LinkedIn Ads Tool Spotlight: Supermetrics -Ep 61

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and AJ created together

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Show Transcript

Have you heard of Supermetrics? If you're a LinkedIn advertiser, it's your new best friend. We're covering the capabilities on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we're highlighting another tool today in the LinkedIn advertisers arsenal. We're discussing a tool that I've been using now for years. It's absolutely indispensable for our team, because we're managing so many different accounts. And we're dealing with so much data. That tool is called Super metrics. And it's a very simple way of getting all of your ads data into a spreadsheet, or visualization tool for better reporting and analysis. I'm excited to welcome Anna Shutko from Supermetrics to answer my questions, and give you the inside scoop on what's coming. Anna and I go way back. And we've even collaborated on a free dashboard for LinkedIn advertisers, that you'll all get here in the show notes and I think you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Okay, I'm really excited here to have Anna Shutko from Supermetrics. She is the Brand Strategist at Supermetrics. She's also host of the awesome podcast, The Marketing Analytics Show, make sure you go and subscribe to that right now,if you're not already. She is based in Helsinki, Finland. And she was number seven on the Supermetrics team. She has been there over five and a half years she is one of the OGs for sure. She's also an avid cyclist and skier. Anna, I'm so excited to have you on the show. We've been friends for a long time. Thanks so much for joining us.

Anna Shutko 1:42
I know, right?! Thank you so so much for having me. I'm super excited to be on the show.

AJ Wilcox 1:49
I'm just as excited to have you I have so many great questions for you. Well, I'm the host. And so if I say that they're great, it's a little bit biased, but didn't really have some questions I think are gonna be really good for you. And for those of us who are listening, tell us anything about yourself that you want anything I may not have covered in your intro.

Anna Shutko 2:05
Yeah, sure. So I think you nailed my bio. So I did a piece of furniture with Supermetrics. As I like to joke about it. I've been at the company for quite a while now more than five years. Wow. It's crazy when you think about it. So what people usually find interesting because I sometimes go in client calls and then when my colleagues introduce me, they're like, yeah, she's been here with us for such a long time. And people who knows Supermetrics are very, very surprised, because I guess not so many people like me have been with the company for a long time. We were a tiny team back then. Now we've grown fantastically. And we've grown so fast. Now we're over 250 people. It's crazy. So yeah, it's been a wild ride. And yeah, like I said, I've been moving between different areas of marketing between different departments. So I started as a growth marketer, then I went on to become a product marketing manager. I was also product manager, I was managing the relays and different connectors. And then I moved on to brand marketing. And now I'm super excited about my new role. So I'm building the brand measurement system, and I'm pretty sure we're gonna hear more about it. But yeah, that's a little bit about me. So many different areas. It's super exciting to see the company grow. It's super exciting to change all these different roles and learn more about connectors, including or favorite LinkedIn connectors. So that's a bit of a thing.

AJ Wilcox 3:39
Oh, beautiful. And I am a fan of the LinkedIn connectors for sure. So thank you for your great work on those. Let's go ahead and start in here on the first question. So for those who are not already familiar with Supermetrics, what are the challenges that Supermetrics solve. Why is Supermetrics originally in business?

