Why Are Reporting Tools So Important for Your Business
Data! The heart of digital marketing. Until recently, data was hard to come by and often incomplete. Now, we have a different problem, data overload. Business owners don’t know how to utilise the data correctly, and many agencies spend excessive amounts of time trawling through or creating reports that no one ever reads.
Reporting tools help streamline the process by gathering and presenting data in charts, tables and other visualisations so the end-user can understand the data more efficiently. Inevitably having a reporting tool that extracts the right data can help your business make better marketing decisions.
What Is a Reporting Tool?
A reporting tool is a system that gathers data from multiple sources and interprets it in tables, charts, visual presentations, and other forms so that the data can be more easily analysed. This is the fastest way to turn your data into insights and make more informed decisions.
How Do Reporting Tools Work?
Report designer tools are employed to define properties such as data sources, display formats, graphical visualisations, filters, parameters, and many other features that are essential for report presentation.
The best part? Enterprise reporting tools enable users to generate reports and dashboards straight from a Web application using specific reporting capabilities. By developing reporting components, pulling in data, and creating ad hoc reports on their own, end-users can create exactly what they need to make swift data-driven decisions.
Reports can be released to a reporting engine that extrapolates data into various formats: tables, charts, graphs, or other visual elements that make your data as interactive as possible. Reporting tools usually include scheduling, exporting, distribution, bursting, and so on.
What Is the Goal of a Reporting Tool?
The purpose of reporting tools and BI tools is to help you glean valuable information from your data.
After all, what is the point of working with multiple data sources if you cannot refine the input and add value to your business goals? There are also many use scenarios for reporting tools, from handling performance data to enabling your clients to leverage reporting of their data. And using the right tool means that you can adapt it to any workload or scenario.
What Are the Benefits of Reporting Tools?
If you leverage site analytics, use PPC advertising, or create social media campaigns, you’ll probably want to combine all that data into one dashboard to get actionable information at a glance. This way, reporting doesn’t need to be a nightmare and you actually make the most from all your data sources.
Reporting tools are helpful because they gather data across sources, such as inventory, sales, conversion, web traffic, social media impressions, time spent, and so on. Furthermore, they organise it in a visual way to make it exciting for users to view and interpret.
Reports can usually be delivered into different formats, printed and distributed, or visualised, and presented, so it is a great alternative to show large amounts of useful information quickly. Also, reporting enables you to ask comprehensive questions and then collect the information you require to make the best decisions.
Here are the top five benefits of having a reporting dashboard to streamline your data.
1. Reduce Time-Consuming Manual Tasks
2. Enhance Accuracy
No matter how proficient your analysts are, they are human — and humans sometimes make mistakes. This risk for error and accuracy fallacies are something that can be avoided with automated reports. This feature saves time, money, and the sanity of your business analysts.
3. Provide Comprehensive Insight and Analysis
Mastering Google Ads but struggling with Facebook? It would be more accessible if the reports were merged into one dashboard as opposed to different layouts on different platforms. Get an overall apples-to-apples measurement of all your campaigns and decide based on accurate data, not guesses.
4. Boost Productivity and Reduce Costs
Merging all your digital services into a single reporting dashboard grants you more free time, especially if you are an agency with many clients. You could scale your interpretation and reporting structure across all clients. Configure once and deploy. This type of cost savings will get your accountants excited.
What Are the Types of Reporting Tools?
Reports can range in their interactivity. End-users cannot change static reports. But they can do so much with interactive reports. They can navigate the data through various systems and visualisation elements, all while consuming several levels of information at the click of a button. Moreover, they also enable you to navigate, sort, filter and view the required information.
There are several kinds of reporting tools, such as:
- Dashboard software — enables you to place the most relevant reports to you front-and-centre.
- Data visualisation software — is all about turning data into something visually-oriented that users can easily read.
- Scorecard tools — are all about performance data, so you know who your high achievers are.
- Ad-hoc report writers — create various styles of reports in-the-moment for companies that have ever-changing needs.
What Are the Types of Reporting Tools?
See What Reporting Tools Can Do for Your Business
By merging all your digital marketing data, you can solve structural problems like:
- How much money am I spending?
- What is my return on investment?
- Is campaign performance improving or getting worse over time?
- Should I allocate more or less money to a channel?
You can prove your skills on the spot with funnel templates, or you can build your very own in a few clicks.
Organise your marketing intelligence to present continuous, cross-channel marketing data. Generate extensive, automatic dashboards using your compared data to share with your team and customers.
You can start with reliable templates, custom-build for yourself, or allow data experts to assist you in outlining and building the ideal digital marketing hub for your business. Check out this affiliate link for free trial and see how much easier reporting can be. Getting started is easy. You’ll be up and running in minutes.
Bottom Line
Today you can gather all your marketing data in one place and automate your reporting. This means generating custom reporting elements to creatively display data in minutes rather than hours of combining in Excel. For a professional result, apply custom-branded interfaces for your clients and scale and segment your configurations.
Are you ready to take your digital marketing insight and reporting to the next level? Find out how we can help you.
