As more agencies delve into what they can do with PPC data pipelines, marketers are searching for solutions to collect, analyze, and store all that data.
Funnel, a Swedish start-up founded in 2013, is an analytics platform designed to simplify data collection by integrating with a broad range of marketing and sales data sources.
In January of 2020, Funnel raised $47M in venture capital to fuel their mission of collecting, structuring, and making data “business ready” for analysis and reporting.
The Shape ADI (Advertising Data Infrastructure) is designed to help agencies with the collection, analysis, and storage of PPC data.
From our perspective, the three main differences between Funnel and Shape ADI are why PPC professionals should consider us as an alternative:
1. Shape's focus on PPC.
Funnel is a one-way data pipeline for over 500 data sources. The Shape ADI is focused on just the ad networks that matter most to PPC marketers. By focusing on the needs of people doing PPC work, our integrations offer more data fields and the ability to push changes back to the ad networks (not just collect data).
2. The Shape ADI includes a fully-managed data warehouse.
Funnel makes it easy to distribute your data to services like Google BigQuery. But, launching and maintening a data warehouse is not part of their offering. The Shape ADI includes a fully-managed PPC data warehouse designed to meet the specific needs of PPC agencies.
3. Shape’s ability to push edits back to ad networks.
Funnel is designed to pull data in from many different sources. But their pipelines are designed to allow data to flow one way. This means Funnel primarily powers reporting workflows.
The Shape ADI is built with a foundation that allows edits to be pushed back to ad networks. This empowers agencies to build custom tools and solutions that automate manual tasks beyond reporting.
If you need to be able to pull in data from a broad range of niche marketing data sources for purely reporting purposes, Funnel is likely going to be the better fit.
If you are focused on PPC, and need specific data fields, a solution to store the data, and the ability to build complex tools, the Shape ADI will more likely meet more of your needs.