NBBC Group Fuels Agency Growth and Client Satisfaction with Looker Studio Pro and Funnel
NBBC Group Results with Google Cloud:
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75% Reduction in Reporting Time: For a key client, reporting time dropped from 80 hours/month to 20 hours/month.
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New Revenue Streams: Agencies are empowered to turn advanced analytics into a revenue driver, using the added value to raise base fees, and retain clients for reporting maintenance after campaign conclusion.
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Enhanced Client Satisfaction & Retention: Automated, comprehensive, and easily digestible reports lead to happier agency clients and higher retention rates.
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Faster Client Onboarding: Templatized reporting and a “master dashboard” approach streamline the onboarding process for new clients.
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Empowered Non-Technical Users: Conversational analytics and automated slide generation give clients self-service access to insights without needing an analyst.
The Journey to Data Mastery: From Spreadsheets to Scalable Insights
Nicolas Plunkett’s journey into data automation began with a familiar pain point: the overwhelming task of aggregating and reporting data for multiple companies using rudimentary tools like Microsoft Excel and QuickBooks. “It was becoming very cumbersome to create these reports, aggregate it, pull it from all these different systems,” Nicolas recounts. The sheer volume of data and the need for up-to-date reporting every few hours made the manual process unsustainable.
A move to a new company brought a new directive: “No more Microsoft Excel, only Google Sheets.” This shift marked Nicolas’s deep dive into Google’s ecosystem. While he became an expert, even building “extremely large, advanced networks of Google Sheets,” the limitations of spreadsheets for scalable, efficient, and visually appealing reporting soon became apparent, especially for non-experts.
“If you put data in a Google Sheet for the last, let’s say, two months… someone asks you to go back two years, if you don’t have all that data in that spreadsheet, you’ve got that system, you’ve got to pull it, you’ve got to update it,” Nicolas explains. This manual burden highlighted the need for a more robust solution.
Discovering Looker Studio and the Power of Unified Reporting
Nicolas’s search for better visualization and a more efficient reporting solution led him to Looker Studio. “We moved all reporting to Looker Studio just because, visually, it’s so much better,” he states. The ability to easily implement toggles, dropdown menus, and date range controls made data consumption far more accessible for clients, particularly those without spreadsheet expertise.
In February 2020, Nicolas and his wife founded NBBC Group, a full-service marketing agency. The company’s quick success in data reporting and analytics soon led them to specialize. “With how well everything’s been going, we have now switched to only focusing on data importing because it’s just been such a great system,” Nicolas shares.
As the company’s growth and analytics demands increased a critical shift occurred with the iOS 14.5 update, which severely impacted conversion tracking. It was a client’s recommendation that introduced Nicolas to Funnel, a moment he describes as “probably the most pivotal moment of my company.”
“Prior to using Funnel and Looker Studio, I was spending about 80 hours a month building reports for this one specific agency,” Nicolas reveals. “After moving to Funnel and about three months of figuring it out… that got reduced by 75%.”
The Winning Combination: Funnel + Looker Studio Pro
Funnel acts as a crucial Marketing Intelligence Platform, sitting between various marketing platforms (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, e-commerce, SMS, etc.) and Looker Studio. It aggregates, stores, and blends data from disparate sources into a single, unified database. This eliminates the need for manual data blending and reduces errors, ensuring data reliability. “If an account disconnects, it shoots you an email and it tells you this is disconnected,” Nicolas notes, highlighting a significant improvement over spreadsheet-based systems that often broke silently.
Looker Studio Pro then connects directly to Funnel, allowing NBBC Group to build “aesthetically pleasing,” customizable, and professional-looking dashboards. “It made a lot of sense just for the interoperability of those platforms that Looker Studio is a clear answer,” Nicolas affirms. The free version of Looker Studio is often sufficient for smaller companies, while the Pro version offers advanced features for just $9 per month per user, providing “unbelievable value, unbelievable power.”
Embracing the Future: AI, Conversational Analytics, and Automated Stories
AI is no longer a futuristic concept for NBBC Group; it’s an everyday request. Nicolas highlights two critical AI-driven features:
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Conversational Analytics: This allows report viewers to ask ad-hoc questions in natural language, reducing the need for an analyst to manually find and relay information. “Breaking down what is the best performing ad creative from this channel in this geographical location for these schools or businesses. This is really where this comes very helpful to be able to just prompt the conversational analytics right there and get that answer.”
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Automated Slide Deck Creation (Gemini in Looker): Previously, creating slide decks was double the work, involving data automation into Google Sheets and manual slide building. Now, with Gemini insights, a Looker Studio dashboard can generate an entire slide deck automatically. This feature is a “huge time saver,” potentially saving marketers “two to five hours a week per marketer.”
While Conversational Analytics is showing strong results for marketing data, Nicolas is eager to see its capabilities expand to other data sets, like accounting, for even broader impact. He emphasizes the importance of a semantic model and structured data for AI to be truly effective, “lowering the hallucinations.”
Unlocking Growth and New Revenue Streams
The efficiency gains and enhanced capabilities have transformed NBBC Group and its clients:
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Exponential Growth: Nicolas can now handle four times the workload compared to his pre-automation days, managing eight long-term retainers. “I handle probably four times the workload and work probably a third less per week than I did.”
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Faster Onboarding: Templatized reports mean NBBC Group can onboard new agencies rapidly, requiring minimal input from them.
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Monetization of Analytics: NBBC Group clients now have the option to provide their own customers with advanced analytics capabilities for their reports for a upsell.
Nicolas envisions a future focused on refining templates, streamlining processes, and preparing data sets to feed advanced AI and marketing models. The integration of Google tools like Looker Studio Pro, Funnel, and Gemini is not just about efficiency; it’s about driving “actionable insights” and enabling agencies to scale their reporting effectively.
Learn more about NBBC Group, Looker Studio and Funnel.