Supermetrics for data transfer
Supermetrics helps teams export data from a range of platforms, transform it, and load it to clients’ reporting, data warehousing, or business intelligence (BI) platforms.
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Accurate reporting on consolidated data has also become much faster with Supermetrics. You connect the sources, and in a couple of minutes you have a beautiful report you can send to your clients.
To set up a data transfer with Supermetrics, you must
- Create a destination in your spreadsheet or storage platform.
- Create a transfer. Users have the option to schedule the transfer to run on autopilot, daily, weekly, or monthly. Supermetrics claims that a single transfer never takes more than 6 hours to complete.
- Run the transfer to import your data to the destination. The time ranges for historical data depend on individual data sources and your subscription level.
Once your data begins to flow, you can monitor the progress of your transfer and get notified of any possible errors through automated email alerts. A cool feature.
Supermetrics for online marketing reporting
For many digital marketing teams, Supermetrics is a go-to solution for creating reports with KPIs and metrics populated from diverse sources. At the time of writing, Supermetrics has data connectors for around 70 digital marketing data sources.
But if you want to create a reporting dashboard, you quickly discover — that Supermetrics doesn’t have a data visualization feature.
Yes, you heard it right. You can import data but don’t have the means to report on it.
To visualize your data, you need to use Looker Studio or another reporting tool.
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Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a data visualization tool of choice for most Supermetrics users because it has a respectable number of Google and non-Google integrations.
Using Looker Studio, you can create a report from scratch or use one of its templates. As you go, you can add filters, and adjust data ranges, sources, and dimensions.
However, you can’t escape the fact that you’re using two separate tools for data integration and creating marketing reports.
What are the pros and cons of Supermetrics?
Supermetrics is a capable data transfer and reporting platform, but there’s still room for improvement. Let’s take a look at the great aspects of Supermetrics and show what other tools might do better.
Supermetrics pros
Supermetrics is built to be fast. Marketing teams can query data sources directly, pulling only the e-commerce data they need at the moment. Access any field that’s available from that data source. If you need a quick way to move business data to a data warehouse, Supermetrics is a good place to start.
The Supermetrics interface is full of handy features that make it user-friendly to use. For example, if you want to request data from Google Analytics for a specific segment ID, you don’t have to remember the exact name of that segment, just use a dropdown menu and select the segment you need.
Supermetrics cons
Supermetrics doesn’t have a way to visualize data, so you need to use another tool such as Whatagraph. You can connect your Supermetrics account to Looker Studio and then try to figure out how that works. There’s a short guide, but if anything goes wrong, you’d have to troubleshoot yourself because Looker Studio doesn’t have customer support.
Also, Looker Studio is not very intuitive to use and offers a limited number of templates.
- Customer support takes forever to respond
Multiple users have complained that it took several weeks to get an answer — some of them never got a reply at all. This is definitely not something you want in the midst of creating a marketing report or in a situation when your data transfer has encountered an error.
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If you value fast and reliable customer support, you should try Whatagraph. Contact us by live chat, email, or phone call — our customer support is on standby 20 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Whatagraph beats the competition in many areas, but our clients particularly love our customer service.
Supermetrics can be fast, but you need to slow down when you try to add granularity to your analysis. If you want to run an analysis on the product level that includes millions of rows of data, you’re better off with another tool.
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A data warehouse would be a better solution. Your data is already stored and structured, so if you need to run a more complex query, you’ll be able to execute it much faster. Also, you won’t have to rebuild datasets constantly. Using a data warehouse takes more planning, but it’s more scalable
Supermetrics API doesn’t give you a way to clean up errors in your data. If you need to make corrections, you need to do it in your BI or visualization tool, which can be time-consuming.
A data warehouse like Google BigQuery would be a better solution in this aspect. If you have several people on your marketing analytics team, the warehouse could serve as a single source of truth so everyone is working on the same datasets.
In other words, unless you’re going to use only basic reporting, Supermetrics could soon become a liability.
The initial Supermetrics pricing is low, but as you add data sources, you often need to expand the pricing plan. Supermetrics sells different versions of its software that correspond to different tools, which allows sets to transfer the data to a data warehouse, BI, or data visualization solution like Tableau, Power BI, or Qlik.
