When you run marketing campaigns for clients, you know they’re interested in what you’re doing, how you’re spending their budget, and the results you’re driving. But pulling all of that information together and polishing it up for client meetings shouldn’t take hours and hours.
That’s where reporting software comes into play. The trouble is, there are a lot of options to sift through. The features and pricing you need may be different from what another agency or in-house team needs. Do they charge by the account or can you connect unlimited data sources? Are they designed for in-house reporting or client-facing reports? What are your options for customizing reports? How easy is it to share data and reports?
We tested 3 reporting software options: ReportGarden, Supermetrics, and Power My Analytics. Now, we’ll walk you through an in-depth look at features and pricing and recommend who each is best suited for.
Note: For this article, we brought in a content marketer who had never used any of the three tools discussed before now. What follows is her reaction to using the tools for the first time.
Features
The three contenders we’re looking at differ dramatically. Based on the features of each, you can draw a clear line between add-on tools and full-service solutions. Add-on tools alleviate some reporting hassles, but full-service solutions completely change the way you manage clients and reporting.
Key features for a reporting tool include:
- Integrations and data sources
- Ready-made templates
- Custom dashboards
- Seamless ability to share reports with clients.
With those features in mind, let’s take a closer look at what ReportGarden, Supermetrics, and Power My Analytics bring to the table.
ReportGarden (Try it Free)
Features
Of the reporting tools we tested, ReportGarden has the broadest feature set. That’s because it’s designed not just for reporting, but for managing all of your clients, campaigns, and reporting in one platform.
ReportGarden offers all the important reporting features — including more than 30 integrations, both custom and templated dashboards and reports, and easy shareability. You can connect any of the popular data sources, from Google Adwords to Mailchimp to Snapchat Ads. And the Client Portal feature means you can share dashboards and reports with clients, enabling them to log in and find every deliverable you’ve shared in one place.
ReportGarden’s reporting features are more than capable and among the easiest to pick up. On top of those features, ReportGarden offers a host of other features to streamline client and campaign management.
Automated billing and invoicing pulls spend data directly from the data sources you connect, and ReportGarden integrates with popular accounting software to make invoicing and budgeting a breeze. You can create professional proposals from customizable, ready-made templates, and clients approve with one click. The SEO suite means you can monitor organic and paid performance in one tool.
Our Experience
We tested ReportGarden last out of the three, and “breath of fresh air” is a huge understatement. Once you open an account or start a free trial, all you have to do is connect the data source(s) and you’re ready to rock and roll. It was the easiest and fastest setup process by far.
Once your data is connected, there are more than 20 report and dashboard templates to choose from — such as the Facebook Ads report in these screenshots:
Just select the template and your data syncs in a blink.
Edit templates and their elements directly in the report.
When we were ready to share our Facebook Ads report, publishing to the Client Portal couldn’t have been easier. Just click More and choose Client / Portal, then toggle on Publish to Client Portal.
And here’s the kicker: Once you’ve customized a report to your liking, you can schedule it to pull data automatically and publish to the Client Portal daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Think ReportGarden is right for your team? Click here to try ReportGarden free (no credit card required).
Supermetrics
Features
Supermetrics offers a handful of products designed as add-ons to Google Sheets, Excel, or Google Data Studio. If you already do reporting with one of these products, you know how cumbersome it can be to build useful, professional reports and dashboards. Supermetrics seeks to make that process easier by working on top of your existing reporting flow.
There are ready-made templates to choose from for most of the popular data sources, and if you’re an Excel or Sheets pro, you can build your own customized dashboard, too.
Supermetrics offers the most integrations of the three reporting tools, boasting over 40 connectable data sources. And you can schedule your reporting to automatically refresh (and email) on any interval, from hourly to monthly. If you choose Supermetrics for Google Sheets or Data Studio, you can enjoy the benefits of Google’s effortless shareability.
Our Experience
We tested Supermetrics for Google Sheets and connected our Facebook Ads account. Our first observation? Supermetrics definitely comes with a hefty learning curve.
It was quick and easy to connect our account as a data source, but getting the right data into a template was less so.
While there’s a wealth of over 35 templates to choose from, they weren’t as ready-made or easy to implement as you might expect. We inserted the Facebook Ads template, only to find several fields that ended up blank or showing an error (like in the screenshot below).
Sample Facebook Ads report based on a template in Supermetrics for Google Sheets.