Anna Shutko 3:58
Yeah, definitely. So Supermetrics essentially, is a data pipeline tool, as I like to call it. So we transfer data from a variety of different data sources or connectors, how we call them interchangeably. And these are LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, e-commerce platforms like Shopify. We cover over 80 different platforms. And like I said, literally any most popular and big marketing platform, you name it. And we transfer all this data to set up different data destinations. So we have sub categorized them into spreadsheets. So these are your Google Sheets and your Excel. Then there are different data visualization tools like Google Data Studio, or Power BI, Tableau, so data analytics/data visualization tools. And the third group is our data warehousing clusters. So we transfer data to different data warehouses like Azure, Google BigQuery, etc., etc., etc., And data links so you can combine your all your data in one place and store it securely. So that's a little bit about Supermetrics. So because we cover a lot of data destinations, and we connect to many different platforms and transfer the data, we cover a variety of different scenarios here. And this is actually historically has been the challenging part within product marketing, which also makes it very, very interesting that because we have so many products, we can help you cover multiple scenarios of what you want to do with your data. So you can have your reporting and dashboarding. So these are your client facing reports for agencies. And if you're an in house marketer, you can create your so called boss pacing reports, you have to create within your team. So these can be done in tools like Google Sheets, there are lots of writers who take advantage of Google Sheets and Excel and the formulas they can create there. And also, of course, do the visualization tools like Google Data Studio, super easy to add connectors there, it's super easy to create beautiful reports there and share them with your team. Then there are some cases of ad hoc analyses. And these are usually related to the questions you need to answer right now. So for example, why is my LinkedIn Ad spend so high and I have not seen the results? Or why does target audience A perform better than target audience B? So if you have this question and you really want to quickly acquire your data to answer the specific question, Supermetrics for Google Sheets can be a really good tool because we have the sideboard technology where you can select the metrics and dimensions you want to pick, and then it will pull the data into the spreadsheet, so that you can quickly answer very pressing questions. And another use case we have is the data warehousing use case where you can tie data across multiple different sources. So instead of just looking at one or two, or three or five data sources, you can create really complex models. But in order to create these models, you need to store your data in one place in order to join all this data. So here, you can pull all the data into your Google big query and then visualize it with a helpful view. But you can also perform the necessary data transformations within this data warehouse. So for example, you can compare the performance of your ad networks such as Google versus Facebook, again, you can segment and test different audiences, you can join data in the way you want to see sequel. And also you can report on the whole user journey. So for example, your clients started by clicking on your LinkedIn ads campaign, and they went to your website. And then you capture their website behavior with Google Analytics, maybe some of this data is coming from your CRM. And then with the help of a data warehouse, you can store all these data and then inquiry to connect the pieces together and see the whole user journey. So here are our most popular use cases.

AJ Wilcox 8:20
Okay, so just out of curiosity for being able to track the whole buyer journey. What sort of software or tools do you need in place in order to I guess, get that journey across all the different platforms? Is that requiring that they're in a CRM or something that's already natively tracking all of that?

Anna Shutko 8:36
Yeah, so usually depends on the company. Some companies might not necessarily have the budget or the need for a CRM. Of course, having a CRM is ideal. So if you have something like HubSpot, or it's Salesforce, it's really, really good also because their API's are so robust. They allow you to create custom dimensions and custom metrics to track your unique use cases. So for example, your users have, like I said, clicked on your LinkedIn Ads, and then they land on a website. And then they have to fill in a form. And the form might be somewhere, like on a different website, maybe it's an event and you're hosting a registration on Eventbrite, say for example. So when they put their data into Eventbrite or somewhere else, you also need to somehow capture this data within your CRM. So an alternative solution here could be to build a web page there where they would fill all their details. And then you can store all this data within the server ad. And then at the same time, you can combine it with the data coming from LinkedIn Ads. So it really depends. I would recommend starting with a combination of like ad networks, and reporting on that data and then combining it with data from Google Analytics. This can be the easiest when you're using a CRM, but at the same time, you can already start seeing a better overview of your user journey, and then connect to your CRM and then build on top these custom goals and metrics to create more of a reporting system.

AJ Wilcox 10:16
Very cool. This is a topic that's been really top of mind for me, as I'm thinking about, as cookie apocalypse continues, and we losing our dependence on third party cookies. How effective are we as marketers going to be being able to track someone across the whole user journey when we know that, that cookies disappearing? This is fascinating to me So thanks for helping us out with that. So those are the problems that Supermetrics solves. Why is Supermetrics in such a good position to solve this problem? Why not, you know, Google themselves, just replace you with having a simple tool that just spits out their data. Same thing with LinkedIn? Like, why is Supermetrics solving this problem and not anyone else?

