saves 12 hours a week just on reporting.
- Funnel’s data storing capabilities have removed instances of broken customer-facing reports.
- Funnel’s platform will serve as a base layer for a soon-to-be-launched proprietary media planning tool, Cyris, that Arm Candy is building.
Company profile:
Arm Candy is a media intelligence agency that inspires ingenuity and achieves results. They serve clients across the US that are looking for more robust media capabilities.
Data Stack:
Connectors: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, DV360, CM360, Amazon Ads, Google Analytics and many more.
Export destinations: Amazon S3, Google Data Studio & Google Sheets
The challenge:
Arm Candy is a media agency based in Dallas, Texas, that helps agencies and brands expand their media buying and planning capabilities.
As with all agencies in the digital space, a large part of their portfolio includes digital media. With that comes the need to track performance through marketing data. With a wide range of clients throughout the US, Arm Candy needs to deploy stable and reliable solutions to collect data and send it on to an array of client-facing dashboards.
Since much of their client base is made up of large creative agencies, Arm Candy provides direct and continuous access to their marketing dashboards. The intent is to allow these agencies to constantly monitor performance and make real-time decisions to improve their campaigns.
Before joining Funnel, Arm Candy relied on Supermetrics to collect data and send it to a massive Google Sheets document. Here, across multiple sheets, detailed formulas were applied to transform the data so that it could be sent on to a suite of visualization tools.
However, over time, this system began to break down. Timeouts in data collection and gaps in historical data led to broken cells and formulas, causing broken visualizations and reports.
“The Supermetrics API used to go out all the time and would cause all of our reporting to crash,” said Alysia Ehle, VP Media Management at Arm Candy. “We would have to reconnect everything.”
“We would have Supermetrics going out every single day,” Alysia added.
This meant that their clients, who had live access to the dashboards, would see broken reports at any moment. This, in turn, meant that Arm Candy’s data teams would have to spend hours going through formulas to determine where the fault occurred and to fix it.
Just like with Christmas lights: when one bulb goes out, they all go out.
As you might imagine, this caused loads of disruption to Arm Candy’s operations and stress on their client relationships. And with the upcoming deployment of Cyris, Arm Candy’s proprietary media planning tool, the team needed much greater stability and capability in their tech stack.
The solution:
Arm Candy went searching for a better, more stable solution to support client reporting and data flow into Cyris. They needed something that could collect data more quickly. They needed something that could transform data more efficiently.
After they evaluated lots of different providers, they selected Funnel.
Thanks to Funnel’s custom dimension and internal standard naming conventions, Arm Candy’s data experts could prepare reports much more easily. They didn’t have to worry about writing complex custom formulas for each new report in their Google Sheets document.
With the ability to aggregate data from different platforms, they can map data much more easily and smoothly. Plus, due to the data storing capability of Funnel, even when an account connection is severed, the Arm Candy team and its clients can keep working with the reports whilst the connection is reestablished.
The results:
Obviously, this has saved Arm Candy’s teams a considerable amount of time and frustration.
“I could ballpark that it has saved us 12 hours a week, just on reporting,” said Alysia.
Plus, as you might expect, client relationships are much stronger, since their dashboards are much more reliable.
This time saving (and reduced stress on the teams) has also led Arm Candy to seek out new opportunities to expand their service offering. This includes a new proprietary media planning tool, which they will be launching soon.