In the latest episode of The Undiscovered Metric podcast, Jessica Cardonick, VP of Product Marketing at Adverity, sat down with Landon Perry, VP of Ad Measurement and Data Analytics at Green Line Digital, to discuss how marketers can best manage their data pipelines to improve campaign performance and streamline reporting.
Landon shared a wealth of practical insights based on his experience managing ad measurement and analytics across a diverse range of clients. This blog will break down the key takeaways from their conversation and provide context to help marketers optimize their data management strategies. Read on for more, or watch the full episode below.
A key theme in Landon's approach to data management is the importance of beginning with the end goal in mind. As he explains, “We know it's ultimately going to end up on a client dashboard... so let's make sure we're capturing everything we need.” From the outset, Green Line Digital structures its data collection to align with the insights clients will eventually need, ensuring the process is efficient and purposeful.
By planning with the final output in focus, Landon’s team is able to minimize the need for extensive data cleaning or transformation later on. “We start at the beginning with the end in mind,” Landon emphasizes. This mindset ensures that all data collected is not only relevant but also directly tied to the client’s objectives, providing cleaner, actionable insights right from the start.
When asked about the challenges of creating custom data solutions for different clients, Landon noted the value of standardizing certain processes. “People don't like the word template,” he says, “but, you know, a standardized approach to data governance, data pipelines, things like that, it’s very freeing.”
For more on how you can set up your agency data pipelines check out our guide here.
At Green Line Digital, clients come from a wide range of industries, including automotive, eCommerce, and financial services. Despite the diversity, many foundational metrics, such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, remain the same. By implementing a standard framework, the company can streamline its data processes while maintaining flexibility to adjust to specific client needs. This balance between standardization and customization enables them to efficiently handle a large volume of clients while ensuring consistency across the board.
Another major advantage of standardization is that it makes it easier to spot anomalies. “If you know exactly what shape your data is supposed to be in, you know what data you're supposed to be receiving every single day,” Landon points out. This allows his team to quickly identify when something goes wrong and resolve issues before they affect the client’s confidence in the data.
Landon stresses that one of the biggest risks of poor data management is the erosion of trust between the agency and the client. "When you have poor data management, people start to not trust the data," explains Landon. When clients start to question the accuracy of the data, it doesn’t just affect the reporting—it reflects poorly on the agency itself. Especially in high-stakes environments like Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaigns, data anomalies can lead to skepticism about the agency’s overall performance and whether its marketing efforts are truly driving results.
To mitigate this risk, Green Line Digital focuses on building strong data pipelines that minimize errors and ensure data reliability. While it's impossible to completely eliminate data issues, being able to catch and address anomalies quickly is key. “Our goal is not necessarily to say we're never going to have a data anomaly,” Landon says. “But being able to catch those quickly, being able to resolve them as quickly as possible - that's how we guard against poor data management and that lack of trust.”
Handling diverse clients with varying objectives and KPIs presents a unique challenge for data teams. Green Line Digital manages over 200 clients across industries ranging from auto dealership groups to eCommerce brands, and each of them has different data sources and goals. “You can imagine the diversity of data connections...Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok, Google Analytics, display partners,” explains Landon. “It's hard to keep it straight in our head sometimes.”
Despite the complexity, Landon’s team finds common ground by focusing on the core objective: spending money to drive a KPI. Whether it’s selling products on an eCommerce site or generating leads for an auto dealership, the overarching goal remains the same. Standardizing the framework for how they approach client reporting helps them juggle the complexities of different clients while maintaining a clear focus on performance outcomes.
A key insight Landon shared is the importance of understanding the limitations of the data and maintaining a balanced perspective. In digital marketing, most data comes from third-party platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook, and TikTok, and is often based on sampling and modeling. “What I always say is it's best to keep in mind that we're looking at this data and asking the question, is it directionally true? Not necessarily reality true,” Landon explains.
This mindset allows marketers to make informed decisions without getting bogged down by the minutiae of absolute accuracy. “We make decisions off of sample data all the time,” he adds. Just as we trust weather forecasts based on average trends, marketers can trust sampled advertising data to guide their decisions on budget allocation and channel performance.
Landon advocates for zooming out and looking at the larger trends rather than over-analyzing short-term fluctuations. “We try to always encourage people to zoom out, try to keep in mind the context,” he says. By focusing on the overall direction of the data, marketers can make more strategic decisions without being swayed by small, day-to-day variations that may not reflect the bigger picture.
Data visualization plays a significant role in how Green Line Digital communicates with clients. In response to the challenge of making real-time decisions based on limited data, Landon’s team has adjusted how they present data in their dashboards. “One recent change we've made is to try to incorporate more time series data into that, more context,” he explains. By showing clients not just a snapshot of recent data but also comparisons with previous periods, the team can provide a clearer understanding of trends and avoid knee-jerk reactions to short-term dips.
For example, if a client sees a drop in performance over the past week, the context provided by visualizing data from the previous two or three weeks can reveal whether this is just a natural fluctuation or a more serious issue. This added context helps both internal teams and clients make more informed decisions and reduces the likelihood of overreacting to minor changes in the data.
One of the key factors in Green Line Media’s success is its ability to give clients flexibility in how they view their data. While their dashboards are built with standardized metrics, they are also highly interactive, allowing users to customize which dimensions and metrics they want to see. “We obviously have to present the data in a kind of a default way,” says Landon, “but allowing the user to swap out the metrics and the dimensions that they might want to see...that’s really helped.”
This level of flexibility is particularly important when clients have specific, one-off questions that fall outside the standard metrics. Instead of relying on external platforms or manual reporting, the interactive dashboards allow clients to explore the data in a way that meets their unique needs.
When asked about the most important metrics his clients focus on, Landon boiled it down to three core areas: primary conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate. “99% of our clients are really focusing on those three,” he says. Whether the client is trying to drive purchases, downloads, or form fills, the goal is always to optimize these three metrics to ensure campaign efficiency and scalability.
Knowing these core metrics also helps Green Line Digital’s clients better plan their budgets. By understanding how much it costs to achieve one conversion and how many clicks are needed to generate that result, clients can plan their monthly budget and scale accordingly.
For those just starting out in the advertising world, Landon offers some valuable advice: “Talk to the people that are actually managing the advertising...and really find out from them how they're doing their job, what metrics they look at.” While technical skills like working with APIs and SQL are important, understanding the real-world applications of the data is crucial to becoming a successful data manager in the advertising space.
“You need to understand why [metrics] are important, not just how to calculate them,” Landon emphasizes. By developing a deep understanding of how ad campaigns work and what metrics matter most to the people running them, data managers can create more effective dashboards and deliver insights that drive results.
Landon Perry’s insights on data management highlight the importance of having a clear vision, standardizing processes, and maintaining flexibility to meet diverse client needs. By focusing on core metrics, building strong data pipelines, and trusting the broader direction of the data, marketers can optimize their campaigns and build stronger relationships with their clients. As data continues to play an ever-growing role in marketing, following these best practices will be crucial for agencies looking to stay competitive and drive lasting success.