Running a business and constantly improving its revenue is a continuous process that requires a lot of data to keep optimizing your campaigns.
However, it is quite a difficult process to collect all these important data, compile it, visualize and analyze it in the most effective manner.
All the essential data could be scattered across various tools in your marketing tech stack and it is extremely difficult to check all these tools separately to check for the KPI's you care about.
Thankfully, there are some good business analytics and dashboard generating tools that you can use to pull in and combine all these data from multiple sources into a single source that you can easily visualize and analyze.
Among these tools, Supermetrics is one of the most well-known in the market. It is an add-on for Google Sheets, Excel, and Google Data Studio that helps you import the data from all your marketing tools to Google Sheets, Excel, and Data Studio respectively.
As good as Supermetrics is for this purpose, it might quite expensive for some agencies and marketing that would want a more affordable alternative that offers the same functionality.
We will see the best such alternatives available in this post. Let's get right into it.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month for 10 data sources and 10 dashboards.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 3 data sources and 3 dashboards.
Databox is one of the most feature-rich client reporting and business intelligence visualization tool with more than 70 integrations available with a varied type of marketing tools including CRM's, email marketing tools, form builders, website builders, etc.
With Databox's excellent dashboard designer, you can build custom dashboards based on your specific requirements easily. If you do not intend to do it yourself, Databox has more than 200 pre-built templates that you can use as a starting point to customize it further.
That's an incredible number of templates that cover a lot of marketing tools for any marketing team or agency to build visual dashboards.
Databox also has excellent pricing with one of the best free plans available. The free plan lets you build 3 dashboards pulling information from 3 different data sources and up to 3 users can access it making it useful for even medium-sized agencies.
The data refresh happens daily in the free plan and the historical data is stored for a period of 11 months. All the paid plans have an hourly data refresh and the highest plan comes with unlimited historical storage.
The highest plan also lets you completely brand the dashboards with your company logo and completely remove the Databox branding. It also gives additional security by enabling password protection and limiting the dashboard access to a specific IP address.
Dashboards are completely optimized for any screen size or screen type including desktop, mobile, or even televisions. This is very useful for medium to large-sized teams, where real-time data and analytics can be displayed on a big screen that every team member can have a glance at any time.
You can set up alerts for specific goals you want to achieve in an important metric for your company. It is also possible to set it based on a pre-defined percentage increase or decrease. Another way is to get alerts when a metric crosses or gets behind an absolute number.
Another unique feature of Databox is the availability of mobile apps for both iOS & Android. This lets the team members of a marketing team track all the key performance indicator's on the go with real-time alerts and notifications.
You can also enable push notifications for mobile to alert you immediately of any changes in the important metrics.
You can also edit your dashboards and share them with your teammates all with the mobile app. To get it even further, there is an app even for the Apple watch.
Databox also allows you to build KPI scorecards for your teams where you can set up goals and analyze the performance of your sales and marketing teams.
These scorecards can be of huge help in team collaboration across various departments and could save a tremendous amount of time as everyone in the company is aware of the goals they need to achieve and where they stand at any specific time.
Pricing - starts from €35 per month for 5 clients and unlimited dashboards.
Free Plan - No, but a 14-day free trial is available for all paid plans.
Octoboard is another fantastic alternative to Supermetrics that has exclusive plans for both individual businesses and marketing agencies.
Octoboard has more than 60+ integrations with a varied type of marketing tools and more than 200+ templates to start building your dashboards.
All the plans except the basic starter one come with every feature included with the only difference being the number of clients you can manage with Octoboard. Also, every plan comes with access to an unlimited number of users making it a perfect fit even for large agencies or marketing teams.
Another excellent feature in Octoboard is complete white-labeling of the dashboards with your company's logo and colors. It is also possible to client portals under your own custom domain which is fantastic for branding and a key advantage for your agency among the competitors.
Octoboard also has a really good agency-specific feature where you can do an unlimited number of SEO audit reports for your prospects. It is possible to embed SEO audit forms on your website and generate a continuous flow of inbound leads for your agency.
