Supermetrics for Online Marketing Reporting: 6 Reasons To Consider an Alternative

However, it may not be the best choice for online marketing reporting. While it excels at features such as data transfer, the online marketing reporting feature is lackluster compared to the competition.

Today, we’ll show you some reasons why using Supermetrics for online marketing reporting is not such a great idea and why you might consider some Supermetrics alternatives to create reports on your marketing efforts.

6 reasons to consider Supermetrics alternatives for online marketing reporting

While Supermetrics is a well-known tool for data storage and data transfer, it’s also a popular solution for building marketing reports. However, it’s akin to using a Porsche as a taxi car. Sure, it will get the job done, but you’ll always be wondering if it’s the best tool for the job.

Today, we’ll discuss 6 reasons why using Supermetrics for online marketing reporting is not such a great idea and what you can do instead.

1. You can’t create reports or dashboards directly in Supermetrics

This tool has a good number of digital marketing data sources - around 70 at the moment of writing. To create a report, you connect your sources (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc.) and move that data from your connectors to Supermetrics.

Then you want to use this data to create a report, but tough luck. Supermetrics does not have a data visualization feature which means you only have metrics but no way to turn them into reports.

To visualize your data, you need to export it from Supermetrics to another tool, such as Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio) or Tableau. This means that you cannot aggregate and visualize your data in a single tool, making Supermetrics far from intuitive to use.

On the other hand, Whatagraph allows you to create stunning marketing reports in a matter of minutes. Connect your marketing sources and you can visualize your data in the same tool in just a few clicks.

Speed up your reporting process with more than 100 reporting templates for different platforms and use cases. Your report template has all the widgets and visualizations (graphs, bar charts, tables, pie charts) you need to get started. All you have to do is connect your sources.

2. You have to rely on Looker Studio

Let us for the moment neglect Tableau since it is a paid tool while Looker Studio is seemingly free. You can connect your Supermetrics account to Looker Studio and only then can you start creating reports since Supermetrics has no visualization functionality in any shape or form.

This might not sound like such a bad thing but let’s break it down for you.

First of all, you have to rely on Looker Studio support. In most cases, this means finding the information you need and troubleshooting yourself because there is no proper customer support. You cannot talk to a human being since actual Looker Studio customer support does not exist.

Second of all, Looker Studio is not very intuitive and easy to use. You’ll have to do quite a bit of trial and error to create your first report and as outlined above, there will be no one to help.

Last but not least, you are very limited in the number of report templates that you can use. Let’s cover that in some more detail.

3. You have a small choice of dashboard and report templates

A report template is a pre-made report with all the necessary information to create an amazing cross-channel or single-channel marketing report. For example, a LinkedIn ads report template has all the metrics and KPIs needed to highlight a LinkedIn ads campaign. You just connect your LinkedIn channel(s) to the report, and it populates itself automatically.

At the moment of writing, there are only 11 Looker Studio templates available. This means that if you want to quickly create a report, you’ll have to do the work yourself.

Report templates allow you to create reports in as little as minutes since they are plug-and-play. At Whatagraph, we have over 100 different report templates for use cases such as SEO, PPC, social media, e-commerce, and many others. Even without any reporting knowledge, you can use these templates to create a report quickly.

Every report comes with all the high-level metrics you need for accurate reporting: click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, the conversion rate on your landing pages, organic traffic, the number of qualified leads… Everything you need to create an in-depth performance marketing report for a wide variety of stakeholders.

Since Supermetrics doesn't have any custom templates, you’re forced to work with what you have in Looker Studio, and that isn’t all that much.

4. The customer support is not exactly stellar

Reading online reviews is one of the basics of due diligence when buying software. If you take a look at Supermetrics’ online reviews, all of the really negative ones have one thing in common: they state that customer support is pretty bad.

In fact, sending out anything through email will result in getting your answer weeks later. And this is not anecdotal information - many reviews state that it takes several weeks to get any updates about your questions, and even then it does not mean you will get a definitive answer.

Moreover, reaching out on the phone seems like a fruitless effort as well.

All of this means that if you’re stuck when creating a significant report for your client, there will be no help from Supermetrics at any reasonable time. And if you use a combination of Supermetrics and Looker Studio… You need to have a lot of patience and nerves of steel.

If you’re looking for a reporting tool that is always there for you should you get stuck, give Whatagraph a try! Whether it’s email, chat, or phone calls, our customer support is there for you 20 hours a day, 5 days a week. There are many reasons to love Whatagraph, but customers are particularly in love with our customer support.

And if you want a detailed comparison of the two tools, check our guide on Whatagraph vs. Supermetrics.

5. Connections with data sources are not that stable

You have all your marketing data ready and connected with Supermetrics and furthermore, with Looker Studio. Ideally, you create a report that shows the most up-to-date information from all of your sources.

The only problem is, it doesn’t happen all the time. A common complaint with Supermetrics is that the data connections keep breaking. Your clients open up a report, hoping to see what you’ve done with their budget and your marketing strategy, and nothing happens.

Data sources can break pretty often in Supermetrics, causing an entire source to stop working in your report. Imagine creating a social media report and none of your Facebook metrics showing up in your report.

And then you want to troubleshoot it and the support can take weeks to fix it. Whether it’s a Supermetrics or Looker Studio issue, you’re left in the dark and you have to dig up your metrics manually from your source - which defeats the purpose of using a reporting tool.

6. You don’t get fresh data

Clients that have huge budgets and work at a rapid pace need to have data available at all times. If they want to see how a campaign is performing at 10 PM on a Friday, they should have that option. Supermetrics makes this pretty difficult.

In an ideal world, Supermetrics would fetch and refresh the marketing data in your reports automatically. That is not the case as this tool often has outdated data and you’re forced to refresh it manually to get the most recent numbers.

If you’re sending out monthly reports, this may not seem like such a big deal. However, if you want to create live reports that clients can access at the click of a button, this creates a world of problems. You could be doing the best work in the world, but if Supemetrics is not fetching the results (such as traffic or ad data), the clients can’t see it.

On the other hand, data in Whatagraph is refreshed automatically in intervals of around 20 minutes. This ensures that your reports are always accurate, even if a client checks that at 4 in the morning.

Want to try a better Supermetrics alternative?

The truth is, Supermetric is a powerful tool in its own right. However, it may not be the best solution for a marketing team that wants to create client reports. The data transfer feature works alright but if you need accurate, real-time reporting from a variety of marketing platforms, Supermetrics creates more hurdles than it solves problems.

Try out Whatagraph today and see the benefits of fetching data and creating reports all in one tool. Whatagraph makes it easy to collect data from your marketing campaigns and then visualize it in a beautiful report in one click.

You can create reports on a variety of marketing channels (more than 40 data sources are available, including Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Analytics, and many others) and create specialized reports (such as SEO, social media, email marketing, etc.), as well as create a cross channel mix with more platforms at once.

Perhaps the best of all, Whatagraph has clear and transparent pricing and you’ll know what you pay every month, without exception.
Sign up for your free trial of Whatagraph today and enjoy trouble-free reports your clients will love!