When companies that rely heavily on real-time marketing data specifically digital marketing agencies, media publishing companies, and large retail brands start looking for Funnel.io alternatives, it's usually for one of three reasons.
- Their marketing and advertising teams need an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool that can import more nuanced metrics and offer a bigger range of historical data. All connectors aren't made equal just because an ETL tool can pull advertising data out of Google Analytics, doesn't mean it's going to give you the metrics you need for as far back as you need.
- They need a faster way to extract data. ETL tools like Funnel.io pull data by breaking it down by level. This method makes it more time-consuming to get data into your reporting and analytics tools.
- They want an all-in-one reporting and analytics tool. An ETL tool pulls data from one platform and funnels it into a reporting tool, such as Google Data Studio. But if you want a more powerful and seamless solution for reporting and analytics, it might be more cost-effective to switch to an all-in-one marketing operations platform, so you don't need to manage multiple tools from different vendors for data connectors, data preparation, visualization, and reporting.
To help companies achieve those goals, we have two different platforms at TapClicks that work as highly competitive alternatives to Funnel.
First, we have our TapFusion for GDS Tool. This is a direct Funnel.io alternative that we made for teams who want their ETL process to be faster and more nuanced with a greater scope of metrics within data sources. Plus, we have almost 6,000 data sources (connectors) available!
Second, we have our all-in-one marketing platform. Teams use our platform to create marketing dashboards that pull data out of their marketing and advertising platforms and allow them to analyze data, send out reports, and suggest actionable changes that will help increase profitability.
In this post, we're going to show you how each tool can be used by your team to improve data analysis and automate marketing reporting.
Note: If you'd like to see how TapClicks functions as your all-in-one advertising dashboard, try our free 14-day trial.
How TapFusion for GDS is an Improvement Over Funnel.io and Other ETL Tools
When you're using an ETL tool, you want that tool to help you do as little work as possible when exporting data into your third party reporting platform (such as Google Data Studio, BigQuery or Tableau).
Here's how TapFusion for GDS can help your team.
You Can Pull Data Quickly and Start Analysis Sooner
ETL tools can be slow and messy to use because they pull data in an inconvenient way one level or breakdown at a time.
With TapFusion for GDS, we don't pull data by level. This has three immediate benefits for you:
- You extract and aggregate your data more quickly. By not breaking down the data by level, it's easier and faster to extract your data out of its platform and into a tool like Google Data Studio. With TapFusion, you can set up a connection and get data channeled into your preferred marketing platform in a matter of minutes.
- Your data is delivered for reporting as a coherent data set. Because Funnel extracts data by level, this means once the data is in your dashboard, it's presented more like a data dump what was once coherent and organized is now disparate and needs to be rearranged within your reporting tool. This adds significant labor hours for your analysts, who then need to reconstruct the data before they can analyze it. With TapFusion for GDS, the data is imported into your reporting tool, mapped to the proper categories and ready to be analyzed.
- Plus, with TapFusion for GDS, you can pull data in different tiers. You can pull data from all of your advertisers, specific advertisers, or even group certain advertisers together. This makes it even easier for your analytics and reporting team to segment data based on campaign, client, or report needs.
You Get Access to Internal Reporting Benefits
You'll sometimes want to see the results of all your campaigns across all clients or business units. This helps monitor the profitability of your marketing efforts across various industries. It also allows you to spot any opportunities or challenges, such as full industries or markets where your ad spend is lower or higher than it needs to be.
Internal reporting is difficult to do with other ETL tools because once your data is in a platform like Tableau or Google Data Studio, you still need to aggregate the data on your own.
With TapFusion for GDS, you can roll up aggregates at various levels quickly and efficiently. This gives a full picture of your marketing efforts across the entire organization.
You can also roll up data across specific regions or divisions within your business or within a particular client.
Keep in mind: ETL tools such as Supermetrics are only responsible for extracting your data out of various platforms and importing it into a third-party reporting tool. From there, your analytics team creates reports using whatever data visualization tools are available in the platform they're using.
If your client list or ongoing campaigns are growing and it's becoming burdensome for your marketing team to deal with an ETL tool and marketing analytics software, then keep reading to learn about our all-in-one data collection and reporting & analytics platform.
