Ditched the spreadsheets, but still stuck manually uploading cost data?

Out of necessity, app marketers have become comfortable with copying and pasting total cost data from partner dashboards or reports into their own master marketing spreadsheet. 

That’s a lot of annoying work.

Five years ago, Singular set out to solve the problem of cost aggregation. Since then, we’ve mastered the art and science of data analytics. We provide app marketers with an automated, streamlined process to accurately and reliably collect spend data so they can optimize their marketing campaigns in the moment and boost ROI. 

Now more than ever, having complete, accurate, timely marketing ad spend reporting is just as important, if not more so, than counting installs. Despite this and record programmatic adoption, there are still many out there who haven’t bought into a marketing analytics platform that provides this efficiency, for one or more reasons: 

1. They’re only running on ad networks like Facebook, Google, or Twitter (which use their own attribution and billing despite third-party MMPs ruling on attribution).
2. They don’t think they run ad campaigns with enough partners in order to justify the cost of a solution to automatically collect their marketing cost data from all their partners.
3. Their current attribution provider offers a solution that may seem faster than making sense of cost data in a spreadsheet, but “cost ingestion” still requires manually uploading error-prone data.

Complete costs: the full picture

First, the basics. What can you do—or not do—with complete cost data on a daily basis? 

For instance, how do you know where you’re pacing? Can you spend more today? What are your effective cost per install rates? What does the ROAS look like? 

Now, if uploading an email report is on your to-do list for today, then you’re a few steps behind those managers nailing these questions right after their morning coffee.

That’s where an automated platform like Singular comes in. We automatically collect your marketing costs, saving you time, headaches, and the possibility of errors in your data. 

How fast is “fast”?

Let’s walk through each scenario of working with a handful of media partners, to provide a clear view of just how fast and efficient we’re talking. 

Scenario #1: the manual spreadsheet report

Here’s the reality of working with even just five media sources and doing manual reporting for each network in a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet example:

1. Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboards (2 minutes)
2. Find my Excel spreadsheet and open it (1 minute)
3. Download reports from my reporting tool and paste them into Excel (5 minutes)
4. Copy and paste ad spend data (source-level only) from each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
5. Allow my Excel macros to update or copy and paste a formula down many rows of data to calculate ROI (1 minute)

Total time: 11 minutes

Scenario #2: the cost ingestion tool into your attribution provider

1. Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
2. Download reports from each ad network (5 minutes)
3. Format each report as required (5 minutes)
4. Upload individual reports from each network (5 minutes)
5. Wait for my uploaded reports to get processed or troubleshoot any errors (15 minutes minimum)

Total time: 32 minutes

So the bottom (ROI) line…

Neither of these scenarios is helping you make fast decisions. 

How Singular can help

What’s the easiest way to save time, bring in more revenue, improve ROI, and make better, faster marketing decisions? We recommend finding a provider who:

• Has years of experience collecting cost exactly as the media sources display it within their systems
• Can work with your existing attribution provider to pull in the results from your marketing campaigns
• Can then connect this to your spend data and report your ROI whenever you need it 

Singular has a tried-and-true process for automating the collection of ad spend that can save app marketers 15 hours+ a week on average, which is why we’ve become the de facto solution for teams scaling their growth. Go ahead, try us for free today.