New arrival in Dublin Supermetrics has an innovative answer to the problem of the flood of digital marketing data. It's an area that shows no sign of slowing down, and that’s a problem for businesses that use it, either in-house or outsourced to an agency. The clue is in the name – ‘digital’. Because the marketing and interactions are digital, there is an enormous trail of digital crumbs that someone has to make sense of. Otherwise, nobody knows what’s working and what’s not.

Typically, a digital marketing platform such as Google will collate a record of the advertiser’s interactions and activity in a CSV file format that then has to be imported into Excel or Google Sheets for further analysis.

In 2013, Finnish entrepreneur Mikael Thuneberg had the idea of creating a system that would pull all this digital marketing activity reporting together. Supermetrics was born, and c.17,000 customers later the company has established a base in Dublin to tap into the city’s multilingual sales and customer care talent pool.

Thuuneberg says his venture has been profitable from day one, and that Supermetrics booked a profit of €6m on turnover of €36m in 2021.

That’s because the products aren’t cheap. The entry level version of Supermetrics for Google Sheets is priced at €99 per month for one user. This allows data import from ten data sources, which for most social media advertising users would encompass Facebook Ads, Facebook Insights, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search, and Instagram Insights.

The €199 per month version of the same product extends the data source options to LinkedIn Ads, Google AdSense, Pinterst Ads, TikTok Ads, Twitter Ads, and YouTube.

Each digital advertising platform has its own user interface and siloed data. The metrics that interest marketing types are users, sessions, bounce rates, total time on site, page views, and so on. This data is pulled into Supermetrics for analysis and reporting. The numbers still have to be crunched, but when they’re all in the same place comparisons are easier.

Supermetrics has moved beyond its Excel origins to data warehouse products for heavyweight web analytics. With VC investment, headcount has doubled to 260 people in the past two years, with new hires who include chief marketing officer Gabrielle Stafford, who joined from Groupon.

The costs of setting up the Supermetrics office in Dublin is being funded partly by taxpayers, through state aid from IDA Ireland. The quid pro quo is the promise of up to 100 new jobs over the next two years.

Says Thuneberg: “Ireland has established itself as one of the world’s leading tech hubs. It is renowned for its highly skilled workforce and strong ties with the US, all of which were critical factors in our decision to expand our Dublin operation. We are constantly recruiting new talent in response to growing demand, and Ireland is the perfect market to help us achieve this.”