In this post, we look at TapClicks as an alternative to Klipfolio a popular business intelligence tool that is sometimes used by digital marketing agencies as their reporting and analytics software.
After reviewing Klipfolio.com (including trying its available demo) and referencing user reviews on G2 and TrustRadius, we've concluded that the key differences between TapClicks and Klipfolio can be categorized in two ways:
- The depth of data you can pull out of your integrations.
- How each platform helps you onboard new clients.
Below, we cover each of these areas in more detail to help you better understand which product would best fit your business needs. Then, we show you an in-depth look at how agencies use TapClicks as a user-friendly, powerful way to get all of their data sources into one marketing dashboard, while streamlining their reporting and analytics processes.
Are you ready to streamline your reporting and analytics? Try our free 14-day trial to see how TapClicks can level up your marketing operations.
Klipfolio vs. TapClicks: The Key Differences Explained
A quick note about Klipfolio: Klipfolio has two major products, (1) Klips and (2) PowerMetrics.
Klips is Klipfolio's business intelligence tool that offers advanced customization but is often overkill for marketing agencies. It'll require several different business analysts to help set up and maintain your business dashboards.
So, Klipfolio made PowerMetrics to cater to marketing teams who don't need the advanced and labor-intensive customization that a full BI tool offers.
There is some overlap between the two products, but unless otherwise stated, we're comparing TapClicks with Klipfolio's PowerMetrics.
Note: If you want to see how TapClicks compares to other top marketing analytics software, check out our posts on TapClicks vs. Agency Analytics and Google Data Studio Alternatives.
1. Klipfolio's PowerMetrics vs. TapClicks: The Depth of Data You Can Pull
Both Klipfolio and TapClicks offer a significant amount of data integrations.
For example, TapClicks has over 250+ Instant On connectors, from social media platforms like Facebook to CRM platforms like Salesforce. These are connections you can set up easily without any API knowledge. You simply click on Data Sources within your TapClicks account and then choose the integration you want to set up.
Note: We also have a solution if you need to pull data from a platform where we don't have an API connection, which you can read about here.
For instance, let's say you click on our Mailchimp connector to start pulling in your email marketing data. You're immediately taken to Mailchimp's login screen, where you can login and authorize TapClicks to start pulling data.
Plus, TapClicks is a marketing-specific reporting and analytics platform.
In fact, what sets TapClicks apart from Klipfolio is the depth of data we can pull out of your platforms.
Let's say you need to pull data from Facebook Ads. If you're only pulling surface level ad data from Facebook, then your ability to do data analysis is limited.
To better understand what we mean, let's look at what goes into building an ad on Facebook.
When you build a new Facebook ad, you're creating a new campaign, which consists of an adset, which has demographics (region, gender, age group, etc.), and those ad sets have creative elements (copy and design) that you've strategically catered towards your demographics.
When you analyze the performance of your campaign, you don't just want to measure ad success based on top-level performance (which ad is converting vs. which ad is not) but at the demographic level (how ads are performing across demographics). Without that granular analysis, your analytics tool isn't matching the sophistication of your ad.
That's the difference between Klipfolio and TapClicks. With TapClicks, you get more valuable information from your data, which lets your marketing team make more informed decisions.
2. Klipfolio's PowerMetrics vs. TapClicks: Quickly Setting Up New Clients
Using a tool like Klipfolio to set up a new client can be time-consuming, even when using their marketing-focused product PowerMetrics. With Klipfolio dashboard creation, every widget you build needs to be manually associated with a specific campaign.
So, not only are you responsible for building a new dashboard for every new client or campaign but you're also responsible for building every widget that you're going to use within that dashboard. You can be building dozens of widgets for each client, and if your dashboard ever needs to change due to a switch in strategy, you need to manually create another widget.
We made that process simpler, and more scalable in TapClicks. Based on our decades-long experience with marketing teams, we realized most agencies are generally reporting back on similar metrics across different clients.
With TapClicks, you build a dashboard template instead of a new dashboard for every client and campaign. From that template, you can filter down to specific clients or campaigns.
Let's take a look at what it looks like to onboard a new client in TapClicks.
First, you go to Admin within TapClicks and click on Clients.
From there, you want to click on Add New Clients.
This takes you to the New Client screen, shown in the photo above, where you can fill in the client's name and load their logo, which will be used in future reports to create customized white label reports for your client.
Once the client is added to TapClicks, you're ready to assign the client's data sources to their profile.
In the image above, you can see a green plug icon in the top right of every data source that you currently have connected.
In this example, on the Google Analytics icon, you can see it says Assign to Clients. You'll select the account and the client from your client list.
Once you hit save, you've successfully mapped data sources to specific clients. Now you're ready to make a client dashboard.
Creating a Dashboard
From your home screen, click Reports and then click Dashboards.
