Do you struggle every month with manually updating reports? Is management asking for numbers that you cannot pull out of your data tools? If you dream about combining different data sources, to connect the dots and get deeper insights, this blog post is for you.
Standard reporting can be tedious and frustrating. This is where custom reports come into play to save you time, money and offer you exactly what you need. We reviewed the top five benefits of custom reports and provided practical examples.
Save Time with Automation
Time-efficiency is probably one of the most important benefits of custom reporting/dashboards. Instead of gathering data, preparing and crunching the numbers in Excel, and then having to create the report, for example, in PowerPoint, you could use a tool that does all of that for you. After the initial setup, your reporting process can be entirely streamlined and automated. Since all data feeds into the report/dashboard are live, any incoming, additional requests can be done quickly by simply making changes to the existing report.
Google Data Studio is a free tool that allows you to easily integrate the standard marketing channels. Take a look at our previous blog post that guides you through each step to set up your Google Data Studio report.
Create Custom Visualizations
Building your own visualizations allows you to easily interpret your data and make informed decisions. Find graphs, charts, funnels, maps, tables and other visualization solutions that show the data you really care about. Add design elements to customize the look of your dashboard/report and provide orientation and guidance for the viewer to understand your report at a glance. Controller elements like the date range allow you to jump between different time periods. Filters and hover-over effects make your reports interactive and insightful.
Measure your Performance and ROI
Another reason customized reporting is a valuable feature for many organizations is that not everyone defines success in the same way. Every company, and even every department, has individualized goals and strategies to meet them. According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, 39 percent of respondents stated that their top marketing challenge is reporting on ROI of their marketing activities. This includes different metrics in every organization.
Custom dashboards are an open opportunity and can provide in-depth data on your marketing efforts to acquire new leads and push sales. The status of potential leads in your marketing funnel can be included as well to illustrate potential revenue and where your teams need to step up. Popular use cases are generally Paid Media or eCommerce dashboards.
Mix and Match Data Sources
To connect all the moving parts of your business and gain deep insights you first need to determine which KPIs are crucial to your business, and what data sources these measurements are coming from. As a next step, you can combine your data sources to broaden your focus and get an extensive picture of your digital environment. This is where standard, out-of-the-box reports often do not cover specified needs.
To fully leverage your data, we present solutions to customize your reporting environment to make reports and/or dashboards work the best for your business ecosystem. Our recent challenge for a customer was to integrate Hubspot with Klipfolio, one of our favorite dashboard tools, to unlock a potential niche. We could take this even further and combine key metrics from Hubspot in a custom dashboard with data sources such as Google Analytics, Adwords, and Social platforms to take insights to the next level.
Team Productivity
Custom reports are suitable for various business units, such as sales, finance, or marketing. The main purpose is to translate any data into actionable insight that can help your team make better, evidence-based decisions for your business. Depending on the kind of data you are seeking, the standard reports often only scratch the surface when it comes to identifying trends and looking for ways to improve or streamline processes. You could create custom reports to help your sales team land more deals, assist your marketing team with reports that showcase what is working and what is not (and where they should focus on) and, eventually, bring the teams together with multi-channel marketing reports.
Conclusion
In a world where we are surrounded by mountains of digital data, analytics reports exist to condense everything into a digestible format. Generally, such advanced reports break down the statistics, analyze trends and offer insights valuable to your business and improvement of your ROI. There are many tools that provide pre-configured reports to work with out of the box but the ability to customize and build your own reports is what will set you apart from the rest. We can assist you in finding your way through.