The Magic of Combining Ad Reporting Models: An Easy Button for Growth Marketers

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In today's fast-paced digital advertising landscape, harnessing the power of data is essential for growth marketers. Every platform, from Google ads, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and more, operates with unique data schemas, making it challenging to consolidate data for a comprehensive view of customer acquisition costs. However, the modern data stack of Fivetran, dbt, and Sigma has changed the game for growth marketers.

Next-Level Ad Reporting

For growth marketing teams, especially at startups, limited budgets and resources are a constant challenge. The pressure to perform with minimal ad spend is immense. But here's the good news: with Sigma and Fivetran’s ad reporting package, you can perform complex growth marketing data analysis without the need for SQL or technical data modeling skills. This allows you to automate manual and repetitive reporting workflows with ease.

Let's explore the inspiring success story of Veronica Beard, a Sigma customer that embodies the extraordinary possibilities unlocked through this combination. Faced with the challenge of reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC), Veronica Beard embraced Sigma's capabilities. The results were astounding: they achieved a remarkable 20% reduction in CAC. Furthermore, by connecting their ad data with first-party data using Sigma, they witnessed a phenomenal 25% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS). The impact didn't stop there – their email marketing return on investment (ROI) also soared by 11%. Veronica Beard's journey exemplifies the true power of the modern data stack and revolutionizing ad reporting and driving growth.

Managing campaigns, retention, retargeting, and new customer acquisition across multiple platforms can be a daunting task. Fivetran and dbt help streamline this process, enabling small teams to set up cross-platform reporting efficiently. But the real magic happens when you introduce Sigma into the equation.

How It All Works

Imagine a modern growth analyst: tech-savvy, data-driven, working with various ad platforms but lacking the time and resources to dedicate to advanced data modeling. Startups need funding to grow, but CFOs and boards demand responsible and effective spending. Cross-platform reporting is the key.

Effective digital marketing is about understanding impressions, clicks, conversions, and spend—all of which vary across ad platforms. This is typically a cumbersome process that requires integrating data sources, understanding schemas, engineering joins and calculations—all of which require time and resources that might be hard to come by for an agile team. 

Fortunately, Fivetran has an easy solution to help standardize the foundational work and accelerate your time to value. Their ad reporting package released this year paves the way, ensuring data from all of your relevant ad sources are unified into standard tables and layers of granularity, while aggregating key metrics across sources, making cross-platform reporting accessible to even the smallest teams. The package uses SQL-based dbt to wrangle data from these different ad platforms into one unified view of your advertising.

Sigma takes it a step further: It empowers users to drill down from high-level metrics to specific campaigns, URLs, and ad types without requiring additional setup. No more guessing what questions your growth or leadership team might ask—Sigma provides answers in an intuitive spreadsheet UI that feels familiar to marketers.

No Scale Limitations

Here's a typical workflow: a paid marketing team member creates campaigns on different platforms such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Data feeds from each platform are then piped into a cloud data warehouse, or lakehouse, with Fivetran. The team then deploys Fivetran's ad reporting data model in their dbt project—hosted either in dbt Core or dbt Cloud. The ad reporting data can then be combined with internal company data to attribute traffic and conversions and draw insights about your campaign performance. 

Without Sigma and Fivetran, the marketing team would need to export data from each platform and then attempt to combine it manually using tools like Excel. This is not only repetitive and tedious, but incredibly error-prone.  Fivetran’s ad reporting package combines this data, providing a holistic view of campaign performance, while preserving lower levels of granularity needed to assess each individual source. Because Sigma empowers ad hoc, row-level analysis, users can drill-down into this data or assess the entire platform, rolled up to metrics standardized by the Fivetran dbt package.

Another benefit of using Sigma on Fivetran  is the immediate scalability: Growth marketers often hit the limits of Excel and Google Sheets when managing data from multiple sources. Custom reports are downloaded from various platforms and painstakingly stitched together to create weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. With one row of data per day, campaign, URL, ad source, or keyword, the data volume quickly surpasses what typical spreadsheet tools can handle. This is where Sigma shines by scaling with your cloud warehouse, handling massive data sets with ease. Like billions of rows. 

But scale isn't the only issue users face when analyzing marketing data.  They need the ability to isolate trends and identify issues at the row-level. Sigma allows you to cut, slice, explore, and aggregate data effectively at every level of your business. Teams on the ground access daily reports for daily adjustments, while higher-level executives review weekly and monthly insights. In the current economic environment, marketing budgets are under scrutiny, and efficiency is paramount. Trustworthy data fed into a user-friendly BI tool like Sigma is the key to success. Anything less is just spinning your wheels, attempting to achieve more with less effort.

In conclusion, a modern data stack of Fivetran, dbt, and Sigma has unveiled the "easy button" that growth marketers have been searching for. It's time to simplify ad reporting, automate repetitive tasks, and make data-driven decisions with confidence. 

Learn more about how Sigma powers self-service marketing analytics.