Pauw Agency brings transparency to the music industry with Cervinodata

With founders who were signed artists themselves, Pauw Agency understands the music industry from the inside. They bring that experience to campaigns for artists like Afrojack and record labels like Armada (home to Armin van Buuren), driving ticket sales, streams, and fan growth for clients who need results, not reports.

Meet Noah Smits, managing director of Pauw Agency

Noah founded Pauw Agency in 2018 after a career as a professional bass player in the Dutch rock band Stereo. He built the agency to solve a problem he lived firsthand: artists are expected to be both creative professionals and full-time digital marketers at the same time.

"We know how hard it is to be an artist, but also be a full blown SEA and social media advertising specialist to promote your band, sell more tickets, engage with your fans. All at the same time. We try to be the artists' external team so they can focus on what they do best: making great music."

The challenge: dashboards at scale, without the overhead

One of Pauw Agency's core promises is complete transparency on media spend and performance. With 20-plus clients to manage, that promise needed a system that was easy to distribute, consistent across accounts, and manageable without a dedicated data team.

Noah chose Klipfolio as the dashboard tool, selecting it over Google Data Studio for its visualization options and scalability. But there was a real constraint: Pauw didn't have the time, capacity, or in-house expertise to build and maintain dashboards from scratch.

"One of our promises is full transparency on media spend and performance towards our clients. I wanted a clean and easy to interpret dashboard that would summarize the key insights in the results we generate for our clients. The Klipfolio support team put me in touch with Cervinodata, which was a perfect match."

That introduction changed what was possible. Instead of building and maintaining reporting themselves, Pauw could hand clients a clear, reliable view of performance, without anyone on the team having to pull numbers or explain spreadsheets.

Templated dashboards, no formulas required

Cervinodata has been a Klipfolio partner since late 2013 (previously known as Cervino Marketing) and launched its self-serve data management platform Cervinodata (available here) in July 2019. The platform includes a bundle of free Klipfolio templated dashboards connected directly to Cervinodata's data layer.

As Erik van Dorp, CEO of Cervinodata, describes it:

"Our mission is to help marketers fall in love with their numbers. Pulling data together is always a time consuming and boring task. Cervinodata does all the hard labour for its users and makes it readily available for reporting. To make it even easier for agencies, we have connected Cervinodata to Klipfolio, to make delivering dashboards even faster."

Klipfolio CEO Allan Wille recognized the value immediately:

"We know the Cervino team well and when they do something, they do it well. Powering up the Klipfolio technology with Cervinodata is a great way for online agencies to get up-and-running with Klipfolio in a very short period of time, while still maintaining full flexibility in using our powerful platform for custom reporting with our 100+ integrations."

From setup to all clients in minutes

When the Klipfolio success team identifies a customer who would benefit from Cervinodata's templated approach, they make the introduction and Cervinodata handles onboarding.

In a 30-minute call, Noah and Erik worked through which templates fit Pauw's clients best. They settled on the Advertising Summary dashboard tab (covering spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions across all ad platforms) and the more detailed Facebook Ads template. Google Analytics, Google Ads, Bing Ads, and LinkedIn Ads templates were available but not needed for this use case.

During the call, Noah configured Cervinodata while Erik prepared the Klipfolio templates for Pauw's first client. That took about five minutes. Erik then walked Noah through importing the template into a new Klipfolio client account and switching between organizations.

Shortly after, Erik connected with Meggan, head of customer success at Klipfolio, to move the newly created dashboard into Pauw's account. Within minutes, the Cervinodata template dashboards appeared, ready to distribute.

"It was amazing to see the first Cervinodata template dashboards in my Klipfolio account. I only had to add my own logo, I chose to change the colors of the graphs to reflect our own brand. That was all it took to get me up-and-running." - Noah Smits, Pauw

From there, scaling to new clients is straightforward: create a new Klipfolio client, import the Cervinodata template tabs, update the Organization ID, and it's done. Every client gets the same reliable view, without anyone rebuilding anything from scratch.

The Advertising summary dashboard of one of Pauw's clients

Organizing data before it enters Klipfolio

Managing ad platforms and campaigns across multiple clients creates a data organization problem before it ever becomes a reporting problem. Sorting and structuring data upstream keeps dashboards fast, accurate, and easy to maintain when campaigns change.

Cervinodata handles this with an Organization layer: users group ad accounts and analytics views together by client. In Klipfolio, that Organization is built directly into the Cervinodata template dashboards, so all of a client's data arrives together, already structured.

Adding a new ad account or platform is equally straightforward. Connect the new account to the existing Organization, enable data collection, and after the next Klipfolio refresh, the data appears in the dashboard automatically, with no changes to data sources, filters, or formulas.

"This saves a huge amount of time, in particular for agencies and international companies, which will have to add or remove accounts on a regular basis." - Erik van Dorp, Cervinodata

The Choose Accounts page on Cervinodata, where users can connect accounts to an Organization and start data collection.

For Pauw Agency, each record label has its own Klipfolio dashboard and its own Organization in Cervinodata, connected to ad accounts across multiple platforms. The structure stays clean because the data is organized before it ever reaches the dashboard.

Blending campaigns across platforms automatically

Music campaigns typically run two types of activity at the same time: short burst campaigns tied to a release or event, and longer-running always-on campaigns. Keeping filter settings current across constantly evolving campaigns, for multiple clients, is exactly the kind of maintenance work that consumes hours without producing anything useful.

Cervinodata's Campaign Grouping feature solves this. It lets users combine campaigns from multiple ad platforms into a named group. The Auto Select option goes further: it automatically includes new campaigns that meet specific criteria, such as an artist's name or a project ID.

That means a new campaign for an existing artist gets added to the right campaign group and appears in the right dashboard without any manual intervention.

!Cervinodata

"Since my clients are usually record labels with multiple artists, the campaign grouping feature allows me to automatically group the campaigns running on multiple platforms but are from one particular artist together in one group. The record label can simply select the campaign group per artist to see the performance of each artist. This saves me 4 hours a week. Every week." - Noah Smits, Pauw

Four hours a week recovered, every week, without pasting numbers into a spreadsheet or rebuilding filters every time a campaign name changes.

What comes next

With most of Pauw's clients now running on their own Klipfolio dashboards, Noah is focused on making the data even easier to act on. That means adding metric labels that explain what each number means and introducing indicators that turn red or green when performance moves outside expected ranges.

"Even though the dashboards delivered by Cervinodata are very simple to understand, we see that our clients are still very new at this. I have had to explain what CTR is a couple of times, so my next action is to make labels in each dashboard explaining what each metric means. Let's say my clients are very good at bringing great music to the world, not so at reading charts."

The goal is a dashboard that doesn't require interpretation. Clients should be able to open it and know immediately what's working, what isn't, and what to pay attention to.

For Cervinodata, the next step is expanding the template library to serve a wider range of Klipfolio users.

"In the long run I would love to see the option for Klipfolio users to simply select our templates straight from the Klipfolio template gallery. In the meantime we are working tirelessly to build more beautiful templates for the Klipfolio community and make it easier for users to get our templates in their Klipfolio account."

For Klipfolio, the Pauw Agency case showed what a well-matched partnership can deliver.

"We saw how fast Pauw was up and running with multiple dashboards for 20+ clients. Matching the right Klipfolio customer to Cervinodata makes sense for everybody."