However, the problem is that everything beyond a few basic versions is quote-based, so you never know how much it’ll cost you until you book a meeting.
Supermetrics user reviews
Let’s now take a look at what other users say. We’ve compiled verified reviews from reputable software review websites like G2 and Capterra.
Non-existing support
“Takes a lot to get it to work — expensive — no support”
Talya L., a co-founder and CTO of a small business says that Supermetrics would be an incredible tool if it worked right.
For the price of the service, there should be at least chat or phone support. This way, the only way to get in touch with Supermetrics customer support is by email, and it takes weeks or months for them to respond.
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- “It's been 6 months and almost $1,500 in spend and can't even get it to work or even get any responses back from support.”
She even tried contacting them through LinkedIn, to no avail.
Buggy data transfer
“If you're considering Supermetrics, just don't.”
A user Wes N. is a managing partner in a small business that used Supermetrics to automate ad account reporting. They choose Supermetrics for the sheer number of connectors for different platforms.
However, they soon ran into a problem: the data that Supermetrics pulled in was systematically inaccurate. For example, ingested data on “the amount spent” from Facebook Ads never matched what Facebook Ads showed.
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When they contacted Supermetrics support, they got a reply that "...data is always an estimate, and it becomes more accurate over time".
This verified user further says that, at one point, the Supermetrics team was gaslighting them, by insisting that numbers from two different screenshots were the same when they clearly weren’t.
This user also complains about the pricing — what’s on the website is not what you end up paying. In the end, they paid 3-4 times more without additional benefits.
Unexplainable pricing increases & unreliable connectors
“Ridiculous price hike and unstable connector”
Another verified Supermetrics user says his company chose Supermetrics because they wanted to speed up the setup time for reports in Looker Studio.
However, the connectors weren’t always stable and his team spent many hours trying to make data transfer work.
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Then, from one point on, they were charged 3-4 times the original price without any useful add-ons.
The customer support wasn’t of much use, either with the connectors or the pricing issue.
Eventually, they decided to switch to an in-house BigQuery data pipeline.
Messy data, frustrating & slow
“There are cheaper, better, easier options.”
Henry C., a digital strategist in a SaaS company complains that in his company they never got the level of insight that they expected from Supermetrics. The automation often failed and they still had to manually track and record performance data after they set up the tool.
In his words, Supermetrics tries to do much and makes it messy and not user-friendly.
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Connecting new channels pulls in tons of data automatically that you don’t need so you need to manually sort through the lists of what to select and what not. Social media tracking was incomplete and never provided accurate data.
When this user and his team decided to cancel, it took Supermetrics support days to respond — coincidentally, they only answered the day after that month’s auto-pay went through.
Getting it to work
“Impossible to get started with”
Daniel J. who is a head of marketing in a food & beverage company, says that Supermetrics probably works just fine — if you already use it or know someone who can set it up for you.
If you’re a new user, you’re on your own with no customer support.
After 28 days, this user was still struggling to get started with building data sheets.
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The answers he got from customer support were either inadequate or useless, even for simple requests. Not to mention that it took up to a week for them to reply.
Final verdict
As we can see, multiple users mentioned the same issues with Supermetrics over and over again.
It might have an impressive number of integrations and the reporting via Looker workaround works fine.
However, setting the tool up is not always intuitive and users are struggling with the data transfer feature.
Another recurring issue is customer support which not only takes a long time to respond but has shown to be unprofessional on multiple occasions.
The third biggest complaint was Supermetrics' pricing policy. Users have reported inexplicable increases in price for no apparent benefits or paying more than listed on the website.
At Whatagraph, you won’t have such problems.
Our data transfer is easy to set up with a couple of clicks:
Whatagraph has a native reporting feature with more than 100 stunning templates for different types of reports including marketing, SEO, PPC, eCommerce, and many more.
No need to export data to another tool. Just connect the sources, and start creating engaging interactive reports.
And if by any chance you get stuck, rest assured that Whatagraph customer support will not abandon you – our customer team is on standby 20 hours a day, 5 days a week.
If you're looking for seamless data transfer, point-and-click reporting, and dedicated customer support, choose Whatagraph and stay on top of your game.