Anna Shutko 10:57
Yeah, that's definitely a really, really good question. I can talk about this for hours. But we only have a limited amount of time, I guess. So first of all, Google is one of our partners. So Google, of course, is a massive, massive company and they have an amazing set of tools, but they are not the whole ecosystem. So there are lots of other players like Facebook, like LinkedIn, like Twitter, like HubSpot. And they also provide a set of really, really good API's, which allow you to export the data on the campaigns that are run. So super metrics, like mentioned, helps combine all this data and then we push this data to a number of different destinations. These are not just Google Sheets, these are Excel, for example. So for example, if your company is using Microsoft and you are required to use the office space, then Supermetrics can be a real really good tool because we can help push this data to your Excel desktop, say you set up your inquiries, and then you go offline completely. And then you can analyze your data using Excel. So like I said, we don't only connect to Google platforms. We help connect different players within the ecosystem together. And another good example is our Data Studio product. So Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool for those of you who do not know. And they have native integrations with Google Analytics, Google Ads and other Google platforms, that is true. But for example, many marketers use Supermetrics to get data from Facebook or LinkedIn to the same data visualization tool. And if you're running ads on multiple different platforms, it would be a little bit silly to just analyze your Google Ads data without analyzing what you're doing on your LinkedIn as a platform, kind of like together. So we help marketers gain a very holistic view of their performance in the tools they already know, in the tools they already can use in the tools they already know how to use. So for example, if you know how to use Google Sheets, you can just install Supermetrics add on. And then you can continue using your favorite tool without this learning curve without the need to learn a new tool, and just query the data from the platform you want, say LinkedIn Ads, and just create the reports there. Or you can use these tools in combination. So we have a native Data Studio connector for our required products, for example, you've combined the data from multiple different sources in your inquiry project, and then you want to visualize this data. So you can use our Data Studio connector to do this. And the names of metrics and dimensions will have clear descriptions to to be very easy for you to understand what kind of metric you're visualizing, and how you can create a better report using all these tools together.

AJ Wilcox 13:54
Oh, I like it. Alright, thanks for sharing that. I definitely think I'm of the same opinion you are that any of the other networks or channels could easily come out with a product that allows easier access to the data they have. But the Supermetrics advantage here is just being able to aggregate from all of these different connectors, regardless of whether or not any of them come out with an easier way for us to do it ourselves. Tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other platforms. What do you get from that partnership? How long have you been partners, that kind of thing?

Anna Shutko 14:26
Yeah, sure, definitely. So with LinkedIn, we've been partners for quite some time. And there are many, many marketers, 1000s of marketers, is what we're talking about that reported their LinkedIn Ads. And then concrete budget pacing reports with Supermetrics. So we've recently demoed our product to your team. And like I said, we have really, really good and close collaboration there. And in addition to LinkedIn, we partner with Stack Adapt, HubSpot, Google, like I mentioned, AdRoll and many, many other data source and data destination companies. So when we partner with a company, we try to create the best possible value for the end user, of course. So we love creating templates for Data Studio especially. We've created some with the HubSpot. So we sit together with their product managers and think, Okay, what kind of metrics would be great to visualize for users. And we create completely free reporting templates with all the needed metrics and dimensions that our user can use as they are, or they can just take them as a blueprint for their own reports, they can tweak the metrics, they can tweak dimensions they can do that they want. And it's really amazing to partner with these companies, because we can combine the best of both both worlds so to say, so we have the reporting and analytics and data consolidation expertise, and the platform's bring their own know how, their knowledge to the table. So AJ you and I created this really, really good LinkedIn Ads dashboard. And this is one very good example of how your know how or some platform managers know how can be combined with Supermetrics know how.

