Cervinodata's 5-year partnership with Klipfolio leads to 1200% growth

Cervinodata helps online marketing agencies and growing companies organize their online marketing data by bringing it all together and making it available for easy reporting and analysis.

Their mission is to put data in the hands of the people who need it to make decisions, without requiring IT professionals or data scientists.

Meet Erik

Erik van Dorp is the founder and CEO of Cervinodata. He started Cervino Marketing in 2009 as a freelance strategy consultant and brought on his current business partner and CTO Jacco Drenth in 2012.

Since Cervinodata is a lean company, Erik wears many hats. In a typical week he talks strategy with investors, prioritizes the development roadmap with his team, sends newsletters to their base, and handles admin. In between, he connects with customers, prospects, and partners like Klipfolio.

Choosing between Geckoboard and Klipfolio

"Before we managed our reporting with Klipfolio, we were mostly using Excel spreadsheets and occasionally Powerpoint. The biggest pain we had was manually filling in new data. It was time-consuming, boring, and quite frankly, the visualizations were ugly."

Erik and his team needed a better way to produce data visualizations for themselves and for their clients. They narrowed it down and decided to compare Geckoboard and Klipfolio.

"Klipfolio stands out because of its power and flexibility. I like being able to build complex formulas. I also love the way it looks and handles from a design standpoint."

Sometimes the details matter most. Erik particularly appreciates the gridlines that help align Klips in a dashboard. Features like that make dashboard building accessible to leaders who want clear answers, not a technical project.

"For my technical colleagues, Klipfolio's backend flexibility is amazing. Klipfolio's API has been a major breakthrough for us."

Klipfolio has built a strong network of Partners whose purpose is to help clients succeed with data.

"Upon reflection, we made the right choice between Klipfolio and Geckoboard. We've become solid Partners with Klipfolio and we intend to further deepen the relationship in the coming years."

Getting the most out of tracking real-time metrics in Klipfolio

Cervino uses Klipfolio in two ways: for internal reporting and for managing client reporting.

"We use Klipfolio internally to track our web traffic, provide a summary of ad platforms that we use, and for other stats like the number of users we have and revenue generated from license fees."

Erik and his team deploy and maintain hundreds of Klipfolio dashboards on behalf of their clients, who consist mostly of agencies.

The metrics Erik's team tracks most closely:

• Monthly recurring revenue from Cervinodata: the number that tells them whether the business is growing

• Free cash position (cash in bank + invoices sent minus one month of costs): a real-time read on financial health

• Sign-ups per day and per week: the leading indicator for future revenue

Connecting Cervinodata and Klipfolio with BigQuery

"We've been working together with the Klipfolio team to showcase the power of Cervinodata integrated with Klipfolio, using BigQuery as the place where the data is stored."

Check out the BigQuery query builder in action:

With Cervinodata, a Klipfolio user can create a dashboard Klip showing ad spend from multiple platforms, multiple accounts, and if needed, multiple organizations. All of this can be done in under two minutes without writing a single line of code. That means a leader gets a consolidated view of ad performance without waiting for someone to pull the numbers or paste them into a spreadsheet.

Cervinodata has done some amazing work with Klipfolio and BigQuery.

A partnership that fuels growth

"Our business is very connected to Klipfolio. Our revenue related to working with Klipfolio grew 1200% in the last 5 years."

"We have bigger ambitions with Cervinodata. With the growing number of ad platforms, Klipfolio users benefit from preparing their data before using it in Klipfolio. That's where Cervinodata comes in and shines."

The value here is reliability. When the data is prepared and consistent before it reaches the dashboard, leaders can trust what they see and act on it, without second-guessing the numbers.

Using company dashboards to promote transparency

"I look at our dashboard first thing every day, with a cup of coffee. We display Klipfolio on a TV screen in the office, so everyone can see it. We discuss the data weekly as a team, and our investors have a login so they can check the data whenever they want."

Erik's philosophy is that you can never be too transparent with data. Everyone on his team has eyes on financial performance, invoices sent, MRR, expected revenue, and expected costs. No one has to ask for a number. It's already there.

"I really like the Klipfolio team. No matter who you connect with, whether it's customer support, the CTO, CEO, or account management, everybody is responsive, friendly, dedicated, and professional. Exactly the way I like it."

A K.I.S.S. culture

One of Cervino's core values is to keep it simply smart. That means keeping things as simple as possible, which they admit can be harder than making things complex.

"One critical factor is that if someone can't explain it to me, it's too complex. Making things really simple means revising over and over until it is simple enough for the masses to understand. This requires a lot of trust and patience from the team. We think of it this way: asking critical or specific questions is not a critique, instead, it's an invitation to discuss how to make it better."

Erik celebrates big wins by taking his team out for hamburgers and fries. He believes it's just as important to mark small victories, because they happen more often. A pat on the back or a high five goes a long way.

Erik's pro tip for people who are new to Klipfolio

"Try Klipfolio and you will be surprised at how easy it is to get your data on the big screen in no time. Also, make sure to see if Cervinodata is the right fit for you."