Removing Data Silos for BrandCraft

Centralising agency data is key to the agency's growth

It was clear that having all data in one place would be key to unlock new insights and increase the team’s efficiency. We set up a BigQuery data warehouse that the agency owns and to work fast we used Shape’s Enterprise ADI as a data pipeline and added additional data sources via custom built APIs.
This is a case study about how BrandCraft decided to pursue their innovation agenda and everything they achieved in the first month and a half of working with one of our experts on retainer. Upskilling the team is just as important and we delivered training sessions on data visualisation in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) and Google Ads scripts as part of our service.

8 Solutions

Shape powered data warehouse, Google ads scripts, additional data sources via APIs…

2 Months

We work on retainer 2 days a month building solutions and enabling the team with trainings

25 Ideas in the backlog

We work on retainer 2 days a month building solutions and enabling the team with trainings

BrandCraft's team now benefits from our ongoing expertise

The Challenge:

BrandCraft’s leadership team has an ambitious vision and the agency is growing. They knew that owning their agency’s data and managing it centrally would be the key to introduce more advanced analytics for account optimisation and management purposes. But having PPC data experts and developers on payroll is expensive and they are hard to find. However, Chris Davis (Director of Digital Marketing) knew exactly how valuable this technical expertise is for an agency after working with major brands like UberEats.

Our Service:

A dedicated Acuto PPC data and automation expert works alongside the team to manage the agency’s central data warehouse and builds custom solutions for the agency on an ongoing basis. Anything from cross-channel reporting for clients, connecting to APIs to pull in additional data sources, writing custom Google Ads scripts for certain clients and industries, as well as upskilling the team with training sessions on data visualisation and scripts.

“Connecting with the right data partner can be difficult. At Brandcraft it was crucial to partner with a company that not only had a marketing background, but also understood the difficulties that can present themselves to agencies.
Along with the initial understanding, Acuto is also continually bringing additional ideas and solutions to our team that allow us to better perform for our clients. They keep our company values top of mind when presenting ideas and have truly become a partner in not only the growth of our agency but also in the continued success of our clients.”

Chris Davis

Director of Digital Marketing at BrandCraft

What we've built together so far

Data warehouse

Reporting

Optimisation

Training

How we work

We work on retainer, which means BrandCraft gets guaranteed access to two full days with a dedicated PPC data and automation expert per month.
Using sprint methodology BrandCraft’s team leader and our expert agree on priorities for each “sprint”. Acuto experts have years of experience working in big agencies (in this case Merkle) they are proactive and suggest solutions for challenges the team is experiencing. But ultimately the BrandCraft team decides on what takes priority.
Enablement and training is key when owning solutions, we don’t just build and leave. For example, we built a data infrastructure solution as the foundation for client reporting so in month the team was trained on Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) to be able to customise reports. BrandCraft’s account managers also get Google Ads scripts training to enable new strategies.
As we start innovating ideas keep flowing and BrandCraft’s team is constantly adding ideas to the product backlog for automations and optimisations that will be prioritised in future sprints.

Deep dive replacing tapclicks

BrandCraft needed a more stable and cost-effective cross-channel solution to report to clients: they didn’t want to waste time manually downloading and sending reports to clients, and they wanted to own their agency’s data and store it in their own data warehouse. TapClicks is an online platform that advertises itself as a smart marketing cloud, but reports kept breaking and it did not have the necessary customisation options for BrandCraft’s clients.
BrandCraft now owns this key process and owns a purpose-built BigQuery data warehouse and data is imported automatically via custom built APIs and by Shape Enterprise ADI. Shape’s ADI is much more than a data pipeline. Among other things the solution makes it incredibly easy for us to pull data from various channels into a purpose-built advertising data warehouse and to normalise it to run cross-channel or agency-wide reporting. This allows us to save engineering time.
BrandCraft’s data warehouse is hosted in Google BigQuery which translates to massive processing power and automatic data replication for disaster recovery. It helps that storage and queries are incredibly cheap. This is an amazing setup for advanced analytics use cases like running machine learning models in the future.
We push the data out to a custom built Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboard because it is easy for non-technical staff to use. With our Shape powered data warehouse it is just as easy to push the data out to Google Sheets or any data visualisation or business intelligence platform, whether you use Looker, Tableau, Domo or Microsoft Power BI. That is simply a matter of preference.

What we've built together so far

Client accounts

And all associated campaigns,
ad groups, & keywords

Client accounts

And all associated campaigns,
ad groups, & keywords

Client accounts

And all associated campaigns,
ad groups, & keywords

Results

Control and ownership:

We unified all agency data in a fully managed advertising data warehouse that is hosted in BigQuery and owned by BrandCraft forever. Future proofing for advanced analytics and automated optimisation changes is a stable foundation for BrandCraft’s ambitious growth plan.

Custom APIs:

Google Analytics, Synup, SEMRush, CallRail, and many more to come!

Reporting:

Introduced more advanced cross-channel reporting visaualised in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). BrandCraft was able to get off their TapClicks subscription, saving them license fees and guaranteeing much more attractive, stable, and customisable client cross-channel reporting. No more sending PDFs to clients!

Performance enhancements:

Automated Google Ads bidding script optimising impression share and conversion rate.

Cost savings:

BrandCraft lowered their licensing costs because they went off TapClicks and they own custom API connections we built for them.

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