Three ways to tackle cost aggregation: Your guide to getting unified & accurate daily ad spend reporting

Do you lose hours each day reconciling costs from your ad networks?
yes or no

Are you tired of you, your boss, your teammates, and your finance team constantly questioning the accuracy of your data?
yes or no

Do you need daily cost and ROAS reporting in order to make faster optimizations?
yes or no

If you’re reading this, your answer is likely yes to “all of the above.”

Why? Your cost data is fragmented, and even when you manage to pull it together it won’t map properly to your revenue data because each of your media sources employs different schemas to your datasets. Whether you utilize just the big major players (i.e. Facebook, Google, Apple) or dozens of other media sources in your marketing mix, pulling your data, standardizing it and analyzing it remains a huge challenge for teams today.

So, while ROI is indeed one of the most important metrics in marketing, it remains one of the hardest to calculate accurately. But there is hope. Read on to understand the methods growth, marketing analytics & BI teams are using to tackle this problem.

1. Direct data connectors to all your media sources
Data Connectors do the heavy lifting for you by directly syncing to your media sources and placing your cost data in one place—accuracy guaranteed. From direct API integrations to web dashboards, email to internal BI systems, you’ll get flexible integration methods to ingest marketing data from any source across mobile, desktop and offline. This method gives you the ability to accurately match the network’s numbers including retroactive data changes. Beyond cost, you gain access to a wealth of information critical to driving efficient optimizations like creative, bids, campaign, geo and publisher. 

2. Mobile attribution tracking link parameters
You can manually attach macros to the tracking links you create with your mobile attribution provider so cost data is appended on top of every ad click. However, relying solely on tracking links leads to discrepancies with your network (on average 30%) and ad spend will likely differ from the actual invoices you receive, making reconciliations and retroactive data updates impossible.  This method has more serious limitations: lack of support for CPM & CPA campaigns, not all sources support these macros, and it won’t work for any non-mobile marketing channel.

3. Manual reconciliation in Excel
We’ve all been here, and sadly you know the drill all too well. Export all of your reports from each individual ad network, normalize it and then try to map it to your attribution and internal BI data. Spend hours manipulating the data, trying to standardize it, QA it, and ultimately feel 60% confident in its accuracy.

To avoid misguided decision-making, you need 100% data completeness and accuracy, period. The only way to achieve this is with method #1, direct connectors to all your media sources. With thousands of integrations, Singular is the premier option for your cost aggregation solution. We even support adding any type of spend beyond traditional ads i.e. referrals, podcasts, influencers, out-of-home (OOH). You name it, we can do it with thousands of out-of-the-box direct integrations. 

And we provide more than just aggregation…

How Singular Works

Step 1: Connect
From direct API integrations to web dashboards, email to internal BI systems, we have the most flexible integration methods to ingest marketing data from any source across mobile, desktop and offline.

Step 2: Transform
Stop wasting time on tedious, manual reporting tasks. We’ll automatically standardize, unify, and enrich your marketing data to transform into insights your team needs to grow.

Step 3: Analyze
A complete picture of marketing performance, across channels, with our native reporting to visualize, pivot, or slice-and-dice data in a few clicks for fast optimizations. 

Step 4: Load
Rather use your own tool? Load standardized and enriched marketing data directly into your favorite data warehouses like Redshift or BigQuery or storage services to power your favorite reporting tools like Looker and Tableau.

Ready for unified & accurate daily ad spend reporting? Talk to an expert now.  Get a demo!