Are you a digital marketer consumed by time-intensive tasks like reporting? Do you want to spend less time copying and pasting data from multiple sources into spreadsheets and sharing them with clients and stakeholders? It’s time to embrace report automation.
Delivering data-driven insights is a crucial part of your job as a marketer. As you juggle multiple roles, keeping track of many moving parts can seem daunting. Fast decision-making, prioritization, and data optimization are critical to driving business results and can be achieved by automating processes like reporting.
The state of PPC survey 2022 noted that PPC marketers wanted to automate top ‘time suck’ activities like reporting, budget management, writing ads, and search query mining. If this sounds like you, continue reading on.
What is report automation?
Report automation is a way of streamlining the creation, updating, and delivery of marketing reports and dashboards, thus eliminating the need for manual effort or additional human labor.
Report automation can help facilitate faster decision-making and optimize workflows by providing businesses with up-to-date data and insights. It will help you save time and resources by increasing accuracy and consistency in reporting. In addition, it can help organizations gain insights from data in a timely and efficient manner.
Why you should automate your reporting process
The time and effort you’re spending on manual reporting is taking away from other important tasks, such as analyzing and optimizing strategies to improve your performance. Additionally, because manual tracking and analysis are error-prone, you may make decisions based on inaccurate data. With automated reporting tools, you can:
1. Save Time
Are you spending hours a month manually compiling your marketing reports? With so many different marketing platforms and data sources, bringing them all together takes a challenging feat. Plus, if you’re creating client reports, you have to multiply that time by the number of them. The added challenge is making everything look professional and ensuring the correct business reports are shared with the right people. By automating your reporting, you set it up once and are done.
Digital agencies have notably saved hours each week by automating their reporting process. And 33.2% of marketers have claimed that marketing automation has reduced daily work errors and helped them focus on data analysis.
2. Customize it the way you want
Report automation is about making your busy marketing life a bit easier. With a suitable tool, you’re saving time and resources and reinforcing your brand. The right platform will allow you to tailor your reports and send them via your domain, offering you incredible flexibility and customization opportunities.
3. Get real-time data insights
As the number and size of your marketing channels continue to grow, tracking your campaign metrics will become complex and time-consuming. Automating your reporting makes monitoring and identifying problems and opportunities easier and taking faster action, reducing your decision-making time.
4. Improved productivity
By automating time-intensive tasks like reporting, teams have time to focus on more analytical and impactful work. Gemma Ross, PPC Head at BigWave Marketing explains:
“By using, Swydo, we had more time to grow our clients’ businesses and focus on performance rather than writing weekly manual summaries by hand. By streamlining internal processes and increasing productivity, we could scale our business and grow our Paid Media (PPC) department by 100%.”
5. Scale your business
Running a digital marketing agency means wearing multiple hats and giving your clients the best-optimized results for their marketing buck. By automating reports, you get closer to that goal.
Explains Farhad Divecha, Managing Director of AccuraCast and a Swydo customer: “We are a team of 12, and I know it sounds shockingly small for the sort of business we are. It all comes down to being efficient. We use automation as much as possible to make things run smoothly. And use our time very intelligently as a team. We care about delivering the best results for our clients and then found a reporting platform that allowed us to get that maximum bandwidth with as many marketing channels as possible. It allowed us to create reports with a high degree of flexibility with lots of different reporting interfaces. Anybody working with large enterprises knows that you’re probably creating one report per country, one report per business unit, or one report per country per business unit. With that complexity, we needed something we could scale easily with. We love that automation allows us to be accurate, reliable, and scalable.”
What are the criteria for choosing a report automation tool?
When selecting a reporting tool, it is important to consider data accuracy, team management, customization, shareability options, and the type of reports you want to generate. Additionally, depending on the task, digital marketers may want to consider the availability of easy access to support. Look for a tool that is easy to use and learn. This will not only help you save time but also help you train new employees easily. Here are some factors to consider:
1. Branding and customization
Choose software that allows you to customize reports according to your business requirements. – think brand colors, white labeling options and hosting your reports on your own company domain. This will help you increase your brand visibility and reinforce your brand.
2. Cross-platform integrations
Look for software that integrates with your existing marketing tools. This way you will reduce errors and copy-pasting data using manual spreadsheets and help you consolidate your data under one roof.
3. Ease of use
A user-friendly and easy-to-navigate software allows you to create actionable reports within minutes from any data. Also, makes learning and onboarding new clients and peers easier.
4. Data security
Consider the software’s data security measures to protect sensitive client information.
5. Reporting capabilities
The ultimate goal of reporting software is to reduce manual workload, help you scale your business, and get that marketing ROI up and running. So choose a platform with robust reporting capabilities that allows you to communicate meaningful data insights and bolster your decision-making.
6. Scalability
Ensuring your chosen software can scale to meet your business’s ever-increasing demands is important. Additionally, it should be easy for multiple people to collaborate.
7. Customer support
Look for software with reliable and responsive customer support to assist you in case of any issues.
How Swydo can help you with your report automation needs
- Generate professional, branded PPC, SEO, and Social Media reports in a jiffy
- Save time with templates, pre-built widgets and auto-scheduling
- Customer support via chat and video calls
Report automation with Swydo is easy. It takes a few steps to combine your metrics with data from 30+ other marketing channels into one comprehensive report or dashboard. Check out the full list of integrations! Not yet a Swydo customer? Try it for free.