At Pearmill, we like to think of ourselves as a tech-enabled services business. Our ultimate goal is to help our clients grow through digital channels. In this journey, we're willing to build and use software tools to create leverage in our operations, maintain consistency, and help optimize ad-spend.

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1. Weekly KPIs (Pearmill Internal Slack Integration)

This is a tool that helps us with our weekly reports. As simple as the name suggests, it aggregates the KPIs we need for each client and it compares them with last week's data. This one is not an essential tool by any means, but it is very useful. It saves us time and it lowers the possibility for human error.

This tool was custom built by our team using Superblocks and Funnel. The underlying data is used in all sorts of ways within our company — this is just one "interface" for it. Here's an example of what these reports look like for a B2B company:
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2. Data Anomalies Alert (Pearmill Internal Slack Integration)

This is a tool that we often forget we use until it pops up in Slack. It lets us know if something strange has happened in the account, e.g. spend went to $0 or the payment was rejected. It's not an essential tool, but it's highly critical to our operations and ensuring that we're good stewards of the ad spend that brands entrust us with. It takes away the concern that something may go wrong without us noticing.

This tool is also custom-built by our own team on top of our data infrastructure. It runs checks every few hours to check for any anomalies. Here's what an alert looks like for an ad set in Meta:
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3. URL + UTM Checker (Pearmill Internal Slack Integration)

This is a 2-part tool. Part one ensures that the landing page is loading properly every few hours, which is very beneficial when there are multiple people editing websites. The aim is to limit the possibility of users arriving on pages that aren't functioning. This could be because of someone accidentally deleting pages (which happens more than you'd think), upstream providers experiencing downtime (e.g. Webflow failing altogether!), or significant page speed issues we should be aware of.
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The 2nd part of the tool, the UTM checker, ensures that the UTM field is populated on the ad. If it is not, it sends a notification in Slack with a link to the appropriate Ads Manager so our team can add tracking details. This is a check against human error and UTMs getting duplicated, which also happens more often than you'd think!
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4. Daily Reports (Custom Slack Integration)

This is one of our client-facing integrations. It sends out a daily report with the KPIs we set for each client, along with a rolling 30-day average (or a month-to-date sum, depending on the way the client wants to see the data).
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The cooler part about this is that it also sends a chart of the KPIs over time (e.g. Purchases over the last 14 days). This part is great for noticing trends.
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5. In-platform Rules Tools

This is the only tool we use in ad networks (Meta, TikTok, Google, etc.), and we use it when launching creative tests — setting a rule for the ads to end when they reach a certain spend.

Another way we use this tool is to pause ads over the weekend and resume on Mondays.

Something to be mindful of about the in-platform rules is that, when duplicating ads/ad sets/campaigns, the rules get duplicated too. Check them often. Also, sometimes the rules don't fire properly for various reasons. We try not to rely on rules 100%. Make sure to manually check to ensure that what you wanted to achieve when setting the rules was executed.

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6. Automated Metabase Dashboards

For more in-depth and cross-channel analysis, we input data from ad networks, as well as internal client attribution data, into a Metabase instance to help our team make decisions.

The underlying data is used across all of our custom integrations, and Metabase is a great visualization tool on top of it.
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7. Measure4 - Creative Analytics

This is an internal tool we developed to make the lives of both the growth team and creative team easier when it comes to creative analytics. We use it to analyze our creative testing rounds.

For the growth team, it removes the need to use pivot tables when analyzing data. For our creative team, it's a much more visual way of looking at ad spend data, which helps us during our ideation process for iterative creative tests. On top of that, we're also able to add custom metrics (both from on-channel and internal data) to preview results in the most relevant way possible.
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