AJ Wilcox 16:20
Which is beautiful, we are going to link to that dashboard down below in the show notes so everyone can get access to it. But, Anna I'm so glad you brought this up. Because this has been a couple years ago, or a few years ago now. But we worked for about six months, I think on creating this dashboard, we call it the ultimate LinkedIn Ads dashboard. It's in Data Studio, it's totally free, like you mentioned, and anyone out there can go and get really complex analysis of their LinkedIn Ads. And that was because of you and I working so hard on that. I'm a big fan, I hope everyone goes and grabs that. Just to make it clear as to what Supermetrics is doing for LinkedIn advertisers. I mean, it's it's cool that you guys aggregate all of the different data and channels together into one spot. I think marketers who are responsible for more than one channel would love that. But for LinkedIn, specifically, you advertisers who are listening, you know how hard it is to get data out of LinkedIn. If every time you want to do a report, you have to go and click the export feature inside of campaign manager, and then put it into Excel, and then you know, do whatever formatting changes, you need to do, create pivot tables, then all of a sudden, all of that data is it's a snapshot of it, you can't do anything else with it. And so the next time your boss asks for a report, you're going and doing it again. What Supermetrics does is it will take, even on a schedule, this is my favorite part about it, you can say I want this data going into Excel or into Google Sheets, and I want it every day at 2am. I want it to go pull the next day's data. And then it's always there any report any pivot table that you build, all you have to do is just refresh. And now you'd never have to build that same report ever again. So, so cool. We'll talk about more of my favorite features of Supermetrics here a little bit later. But I just wanted everyone to know like, this is why it's so valuable for you. This is why I'm doing this tool spotlight on Supermetrics. Because there just is no other way to do with LinkedIn, what Supermetrics does. So I want to hear from you. What are the capabilities of Supermetrics, especially as it pertains to LinkedIn advertisers?

Anna Shutko 18:28
Yeah, definitely. So I've mentioned a couple of capabilities. And like I said, because we have a product umbrella, it allows us to help customers solve multiple reporting and reporting related issues. So we have your ad hoc reporting, where we can acquire the data on the fly. And this is your Google Sheets, Excel products. We help with the data consolidation. These are your data warehousing products, building beautiful data visualizations, or you can have little exploration in Looker or Tableau or Power BI. Another really interesting thing I'd like to highlight here is that as you know, LinkedIn ads API constantly changes will always constantly change. LinkedIn is always coming up with new features. And he was right, you mentioned that it's challenging to export the data out of LinkedIn Ads. And this is something we're really help with, but it will also help you export this data in the right format. And we can help you create reports with really, really high data granularity. So what it means in practice is that you can test and report on many different pieces of a LinkedIn Ads campaign audiences. You have your campaign types, creatives, objectives, and you can break down your campaign into different pieces, pass these pieces individually or perform an AB test, and then make really, really smart optimizations. So this is one thing that I really, really like and would like to highlight here. And typically, we help achieve this with our Google Sheets product. And one very precise example is, again, the dashboard AJ and I have built. Belt. So you can report on not one, but four different types of spend. So there are formulas that help you calculate your total spend, projected spend, goal spend, as in the amount of you have to spend without under over spending. And then the cumulative spend to something you've spent overall. And here, we've taken one metric, which is spend, and then your budget goal, and then transformed into four different kinds of spend. And this brings me to my earlier point about data granularity, you can report on really granular data. So you can break down your spend by day, you know, Google Sheet, then create these calculations to have these four different types of spends. And then think about it holistically for not one, but four different viewpoints. And then create your budget pacer that can help you allocate budgets. Because LinkedIn Ads is a very costly platform, as we all know. So having these different types of spend calculating these different types of spend is really, really helpful. And the same thing goes with audiences and can campaign types. You can break all these spend down by multiple different dimensions, like what kind of audience brings the best ROI, what kind of campaign type performs better than the other campaign types. What kind of creative helps me get more clicks? So you can get really, really nerdy with your data. And this is something I really, really love. And another beautiful thing is that you can then combine this data. So if you don't want to look at it in a very granular way, you can also combine all this data in Google Data Studio report. And again, this is something that we've tried and tested, and it worked. So after you've analyzed all these types of spend, you can push them into the to see the dashboard to see bigger trends. So for example, you've noticed that your projected spend during this month is higher than your projected spend over the last couple of months. And you can start thinking, why you can understand what might be like bigger drivers behind this change. And in addition to this, you can add all different types of other data. For example, you can add your data on AB testing to see which campaigns have performed better historically. Or you can even add your data from LinkedIn Pages. Because if you use LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Pages in combination with can be a very, very powerful duo. It can help you uncover many sides on your audience. So there are a lot of different ways in which Supermetrics can help you slice and dice your LinkedIn Ads data. But also create really, really good reports that can help you get a general overview.

