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Kiera Abbamonte on March 19, 2021 (last modified on October 29, 2022) • 7 minute read
A lack of transparency in agency reporting sometimes hides a well-known but rarely discussed side of some bigger agenciesâshady practices designed to obscure performance and lock clients into agency systems.
Thatâs something Hero Factory is looking to change. A results-based digital marketing agency with a focus on ecommerce, Hero Factory takes over their clientsâ entire digital marketing operation. They agree with clients on a minimum acceptable ROASâand if they donât hit that number, they donât make money. They need accurate, real-time data at their fingertips to be able to offer a guarantee like that.
We talked with Managing Director Dario Begonja to learn more about how Hero Factory uses real-time, actionable data in Databox to facilitate impressive performance and radical transparency with clients.
Dario knows all too well that there are some shady things going on in the digital marketing agency sphere. From photoshopping results to locking clients into the agencyâs data system, clients need a reason to trust the agencies they work with.
Hero Factory is actively working to combat that with their results-based pricing and transparency.
The team knew they needed reporting software that would enable them to offer clients the kind of transparency that builds trustâand that enabled them to do so without taking time away from the results-producing work they report on.
Here are the challenges Hero Factory faced:
âAs a team lead, I had to make strategic decisions for clients, but I didnât have great insight into the campaigns that were out there. We werenât even aware of tools that give you this kind of freedom and speed,â Dario noted. âI was very frustrated with my people having to build and calculate every single piece of data every time.â
âIn order to be able to take control over the digital marketing of clients, we think itâs fair that they have complete insight into what we doâminute by minute, hour by hour, in Databox,â Dario said.
âWeâre being compared to the big players in the market, which is challenging because we have a team of 6-7 people and the agencies weâre in competition with have 60+ people,â Dario told us. âAnalytics in ecommerce is a piece of the market that no one else has stepped into, so we positioned ourselves as the leading analytics agency for ecommerce.â
Weâre not interested in dataâweâre interested in insights.
Before Databox, reporting was still a huge part of Hero Factoryâs value proposition. That meant the team still produced top-notch reports well before they implemented a reporting solutionâand it took them hours each month to do it.
Eventually, Dario decided they needed a solution and tasked the team with finding one. That search led them to Databox.
They connected Google Sheets, Facebook Pages, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Active Campaign, Instagram Business, Google My Business, MailChimp, and WooCommerce for both their internal and client-facing reports.
Since implementing Databox, the Hero Factory team has turned Databoards and reporting setups into their competitive advantageâsetting them apart from other, larger agencies in the ecommerce market.
Here are the solutions Hero Factory found with Databox:
âWe can build reports really quickly and once we build them, theyâre just there. We donât have to calculate every single time,â Dario explained. âThis freed time for us at the end of the month. Weâre doing reports at the end of the month in the smartest way possible. We already know the situation throughout the month, and we just put a cherry on top and focus on the next steps from the report.â
As Dario explained it: âOur plan is to use Databox as a point of entry, as a showcase initially of what doesnât work and as a sign of transparency. We want clients to be completely transparent and give us complete autonomy over the digital marketing they give us. What we offer back to them is that they can see everything weâre doing. They can feel in control of what happens.â
âWe were working on a way for Databox to be useful to us and to clients. We try to stop the habit of clients asking for and checking âlikesâ and metrics like thatâand focus on the ones that really make a difference,â Dario said. âThe biggest focus is on the revenue, return⌠out of that you have all the other data sources that explain those first numbers. We do the same for a purchase revenue board, audience board, etc. We did everything custom.â
The most notable result of implementing Databox is that Dario and the team are able to deliver on their core promise: transparency and results. Theyâre able to produce bigger results than competing agencies, and theyâre 100% transparent about how those results happen.
Hero Factory is also in the process of launching a new service built off their Databox setup. The new offering will give clients an out-of-the-box service complete with templated databoards for around a dozen different data sources. The idea is to leverage Hero Factoryâs competitive advantage (analytics) as a foot in the door of new potential clients.
Here are the results Hero Factory saw using Databox:
âI think Databox is a natural place for anyone who manages staff to visit each day,â Dario told us. âWe work with a lot of software and Databox has been unparalleled. Itâs something thatâs really made a difference for us in the process of onboarding, making changes…â
âWeâre not an analytics agency in the sense of bringing you raw data,â Dario explained, âbut in the sense of giving you concrete steps in each report with a checklist.â
âWeâre on a level with clientsâ best results or much above itâreal-time analytics is a big part of that,â Dario said.
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