Then click + New Dashboard. You can make your own custom dashboard or use one of our several specifically designed templates. For this post, let's look at our templates.
TapClicks templates were designed with marketers in mind and are highly customizable think of them as blueprints for a dashboard tailored to you and your client.
In the image below, you see just some of the templates TapClicks offers. There are templates for Display Services, Email Services, Facebook Analytics Overview, Mailchimp analytics, and even a Social Dashboard template for all of your social media KPIs.
Note: Under specific templates you may see a notice saying that you're missing some data connections that are needed to get the full experience of that template. This is our way of helping you make sure your I's are dotted and T's are crossed. Simply follow the prompts to collect the data sources you need to get the most out of the template.
Once you select a template, you can start customizing based on which metrics and what timeframe you want to see. This includes creating widgets, which we cover next.
Note: Dashboards can be sent to a client as a downloadable report (such as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF), or your client can be given login access that gives them access to a real-time interactive dashboard. In other words, a self-service dashboard where they can change what data they're viewing (with permissions set by you).
Creating a Widget
Some customers have commented in Klipfolio reviews that when setting up a new dashboard they experienced a steep learning curve and felt like they needed some API knowledge or extensive help from the customer support team. This was true even with PowerMetrics, which is catered towards marketers who often don't have the kind of API experience needed to operate business intelligence software.
We looked into what those reviews could have been referencing and found that when you're creating a new widget in Klipfolio, you have to make a series of choices that are time-consuming and unintuitive for marketers.
Because Klipfolio tries to be more customizable, it ends up putting the burden of choice on marketing teams. But in our experience, marketers want dashboard software that knows what trends and data sets are the most valuable. They can't afford to spend time pouring over dimensions and metrics to get the data they need.
Plus, there's a major time-waster built into Klipfolio's widget creation process. If you accidentally create an illegal combination (a combination of metrics that can't be presented or grouped together), Klipfolio doesn't alert you until you try to create the report, and it won't tell you what specific metrics made up the illegal combination.
If you don't have data expertise on whichever specific platform you're trying to create a widget for, then you might run into complications when trying to get a view of your data.
For comparison, here's what it looks like to create a new widget in TapClicks.
First, click on Create Your First Widget.
From there, you're taken to the New Widget screen.
On the right-hand side of that screen, you can see several important fields, including:
- Title: Enter the title of the widget.
- Data Category: Select where your data is coming from. For this example, we used Facebook Ads.
- Data View: Here, you can select all the different types of data that we can neatly pull out of your platform. This is a perfect example of why we're the marketer-friendly alternative to Klipfolio. You can create a widget that pulls data by campaigns, device, region, creative (different types of ads), genders & ages, leads, placements, and more! Plus, nothing extra is needed on your end; TapClicks pulls that data because we know those are the data sets marketers need to run business analytics.
- Metrics: Once you select how you want to view your data, you can pick which metrics you're looking for, such as Attentive Impression Conversion Value, Impressions, Clicks, Click Through Rate (CTR), etc.
- Dimensions: How do you want your visualization organized? You can sort it by categories such as Ad Name' or Date'.
Note: We made a bar graph in this example, but you have other data visualization options, such as making a pie chart, table, and more.
Once you're done, click Save, and you just created your first drag-and-drop widget!
The big difference in functionality between the two platforms, and why TapClicks is a good Klipfolio alternative for marketing teams, is that once a widget like this is created, it can be automatically replicated or customized for other clients, campaigns, or accounts.
Instead of worrying about recreating individual dashboard elements all the time, you can focus your time on looking for trends and making changes to your ongoing campaigns.
Note: If you want to see how TapClicks performs versus other popular BI tools, check out our articles on Domo vs Looker vs TapClicks and Datorama Alternatives, which compares TapClicks to Domo, Datorama, and Tableau.
Final Thoughts: Using TapClicks as a Klipfolio Alternative
The main difference between TapClicks and Klipfolio is how they were made to be used.
Klipfolio is a powerful business intelligence platform, but this means it's often too complex, time-consuming, and expensive to be used as a reporting tool by digital marketers.
Even their lightweight option Klipfolio PowerMetrics overcomplicates the dashboard and widget creation process, which further burdens your marketing team, and limits how quickly you can perform data analysis and take on new clients.
In comparison, TapClicks was built by and for marketing teams.
Because of this, the data you pull from your integrations is configured by our team to serve your marketing needs.
Plus, we've made it incredibly easy and intuitive to create new dashboards, customize them with widgets as needed, and scale them across clients. To boot, our orders and workflow features combine with reporting and analytics to perform planning, execution, and measurement, all in one SaaS marketing platform.
Are you ready to streamline your reporting and analytics? Try our free 14-day trial to see how TapClicks can level up your marketing operations.
