NinjaCat Helps Real Estate Marketing Agency Flip Their Reporting

Apartment SEO is a multi-family marketing agency specializing in PPC, SEO, social media, and online reputation management for real estate marketers. With almost two decades of experience, the Apartment SEO team leverages their digital advertising expertise to help clients turn leads into leases.

As Director of Training and Marketing at Apartment SEO, Clara Cho synthesizes marketing performance data from disparate sources across their portfolio and helps both staff and clients make sense of their campaigns. With her many years of digital marketing experience and extensive knowledge of creating and executing marketing strategies, data analysis, and analytics reporting, Clara was one of the first at Apartment SEO to realize they needed a software solution to address their reporting challenges.

The Challenge

“Before NinjaCat, we were using distinct reporting platforms for every tactic used by our clients,” explains Clara. “SEO reports came from an SEO tool, PPC from a separate platform, social media from another platform; this ended up creating a ream of singular reports for every product for every client, every month.”

With reporting siloed by tactic, the agency was spending an inordinate amount of time ensuring the performance data that resided in several different platforms ended up in a single place for their clients’ monthly reports.

“Reflecting on all that work that was going into gathering performance data, the constraints felt like an inevitability rather than a solvable problem,” says Clara. “It shortened our bandwidth as an agency handing over a bunch of reports rather than a singular point of truth, and led to a lot of frustration. The process was very daunting to the internal teams trying to connect engagements back to leads. It reached a point where I began to search for software that could help, and that’s when we came across NinjaCat.”

The Solution

For a performance marketing reporting solution to be worthy of investigating at a scale that matched their client roster, Clara needed to illustrate full digital ecosystem performance. This meant database management was a critical factor when choosing the optimal reporting platform.

“NinjaCat wasn’t the only reporting software we were considering,” admits Clara. “Datorama was being pitched to us from our SalesForce reps and that initially looked promising, but it turns out they couldn’t handle the business model. We have a client list of 1200+ communities, which creates large amounts of data, and all that data couldn’t be handled in Datorama without us buying extra accounts and add-ons.”

As with any new software within a marketing agency, an important factor in vetting a potential point solution is how easily it will integrate with existing systems. But even more important is how complicated the on-boarding process might be for staff and clients.

“The quality of customer service and on-boarding were definitely selling points for going with NinjaCat,” says Clara. “The onboarding process for Datorama was extremely tedious and left room for a ton of human error. NinjaCat’s onboarding process was so easy, so that gave me confidence that onboarding our own clients to NinjaCat and introducing them to the new reports they’d be receiving from the platform, would be equally easy.”

With NinjaCat’s data management capabilities, along with the ability to port in any dataset through a custom API, Clara quickly realized the potential for the platform to enhance her team’s capabilities.

“The main challenge was always easy on-boarding and a singular spot for data. And after learning more about the platform, it became clear that connecting any type of data into the software, which was a big barrier in other solutions, was delightfully simple in NinjaCat. Even if you didn’t have an API connection, NinjaCat allowed custom data streams to easily flow in.”

The Results

After an easy on-boarding process and getting a handle on teaching internal and external parties how to interface with NinjaCat, the positive results were almost immediately discernible to Clara, her team, and their clients.

“There were a lot of benefits when we finally switched reporting platforms, and thankfully the client feedback was massively positive. Internally, because NinjaCat is so user-friendly, the on-boarding time with staff and clients is reduced, and the connection with popular CRMs, like Google Analytics and Google Ads, is pain-free. Rather than logging into 6-7 distinct platforms and then downloading the performance reports and analytics, and then customizing dashboards and reports, we finally had a one-stop solution for reporting and data management with NinjaCat.”

With so many tech-driven solutions in marketing, it can be easy to think that tech is the solution to any problem within an agency. But Clara was adamant about pointing out that the level of customer service and support she gets through NinjaCat are the real game-changers.

“While the technical product itself is great, by far the biggest selling point for NinjaCat are the support staff and the customer success managers,” says Clara.

“After working with NinjaCat’s professional services team, we were able to reduce the amount of reporting templates from 200 down to 20, which unlocked a huge amount of bandwidth within the agency. And, whenever I have a question or come up against an issue in NinjaCat, I know Heidi or Eric or anyone from the customer success team, will be super responsive and actually listen to my problems and work quickly toward a solution.”

When asked if Clara would recommend NinjaCat to another agency, she didn’t hesitate in her answer.

“I would absolutely recommend NinjaCat, and the reason why is mainly because of the support,” explains Clara. “There is never any hesitation from NinjaCat in responding to issues or potential ideas. The customer advocacy aspect of NinjaCat has become so important, and compared to other alternatives, it makes a huge difference.”

To find out if NinjaCat is the right reporting tool to amplify the results possible for your team, get in touch.