AJ Wilcox 23:02
I love this, there's no data that you can get from campaign manager that you can't get within Supermetrics. And you own the data, you get to do whatever you want with it. So just like what Anna was talking about, with the ability to break down your spend by ad type and by audience, all these things are fantastic. But then you realize you could have a Google sheet or a page in your Data Studio dashboard that allows you to see the AB tests you're running, and another page that might show you just your budget, like what Anna was talking about. And another one that could be just your metrics at a glance like, hey, how are my general click through rates, or my general conversion rates, all of this you can do, it's super easy. And just in the dashboard that Anna and I built for you here a couple years ago, all of that is like already set up for you. So very, very cool. Anything else you want to share about the capabilities that we should go over?

Anna Shutko 23:58
Yeah, definitely. Also, we have real really nice use cases. There is a tab on our website where you can read more about what other clients are doing. And I know it's useful for a fact because our customer success managers have found it very useful. So you can also learn from other people and you can check what some other guys are doing with their Facebook Ads campaign and apply the same ideas to your LinkedIn Ads reporting, which I think is super super exciting, because understand and basically steal ideas in the best possible way. Understand how others are running their reports. Another really, really good feature is the automated way of reporting. For example, once you've set your LinkedIn Ads budget tracker in spreadsheet, you can say, hey, I want to update my data and if my spend increases, and if it crosses you know the threshold to XYZ amount, send me an email. There is literally no human error unless you set up the query correctly. So you can easily get the data you want, whenever you want. And you can also set up rules and get customized alerts whenever something goes wrong. So you don't need to monitor your ad campaign on a daily basis. You don't need to worry about this, you set the report once, and then you forget about it. And then you can think about creatives, audience testing, whatever you want, whatever is on your table. So that allows you to focus on more interesting problems, which has always been the case for me, for example, when I'm using Supermetrics, I noticed that every single time I'm able to automate something, I can use this time on something else, which is something more exciting. And also, you can report in your campaigns faster, which of course, is a great thing, since you save a lot of time and then can spend it on something else. And yeah, like I said, we help cover pretty much a variety of reporting use cases, we also have a template gallery. So you can check it out on Supermetrics.com. We have our Google Sheets template gallery, we have our Data Studio template gallery, and we're gonna link to the dashboard AJ and I created so you can see how you can visualize your LinkedIn Ads data.

AJ Wilcox 26:17
Oh, I love it. Thanks for sharing those. So what are some of the results that your customers have seen for their LinkedIn Ads because they are using Supermetrics?

Anna Shutko 26:26
Yeah, definitely. So first of all, they are seeing improved targeting. Like I mentioned, once are able to really select your data in a variety of different ways. You can dig deeper into it, and then understand what exactly is working and what exactly is not working. So imagine, if you're diagnosing a patient, and you have only one, two, or maybe tools, that's not really going to give you enough information into what's wrong. And a campaign cannot really tell you what's wrong about it. So once you have a whole tool set being maybe Supermetrics for Google Sheets, data warehousing, etc, etc. You can slice and dice your data in a variety of different ways. Now you can diagnose your patient much better. You can pinpoint exactly what's wrong, whether it's the campaign type, or the spend, or the audience, or maybe creative, or maybe something else. And then you can really, really understand how exactly we're going to go about this. So of course, all that leads to increase ROI, time saved, and improved communication. What we've seen within the teams, because instead of arguing, you know, oh, you've adjusted this spend in a wrong way, no we should have increased these bids, you have much more intelligent conversations. And hopefully your team dynamic improves, because you can just look at the numbers. And this is something we also use internally. We just pull up a dashboard, we just check the numbers and the numbers never lie, and then they tell you the direction you need to take. And we just go from there. So it's very, very cool to use data to your advantage.