In addition to all the marketing tool integrations, you can also connect Octoboard with Zapier events. In this way, you can pull in data from more than 1200 apps that Zapier supports and display it as events in real-time. Octoboard also has a Google Sheets integration to import any custom data of your preference.
You can also completely automate the client reporting process by scheduling reports by email at specific time intervals. Octoboard also has a search engine rank tracking feature built-in and hence it saves you quite a lot of money by not using another rank-tracking tool if you are running an SEO agency. Octoboard supports display to big screens like televisions and monitors.
It also has a feature whereby you can pull in all the positive news feedbacks & trends your client has received across the web. This data can be integrated with the dashboard and shared easily to help prove the worth of your agency.
When it comes to PPC reporting, Octoboard has an excellent feature that lets you separate the ad spend in the reports to show the true ROI your agency brings in for your clients.
Octoboard is a fantastic tool for SaaS companies as well as it has a specific toolset exclusively to track SaaS metrics like payments made, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), cancellations made, customers churned, etc. This really helps to achieve key metrics like reduced customer churn and increased average revenue per user (ARPU).
This is incredibly helpful to easily present the key metrics while making a business pitch to investors or to make monthly & annual reports.
Pricing - starts from $19 per month for 2 users, 2 funnels, and 2 dashboards.
Free Plan - No, but a 14-day free trial is available for all paid plans.
With more than 30 integrations and some fantastic dashboard template designs, Oviond is another pretty good alternative to Supermetrics to build your client reports.
Apart from the usual dashboards, Oviond has an interesting feature called Marketing Funnels that lets you completely visualize every step in your sales funnel and see all the important metrics associated with each step.
For example, you can easily track how much money was spent on a specific social media ad campaign, how many impressions it got for you, and the total engagement it brought in along with the numbers on conversion rate.
To be able to see these for every campaign individually is a huge time saver for a marketing team that manages multiple campaigns. Some of the marketing funnel templates include basic engagement funnel, e-commerce funnel, lead generation funnel, etc.
Oviond also has some stunningly beautiful dashboard templates spread across multiple marketing channels and tools to choose from. Some of the templates include Facebook Ads Overview, Google Ads Overview, Google Search Console Overview, Instagram Ads Overview, Shopify Overview, General website traffic report, Search Engine Optimization report, etc.
There are more than 100 of these excellently designed templates for you to work with as a starting point for your marketing reports and live dashboards.
You can either choose reports on individual marketing channels or integrate every channel you want in a single blended report. The best part is you can also save custom templates for your specific needs and apply them across all of your clients easily at once.
You can set up the sharing of reports and dashboards through email. These emails can be completely customized as well to match your brand and add a personal touch to it. In addition to email, you can also share the dashboard through a unique link.
The reports can be password protected as well to add an additional bit of security if you are dealing with sensitive information sharing with your clients. Once you have built the dashboards, Oviond's built-in search functionality is really handy to easily spot the metrics you want to have a look at.
Oviond lets you select custom timing for automatic data refresh of the live dashboards. You can specifically select trend lines in the dashboard in areas where there is a continuous increase or decrease in the desired metric.
It also has some pretty good agency-specific features as well. For example, you can build an agency dashboard with data from all your clients in one place to have a bird's eye view of the performance of your agency.
You can also add and collaborate with your team members in building the reports by giving personalized access which is very useful for mid to large-sized agencies with many employees. All the clients can be grouped into different groups and folders for better organization.
Pricing - starts from $12.49 per month for 150 query credits.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 30 query credits.
KPIBees is one of the most affordable alternatives to Supermetrics and also the closest match in terms of its functionality as well.
Similar to Supermetrics, it is an add-on for Google Sheets and Excel that you can use to pull the data from various marketing tools and visualize them as live reports.
The best thing about KPIBees is how affordable it is. It is incredibly cheaper compared to Supermetrics with prices starting from just $12.49 per month. That's almost one-tenth of Supermetrics which is quite remarkable.
