Executive summary:
Founded in 2017, Journey Further is the Clarity at Speed performance marketing agency and has grown from three founders to 180 performance specialists across four locations in the UK and the US. Confronted with complex and time-consuming customer reporting, the agency adopted Funnel, a transformative no-code platform. This case study highlights how Funnel drove efficiencies to Journey Further's operations, saving over 500 hours monthly in analyst time, ensuring accuracy in reports, and significantly reducing time to insight. With Funnel, Journey Further streamlined its processes and was able to deliver exceptional results for its clients.
Key results:
- Over 500 hours per month of analyst time saved
- Eliminating broken or inaccurate customer reports
- Significantly faster 'time to insight'
Agency profile:
Journey Further is a performance marketing agency with integrated media specialists across 4 locations: Leeds (HQ), London, Manchester and New York City. Designed to deliver Clarity at Speed for the world’s leading brands and ambitious scale-ups, the agency connects clients directly with a senior team, working in real-time and with complete transparency to deliver previously unthinkable results. It has been named the UK’s #1 company for employee wellbeing and ranked in the top 50 companies to work for by Best Companies for the third year running.
The challenge - Managing reporting during rapid growth:
Journey Further's story began with a small yet determined team of three. By 2019, this dynamic agency had impressively expanded its team to 51 professionals, reflecting its rapid growth and evolving expertise. Initially rooted in PPC, Journey Further diversified its offerings to include a range of services, including paid media, SEO, Digital PR, creative, and digital experience, catering to an ever-widening client base.
However, with this rapid expansion came challenges, especially in the realm of customer reporting. The process became increasingly time-consuming, and the diversity of services offered meant aligning customer reports across different media teams was becoming a complex task.
Aimee Wilkinson, a Senior Analyst at Journey Further, remembers the period: “Preparing reports, filled with the in-depth insights we pride ourselves on, started to consume hours each time.” At the time, the team relied on spreadsheets for reporting, utilizing Supermetrics to partially automate data imports from marketing platforms. But as the data volume grew and the number of platforms expanded, Journey Further recognized the need for change. The search for a more robust, comprehensive reporting solution became a priority, aiming to streamline their process while continuing to provide high-quality insights for their clients.
The solution - Adapting to the evolving marketing landscape:
As Journey Further grew rapidly, it observed a significant trend: key marketing platforms like Google and Facebook Ads were increasingly automating tasks that used to be manual. This shift was recognized by Journey Further, leading them to refocus their role as an agency towards deeper analysis and specialized advice.
Aimee emphasizes, “Today, every media buyer has access to the same tools and best practices, so as an agency, you need to give yourself an edge elsewhere. We don’t want to spend our time with clients saying that clicks have increased by a certain amount. We focus on why things happened and what we can do moving forward.”
In response to this industry evolution, Journey Further sought a platform that could not only streamline its customer reporting but also empower its analysts to delve into detailed data, thereby offering top-tier performance insights to their clients. After thorough market research, Funnel emerged as the ideal choice, prompting Journey Further to integrate it across its client base.
The results - A platform for further growth:
It didn’t take long after getting started with Funnel for Journey Further to notice the benefits of moving to a new solution. A key criteria for Journey Further had been to empower its analysts to provide insights to clients without dependencies on other teams, and Funnel’s no-code platform enabled just this: “Many similar tools require some level of coding skills, and even though we have that within the team, we don’t have it across the team. Since Funnel does not require coding, it makes it so much easier for the whole team to utilize.”
Today, the Journey Further team has grown to 180 professionals, and over 50 analysts at Journey Further use Funnel to power reports and provide insights to its clients. At this point, the agency has used Funnel for almost five years, and according to Aimee, it’s difficult to remember what things were like before: “Our analysts have more time to spend analyzing, communicating and optimizing rather than adjusting spreadsheets. This makes the teams so much more effective in their work.”
Reflecting on the transformative path Journey Further has been on for the past years, Aimee notes that in addition to making their teams more effective, Funnel has also had a direct impact on the dialogue it has with clients: “Funnel is a key point in client retention for us as it allows our clients access to automated live reports and we can focus on providing analysis to go along with it.”