In lieu of buggy and rigid templates, you can build your own custom reports and dashboards — if you’re adept with a spreadsheet.
Our overall impression was that Supermetrics can be helpful for visualizing and sharing data internally. But the less-than-stellar templates limit the aesthetic quality and professionalism — and the likelihood we’d want to share these reports with clients.
Power My Analytics
Features
Like Supermetrics, Power My Analytics works on top of other data management and reporting solutions — in this case, you can choose either Google Analytics or Data Studio. You can connect one of 19 popular data source connectors, or (and we thought this was neat) you can request a custom connector from the Power My Analytics team.
Power My Analytics functions, essentially, as a suite of ready-made templates that work on top of Analytics or Data Studio. The templates are a great starting point for client reports, and you can edit and add to them directly to customize them. Between tailored reports, custom connections, and your choice of delivery output, customization is the main strength of Power My Analytics.
Since you’re using Google Suite, it’s easy to share reports across your team or with clients.
Our Experience
Our experience testing out Power My Analytics got off to a somewhat rocky start. The setup and user interface are a little confusing, but once you get connected and start working in Data Studio, it gets more intuitive.
The base Facebook Ads summary is a good place to start.
Like Supermetrics, Power My Analytics is more of an add-on to your existing setup than a full-featured reporting solution.
The templates, while great for visualizing data, needed a lot of customization and TLC on our part before they became something useful for client-facing reporting. Our takeaway is that Power My Analytics is designed more for basic reporting across teams, not for creating in-depth client reports.
That said, if you’re experienced reporting through Google Suite, you can probably make Power My Analytics work for you.
How Much Do They Cost?
When we started looking at prices, it was immediately obvious these options don’t lend themselves to easy cost comparison.
ReportGarden’s packages come at a monthly cost, and all of their plans include most of the features they offer. The key difference is how many accounts and dashboards, how much spend, and how many keyword units are included in the plan.
Supermetrics, on the other hand, offers three different plans for each of their three main offerings: Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Data Studio. They charge per user/ per month on two of those, and strictly per month on the other.
Power My Analytics charges per data source (or connected account).
So there’s no obvious answer to which reporting tool is most affordable or the best value. It all depends on your team’s needs and usage. We’ve pulled together pricing info for the packages each company offers, along with a breakdown of what you get for that price.
ReportGarden Pricing
Supermetrics Pricing
Power My Analytics Pricing
Who Should Use Supermetrics vs. Power My Analytics vs. ReportGarden?
Now that you have all the pertinent information about features and pricing for our three reporting solutions, how do you decide which is best for you? For some, the answer might have been obvious as you read through — but if you can’t tell from the info above, here are our recommendations for who should use Supermetrics, Power My Analytics, and ReportGarden.
ReportGarden: Best for Full-Service Marketing Agencies
We found ReportGarden to be the best solution for full-service marketing agencies who need an all-in-one solution that the whole team can pick up quickly. There’s no learning curve here — and with reporting, budgeting, and invoicing all together, ReportGarden is the only software here that actually eliminates the headaches and wasted time of reporting at scale.
Supermetrics: Best for Micro Agencies and Spreadsheet Geeks
Supermetrics is well suited to micro agencies who want an add-on tool to work on top of their existing reporting (in Excel, Sheets, Google Data Studio, or Analytics). While there’s a definite learning curve to creating and customizing reports, there’s potential to build something really useful in there. It’s less palatable as an option for larger teams since the per-user monthly cost for the Google Sheets and Excel products can add up quickly.
Power My Analytics: Best for In-House Marketing Teams
From our experience, Power My Analytics is well suited for individual companies and their in-house marketing teams. If you’re more concerned with analyzing your own data than preparing client-facing reports — and you don’t need to connect a ton of data sources — Power My Analytics can alleviate some of the pains of reporting in-house.
So Who Won?
You did, friend!
The bottom line is that each of these solutions — Supermetrics, Power My Analytics, and ReportGarden — is the best option for some subset of the population that does manual reporting.
Whether you need to connect hundreds of sources or build 100% custom dashboards from the ground up, there’s a reporting tool that can at least alleviate and, at best, eliminate the struggles you face with both client-facing and in-house reporting.
With a comprehensive comparison in hand, you can make the right decision for your team and choose the solution that illustrates your value to clients.
Want campaign reporting to be effortless? Click here to try ReportGarden free (no credit card required).