AJ Wilcox 28:16
Amen to that. And how much does Supermetrics cost for these advertisers who want to use it for their LinkedIn campaigns and haven't used it before?

Anna Shutko 28:24
Yeah, definitely. So it really depends on the product. So I don't want to provide inaccurate information. So the best way to check it is to go to Supetmetrics.com and then check the data destinations you want to use. And then check how you want to report on your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. So the price for Google Sheets is of course different from the price you are going to have for your data warehouse. But if you need a custom solution, our sales team is of course happy to help you. So you can select not just LinkedIn Ads, but a variety of different connectors. And this is what I normally would recommend. So don't just pick LinkedIn Ads, you can pick Google Analytics, or LinkedIn Ads, and LinkedIn Pages, for example. You can combine these data with our ad data plus google analytics connector for our Google Data Studio destination. There is a massive combination, all different data sources and the different data destinations you can potentially have so the price of course depends on that. And also, the pricing is relatively simple. You know, it might not sound as simple when I'm trying to describe it. But once you pick your destination, once you pick your connectors, you just pick the number of your accounts and how often you want to refresh your data. But that's about it. Once you know all these factors, once you understand which one wants to go with, then it's pretty simple.

AJ Wilcox 29:54
And it is really reasonably priced. I've been using the tool now for years. Absolutely love. That's why I'm doing a tool spotlight on Supermetrics when there are plenty of other LinkedIn tools that I'm probably not going to cover. So thanks for providing such an awesome tool at good pricing. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back in the LinkedIn

Speaker 4 30:13
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked. com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox 30:22
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the utmost scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, and we'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you.

AJ Wilcox 30:51
Alright, let's jump right back into the interview. Let me ask you, we've talked a lot about the capabilities of the platform and the company. What's your favorite feature of Supermetrics? Like, you're obviously a marketer yourself and a dang good one? What is the most helpful aspect of it to you?

Anna Shutko 31:06
Yeah, sure. So first of all, I really, really love that we collaborate with our data destination partners very closely. And that allows us to develop product which sits within a data destination so to say, in most cases. Not all our products need data destinations, but most do. And I'm talking about all our Google Data Studio we co developed together with Google's team, working very closely with their engineers. So you can go to Google Data Studio, you can create any kind of report with Supermetrics, without ever leaving Google Data Studio. And this is amazing. You don't have to go from one page to another page to the next page. You just go to your Data Studio, you select LinkedIn Ads as a connector, where you connect it to your dashboard. And that's it. You can basically query data and create beautiful reports. So the experience is very, very intuitive. It's very smooth. And same thing applies to our Excel and Google Sheet product. So we have a sidebar, where you can take metrics and dimensions you want to pull. And then some magic happens here and your data just appears within a spreadsheet. So the adoption is very, very fast. I remember when I first saw our Google Sheets product, I fell in love it it instant, and it happened more than five years ago. But it's still remember it because the experience was so good, even back then. And another really, really useful feature is perhaps the ability to pull data from and report on multiple accounts easily. So I'm not talking about data sources here. But accounts, for example, you are an agency, and you're running campaigns on 50,60, 70, 100, different LinkedIn Ads accounts. And you have a really, really big client. And then they have 70 accounts. And imagine connecting these accounts one by one to your dashboard would be a complete nightmare. With Supermetrics, you can just select them all at once or then pull them all into the same spreadsheet all into one database, to a one to one Data Studio report. And then with the drop down selection, you can just take which accounts you want to see date the data from and this data will appear. It's very, very, very helpful for our agency friends over there. And the same thing happens with all the other data sources. So Google's accounts and if you want to combine your LinkedIn Ads with Google Analytics data, it's very, very easy to report on.