The number of integrations available might not as high as Supermetrics, but the team constantly adds new integrations periodically which is good to know.
There is a decent variety of templates to choose from and you can also add custom queries to pull data.
The data refresh time is quite impressive as well. The base plan has daily refreshed data and the top two plans have an hourly refresh. Considering the topmost Expert plan costs just $49.99 per month, it is amazing value for what it offers.
All the plans give access to unlimited templates, unlimited sheets, and an unlimited number of reports as well.
Exclusive Offer - Get 10% off all the plans in KPIBees. Use the Coupon Code "buildrealbusiness"
Pricing - starts from $85 per month for 100,000 unique website visitors and 1 pipeline.
Free Plan - Yes, available for Importing cost data to Google Analytics.
Owox is a Business Intelligence platform that you can use to pull in data to Google Analytics and Google BigQuery.
It is an extremely powerful tool that lets you import your entire cost data, website visitors' data, CRM data to BigQuery.
Owox has a Google Sheets add-on and Google Data Studio add-on that makes building reports and dashboards from the data compiled easily.
You can just import all the data from BigQuery to Google Sheets and build the reports you need. The reports get updated automatically and you can set the time interval for every data refresh. Owox add-on also gives you ready-made queries with dynamic parameters to get started easily even for anyone who might not be well versed with BigQuery.
It is also possible to send data the other way around, that is, from Google Sheets to BigQuery which lets you upload custom data as well. The reports can also be personalized for each employee making it easy to analyze the performance of each member of your team.
In terms of integrations, Owox is well covered with more than 30 tools including various ad services, data processing & analytics tools, call tracking software, etc.
The Insights feature in Owox is extremely powerful and of huge help for marketers & agency owners. It uses AI & Machine Learning capabilities to continuously analyze the performance of your marketing data points and gives you insights on areas to improve.
It can also run an annual forecast for your business to optimize your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Pricing - starts from $35 per month for 15 brands and unlimited team members.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 1 brand.
Metricool is an all-in-one business management platform that lets you schedule your social media posts, maintain all your ad accounts in one place, and get the reporting done as well.
You can easily get real-time live analytics of all your social accounts and advertising campaign performance in a single place. All the most social networks and advertising platforms are supported including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
It is also possible to connect your blog or any other specific web page to gauge the key performance metrics like page visitors, traffic sources, etc., and improve them constantly.
Metricool lets you connect both your Facebook page and groups to give deep insights on the performance of each post, engagement levels, demographics of your audience, etc. As you can also connect your ad accounts with Metricool, it is incredibly easy to promote your posts with just a click.
Metricool also comes with a built-in social media planning feature that lets you visually plan out all your social media content across various channels. It is a massive time saver for marketing teams and agencies as you can publish content across all the social media platforms from a single place without the hassle of logging in to each one of them.
It is possible to have all the content planned in a single calendar or you can build out separate calendars for each social media channel for better organization, particularly if you are a large agency handling multiple clients at once.
You can also upload all the content as a CSV as well for a more custom experience. It also has a native URL shortener built-in to get all the analytics for each post published. Metricool also helps in content curation so that you never go out of helpful content to share with your target audience. The Hashtag Tracker feature gives detailed analytics of the performance of your posts and your target hashtag.
When it comes to Twitter, in particular, there is a feature called Twitter Benchmark which lets you compare your Twitter profile with that of your main competitors to draw out a detailed comparison and action plan to act on the areas of improvement.
With regards to reporting, in addition to the built-in reporting and analytics, Metricool has a Data Studio Connector to get the reporting game to a whole new level. You can add all the data from Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, and YouTube, etc, and display it as custom reports. There are more than 25 data sources to connect with.
The reports can be completely personalized with your brand logo and colors. You can rearrange the tables and graphs as per your preference to get the specific look that matches your brand. The reports can be downloaded or sent to your clients by email directly.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. To wrap up, those are some of the best alternatives you can find in the market currently that are as good as Supermetrics and more affordable as well.
Each one is unique in its own way, but all the options are quite good and you could not go wrong with any of the ones mentioned above.