[MUSIC PLAYING]
MINHAZ KAZI: Welcome to DataVis DevTalk.
I'm your host, Minhaz Kazi.
Our today's guest is Mikael Thuneberg.
Mikael is the founder and CEO of Supermetrics.
Supermetrics is a tool that fetches marketing data
into Google Data Studio and other platforms.
Mikael, welcome to the show.
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Thank you.
Great to be here.
MINHAZ KAZI: So Supermetrics and Google Analytics
and its developer relations team have a long history.
And I've heard that there was also a T-shirt involved
somewhere there.
Can you tell our audience about that entire story?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Sure.
Several years ago, I was working at the marketing department
of a gaming company.
And my job there was to do reporting on our marketing
activities.
But a large part of my time went into copy-pasting numbers
from Google Analytics and other sources into Excel.
And that was really time-consuming and boring.
So when the Google Analytics API came out,
I figured I could use that to automate that process.
And I did some googling around the issue,
and I found a forum post by Nick Mihailovski, who is now
Data Studio PM, saying that the first person who integrates
the Google Analytics API with Excel
gets a free Google T-shirt.
And I figured, that's perfect.
I got to solve my own problem, and I also got a free T-shirt.
So I did a small script that solves that issue.
And I shared that with Nick, and Nick said, that's good.
And he sent me the T-shirt.
But even more importantly, he blogged about my solution.
And that generated a lot of interest
and led me to quit my job and then to found Supermetrics.
MINHAZ KAZI: That is amazing.
In what areas does Supermetrics help its customers, and how?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Right.
So marketers-- they struggle with their data
being spread out in various different systems.
So they may be doing advertising on Google, Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn.
They have a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics,
they have a CRM--
various other systems where they have their data.
And getting the full picture is difficult.
Many marketers, they still rely on a manual process
of getting this data together.
So they might be doing copy-pasting into Excel
like I was doing.
They may be downloading CSVs and manually merging those
together.
Or they may have hacked together some scripts
that are unreliable.
What we do is we automate that process for them.
So we have built high-quality integrations
through all of these different advertising and marketing
tools.
And we get that data together and put that data--
or make the data available into tools that marketers generally
want to use, such as Google [INAUDIBLE],, Google Data
Studio, Excel, and others.
MINHAZ KAZI: How is Supermetrics relevant for your customers?
You mentioned that Supermetrics is
pulling in data from all of these different sources
and making it available on the tools.
So how are your users using that data in Data Studio?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Yes, so usually when
you advertise on different channels,
you want to see a combined view of how
your campaigns are performing.
So that's one thing they can do to get a cross-platform view
of their campaign performance.
They can also merge their advertising data
with their sales data, which is also an interesting use
case where they say, OK, our advertising cost
this much and then [INAUDIBLE] this much revenue based
on the leads we got.
MINHAZ KAZI: And you've also made
a lot of templates available for Data Studio
that people can use with your connectors.
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Yes, so what we
do when we create a connector, we also
want to create a high-quality template
to go with that connector.
So it's really easy for users to get started.
So when you start using any of our connectors,
there's a premade template that is populated with your data,
so you immediately see how your data looks like.
Based on a template, you can then
start doing customizations and modifying
that fit your particular needs.
MINHAZ KAZI: If an organization wants
to make their own data available to their customers for Data
Studio, how can Supermetrics help them in that area?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: So if there's no connector already available
for that particular data source, there are some options.
We have something called a custom [INAUDIBLE]
CSP XML connector, so that you can
use to get data from any endpoint that provides
data in one of these three formats,
so [INAUDIBLE], CSP, or XML.
And our connector takes that data
and processes it into the format the data studio expects,
so it's really easy to get that data into Data Studio
and start reporting straightaway.
That works in many cases, not all of cases.
So if that doesn't work for you, the other option
is to contact us, and we may be able to build
that connector for you.
MINHAZ KAZI: For Data Studio, we've
seen a lot of users and developers
who use it purely as a marketing reporting tool.
But there are also other users who
are using it not just as a marketing tool,
but also as a completely full-fledged PI reporting
solution.
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Yeah.
MINHAZ KAZI: So what are your views on this?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Yes, so I think right now
it's still largely used for marketing purposes.
And a large part of the community connectors
are also marketing-related.
Data Studios is a great tool, and it
can be used for other purposes as well.
And I think that's an area where we
are expanding to in the future very, very, very strongly.
So we are soon releasing our first financial connector,
getting accounting data into Data Studio.
We are going to follow up on that
with various other kinds of connectors
that are not marketing-related.
Accounting, finance, HR, customer service,
all kinds of different choices that can
be visualized in Data Studio.
MINHAZ KAZI: How should small and medium businesses
approach their marketing reporting and analytics
dashboards?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Keep it simple to start with.
It's easy to get a bit carried away
with all the cool features that are available in Data Studio.
You don't want to create a cluttered dashboard with all
the different chart types.
So I would concentrate on a few key metrics to [INAUDIBLE] it,
make a really, really simple dashboard--
big metrics that the audience understands
and that are actionable.
MINHAZ KAZI: Two years ago, we didn't really
have a big developer community around Data Studio.
Since then, we've launched a community connectors feature,
we're working on community visualizations,
and more and more people are getting
interested in building tools and solutions around Data Studio.
So what would your advice to someone
who's just starting to build solutions around this tool?
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: I think Data Studio is a great platform
for developers.
It's really easy to get started.
The documentation is really good,
and you've done a really good job on that.
And also you've got a lot of support from your team,
obviously, when you build a connector.
So getting started with building connectors is really simple,
and I definitely recommend that.
The challenges maybe then come a bit later.
Data Studio has a large user base in the millions.
So if your connector really takes off,
you may get a lot of users.
And that brings new challenges that you then need to tackle,
such as how do you handle the traffic flows with the rate
limits that are in the data source APIs
that you connect to, so you don't go over any limits that
are in the source APIs?
You need to do a lot of caching in different places
to tackle that.
You need to have monitoring in place.
You need to be able to handle all kinds of edge cases
with the queries, such as, what if your query takes
over a minute to run when the timeout for HTTP request
is 1 minute?
So all kinds of things like this,
you need to then start thinking about.
But to get started, it's really easy.
MINHAZ KAZI: Mikael, thanks again for being on the show.
MIKAEL THUNEBERG: Thanks.
Was great being here.
MINHAZ KAZI: You can check out the Supermetrics connectors
in the Data Studio gallery.
Link is in the description below.
Make sure to subscribe to the GCP YouTube channel.
And you can always visit our website at developers.googl
e.com/datastudio.
Until next time, keep building more Vis.