AJ Wilcox 33:55
Very nice, I'll tell you, I have several things that I absolutely love about Super metrics. I've played with a lot inside of Data Studio. And what I love is number one, it's fast. When you're in Data Studio, and you're using Supermetrics as your data source, the pages just load nearly instantly. It's super, super fast. It's also really easy to use, like I use LinkedIn API. And I know what that's like to be looking at these metrics on the back end that have a name, and you're going I don't know what that name is. Supermetrics calls them things like every column, every source, every metric, every KPI, they're all named in ways that even just a very, very basic marketer, like brand new to the industry could still understand what it was they were building. If you've ever tried to take data directly from LinkedIn. So you export it to a CSV, and then you try to put that into Data Studio. What you'll notice is the columns aren't of the right data types, and you have to keep going into your spreadsheet and making changes when you use Data Studio or Google Sheets, but especially Data Studio with the Supermetrics connector, everything already comes in and exactly the right data types, you're never going to have to worry about, oh, my dates aren't showing up because Excel didn't recognize it was a date. And then Data Studio didn't recognize that it was either, you never have to worry about that. Something else that I love, let's say you go into campaign manager, you do an export to CSV. And it's a, let's say, an ADS report or campaigns report, when you look at that column of like, click through rate or cost per click, as soon as you try to combine that or do some kind of like an average, those averages don't mean anything. If you try to do an average of a whole bunch of percentages, it will make some kind of an average, but it'll be wrong. And Supermetrics fixes all those like every time we export something with Supermetrics. All of the columns are accurate all the time in a way that they wouldn't be from LinkedIn directly. I'll also mention one more thing, which is there was a metric that I wanted to see inside of super metrics that I knew LinkedIn had access to it was a new one. And I mentioned something to you, Anna. And you said, Oh, let me message the engineering team. And I want to say it was within like, a couple hours, you've messaged me back and said, Hey, check it, we should have that data available now. And so it's fast, like Supermetrics is always on top of new changes.

Anna Shutko 36:23
I think we should definitely hire you, AJ, if you're ready to move to Helsinki, just know, just let me know, I have a spot for you on the team.

AJ Wilcox 36:32
I am very good in cold weather. So we should talk about it. Let me ask what's coming up in the future that you're super excited about with Supermetrics?

Anna Shutko 36:40
Yeah, so there are so many things that are coming up. First of all, we have multiple new data warehousing destinations for all of you data nerds out there. So you can store your LinkedIn Ads data in more places. And also, we are always developing our data sources, and then pattern paths for now. So you can then combine this one connects data with a variety of data sources. And that's been on the product side. I am always very excited about the new product developments. But also, I'm very exciting about The Marketing Analytics Show. This is the podcast that I host. We're gonna interview really, really cool guest. You're going to hear more about the first party data. So something AJ and I briefly talked about at the beginning of this podcast, and how you can tag your data correctly before you cleanse your data warehouse, and many, many other cool topics. And every single time I talk to these guests on super, super excited because the share very interesting viewpoint about this industry.

AJ Wilcox 37:52
I love it. I'm a subscriber of the podcast, make sure you all go back and listen to episode four, because yours truly was on there. Just kidding. You don't have to listen to that particular episode, go listen to something that you don't already know super well. If you're listening to the show, you probably get everything that we talked about. Something that you mentioned, that I think is so helpful is that if you're making all of your decisions, from the data that you get directly from LinkedIn, you will find that you're making the wrong decisions. What I mean by that is like the data you get from LinkedIn on things like even conversions, leads, means next to nothing, until you find out whether those are qualified leads, whether those leads are actually turning into sales. And so Anna, what you mentioned that is so cool is this direction of moving into the data warehousing solutions. So now you have access to what LinkedIn has. But then with other CRMs and other data partners and data warehouses, you're able to then combine that with the data that you can find only from your CRM, or other sources that can report to you on number of qualified leads and other elements of lead quality, how many proposals sent, closed deals, what the deal closed for, and you can actually report on what really matters. So that makes me really excited. So final question. This might be something you've already answered. But what are you most excited about either personally or professionally, yourself?