Note: Learn more about the differences in reporting capabilities between ETL, business intelligence, and other popular tools in our article on PPC Reporting Software.
How TapClicks Works as an All-in-One Marketing Platform
There's some overlap between our TapFusion GDS tool and our all-in-one marketing dashboard. What changes is that you're not funneling your data into a data warehouse or tool like Google Data Studio to work on reporting and analytics.
Instead, all of your data is pulled into dashboards where you can analyze KPIs, create custom views for various user levels, and schedule out recurring reports.
Here's what it looks like if you stop using an ETL tool, and instead work with an all-in-one marketing platform like TapClicks.
Start with Ready-to-Go Connectors
TapFusion for GDS lets you connect your CRM and advertising platforms on day one. This data is pulled in automatically and is ready to be used within minutes.
Get a Full Picture of Your Campaigns by Blending and Transforming Data
Blending data is where you can view how disparate data sources affect one another within your marketing campaign.
Without blending your data, it's difficult to see how PPC ads and SEO strategies work together within your larger omnichannel marketing strategy. This leads to erroneous decision making, such as cutting ad spend on marketing channels where you ought to be increasing your budget.
Plus, if you are pulling data from both your marketing platforms (eg. Google Search Ads, Bing Ads, Linkedin Ads) and your CRM tool (eg. Salesforce), you can blend those data sets to see the actual dollar impact of your advertising. For example, how many sales are you getting from discovery-based social media ads versus search-based advertising?
Transforming data allows you to take categories that are labeled differently in various platforms, such as ad spend and ad cost, and turn them into one metric to show overall spend.
This lets you get a fuller picture of your campaign because you don't have to juggle multiple reports just to figure out how much money your team is allocating towards its various channels.
Set Up Recurring Reporting
Within TapClicks' all-in-one platform, you can set up reports on a schedule that works for you and your team. The report is automatically made (it can be a link or a PDF file) and sent to external and internal stakeholders.
Plus, because all of your data sets and reporting tools are in one platform, it's easy to handle one-off reporting requests.
Let's say it's Friday and there's an hour left in the day. You get a last-minute request from a client. This is a SaaS client that wants to see the relationship between your Google search efforts and your Linkedin Ad campaigns over the last six months, but they're looking for whether or not they can reallocate the budget away from Linkedin (where the ad cost is higher) to the ongoing Adwords campaign (where ad spend costs less). You usually report on all of these platforms together and never in 6-month intervals, so this requires a custom report.
Simply log in to TapClicks, go to the user-friendly marketing dashboard, click the data sets you want to be included within the requested time frame, click create report, and send it out to your client.
Create Custom Access to Dashboards
Within TapClicks, you can create unlimited agency and advertiser level users and assign them access by features and metrics.
This functionality grows as your team and client list grow letting you scale up who has access to what data sets.
Plus, you can create separate dashboards for team members and clients. On the team members' dashboards, you can separate the cost of the advertising and your agency cost. Meanwhile, on the client dashboard, you can combine markup with ad spend into one cost. This lets your clients see the overall value of your service without having them focus on what your team charges to get that value.
Similarly, clients can use custom dashboards to create various data profiles. There can be a dashboard made for founder-level executives (who may want less detail and more focus on overall ROI) and a dashboard made for analysts (who may benefit from seeing the more nitty-gritty numbers).
Ready for a Better Solution to Reporting and Analytics?
There are two parts to reporting and analytics.
- Getting your data out of the appropriate platforms.
- Loading that data into a third-party reporting and analytics tool.
ETL tools like TapFusion for GDS focus on getting your data into a third-party platform in a way that is quick, efficient, and accurate maintaining your data's integrity. We can do this because our API connections are sophisticated, pulling over more metrics and parameters than the competition. The overall benefit for your reporting is that now you're able to glean more valuable insights into your marketing campaign.
But there are still limitations on what you can do with your data if you're using a third-party reporting tool.
For advanced analytics and reporting, your company can benefit from our all-in-one marketing dashboard. With TapClicks, we connect disparate data sources so your team can do analysis and reporting within the same platform.
Want to give TapClicks a try? Check out our free 14-day trial to see our marketing operations platform in action.