Anna Shutko 39:15
Yeah, sure. I am excited about a few things in general. And like mentioned, there have been really, really exciting product developments at Supermetrics. But one thing I wanted to pinpoint is that right now I'm building the brand measurement system. And this is basically a series of data transformations and dashboards that help combine all the data about our brand and how it's performing. And I'd like to say we drink our own champagne, it's a Supermetrics. So of course, we're using Supermetrics to consolidate all this data. So it's really exciting to work in this project. And it's really exciting to see how our product works from the client perspective. And of course, whenever I'm ready, I'm happy to share all the insights and all the learnings.

AJ Wilcox 40:09
Wonderful. Well, as you're coming out with that stuff, how can people follow you? How can people obviously I would say, make sure you subscribe to The Marketing Analytics Show. But how else can people find out this stuff as you're releasing it?

Anna Shutko 40:21
Yeah, sure. So I am on Twitter. So it's @AnnaShutko on Twitter. And you can just follow me there. I promise you, I really promise that I will post more and I will post more updates on the podcast and insights that are learned after building this system. And another way to connect with me is to follow me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me there, you can send me a DM and I will also be posting some of the updates there.

AJ Wilcox 40:54
Oh, I love it. Okay, we'll put all those links here in the show notes below. So make sure you do follow Anna, reach out to her if you have questions. Anna, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think it's very obvious that I'm a huge Supermetrics fan. I really just appreciate our collaboration in the past, and everything you've shared. Is there anything else that you want to share with us before we jump off?

Anna Shutko 41:15
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, AJ, for inviting me, it was a very, very interesting conversation, great questions. And I love being interviewed by fellow podcast host. So one more thing before we leave. So I'll ask AJ to link the article we co-wrote in the show notes. So you can follow how exactly we came up with these four different types of spend you can monitor, and how you can report on AB test for your LinkedIn Ads campaign, there was a lot of good stuff there. So also, this article contains really practical instructions and how you can connect your LinkedIn Ads, and then create this superpower spreadsheet and then connect that spreadsheet to Data Studio dashboards so you can also use different charts and visualizations. So not only will you learn how to approach LinkedIn Ad spend reporting. You will also learn a bunch of different tools, hopefully. So check it out. I really hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. And I'm really, really happy to be part of this LinkedIn Ads community.

AJ Wilcox 42:27
Wonderful. Well, thanks, Anna. I will definitely link to all of that. And just a big shout out to you everything that you're building is awesome for us marketers. So a huge thank you from the LinkedIn Ads community.

Anna Shutko 42:37
Thank you so much. I'm so happy you are enjoying.

AJ Wilcox 42:39
All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Speaker 4 42:49
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox 43:00
Okay, like we talked about during the show, I have the Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and I created together. So check the link there in the show notes, you'll absolutely love that I'm sure. There's a killer template for budget tracking inside of Google Sheets, as well as the full Data Studio dashboard that we created together. You'll also see the link to Anna Shutko on Twitter, as well as her LinkedIn profile. So as she said, send her a DM, follow her, connect with her all that good stuff. She's also the host of The Marketing Analytics Show so you will see a link to that. Because all of you are podcast listeners, obviously, you'll definitely want to go check that out and get subscribed. Any of you who are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, or maybe you have a colleague that you're training or something like that, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's by far the least expensive and the best quality training out there and it's next to no dollars. It's pretty cheap compared to any other training. You'll enjoy it. Please do look down whatever podcast player you're listening on and make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you back here next week. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Honestly, I say it way too much. But it really means a lot. It makes a difference to me. So please, please, please go leave us a review. We'd love that with any suggestions, questions, feedback, anything like that. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.