6 Ways We Improved Agency Reporting Software

14 Apr

Most agency reporting software will import data from popular marketing platforms, let you do some calculations, and will give you a reporting tool to build out graphs, charts, etc.

TapClicks does all of those things while also improving on them in ways not commonly found in most agency reporting software. It’s these improvements that help marketing agencies (especially agencies at the enterprise-level who are dealing with hundreds of clients/vendors and thousands of campaigns) save a significant amount of time when it comes to reporting.

Improvement #1: We can integrate virtually any data set into your TapClicks database. Most reporting tools have some finite set of API connections to popular marketing platforms like Google and Facebook, and that’s it. If you have data you want to report on from a more obscure source, you have to deal with it manually. TapClicks, on the other hand, comes with the ability to create custom connectors to virtually any data source, whether it has an active API or not. We’ve created connections to thousands of data sources to date.

Improvement #2: We don’t just pull in data, but we make it easy for you to filter through your data. If you’re handling businesses in multiple locations, then sifting through the data can be a tiring headache. Your advertising platform will list data by campaigns but when you pull that data into TapClicks, you can filter by a single location, region, state, nation, and even at the global level.

Improvement #3: You can manage all your clients’ dashboards with one reporting template. Instead of having to create countless dashboards to manage (and edit) for each client or campaign, with TapClicks, you can create one dashboard template, and when you edit this template, all changes are saved across all clients. Or, you can even create just one reporting dashboard for all clients of a certain type and simply filter the data for each client (and give them links to just their filtered version), leaving you with only one dashboard to manage, not dozens or hundreds.

Improvement #4: You get a permanent store of your data. Most reporting software tools give you a live feed of your data, with most offering a look-back period (i.e., a set number of days where you can see past data without having to re-export data sets). If you lose access to the data source (e.g. a client drops), you’re out of luck. But TapClicks acts as your marketing data warehouse, which permanently stores all of the data you’ve ever imported into it. This allows agencies to do a lot of advanced calculations and benchmarking using past client data that would otherwise be difficult to do.

Improvement #5: We automate the calculations your team is making so they only need to make them once. Sometimes reporting software will give you tools to make manual calculations easier, but you’ll still need to make them anytime you want to send out a report and make them for every client you have. With TapClicks, you can fully automate this process. Once you have a calculation set (e.g. adding up total engagement across multiple social campaigns), it’s saved and can be used for every report and every client.

Improvement #6: You can set up recurring PowerPoint or PDF reports to pull up-to-date data and automatically plug it into visual elements. Most reporting tools let you visualize data in dashboards, but many clients also want PowerPoint or PDF reports to be emailed monthly or weekly. With TapClicks, you can create a recurrent report template and schedule it to be sent to stakeholders every week or month and the most up-to-date data is automatically pulled into the file. Numbers, graphs, and chart fields are automatically updated with the latest data. This can save agencies an incredible amount of employee hours every month that would otherwise be spent building the same weekly or monthly reports over and over again.

Below, we look at these 6 key improvements to agency reporting software in more detail.

You can also start your free trial today to see how much time you save by using TapClicks as your agency reporting software.

Improvement #1: All Your Data in One Spot (Including Data Most Agency Reporting Software Can’t Bring In)

TapClicks integrates with over 250 instant-on connectors.

It’s common for agency reporting software to bring in the data you need into a reporting tool — that’s more or less the point of getting reporting software. It saves you time because you don’t need to manually export data out of one platform and into another.

But at TapClicks, we can integrate with virtually any data — even platforms or data warehouses that no other reporting tool has an API connection with.

With easy-to-set-up connectors, we can pull in data from:

Popular advertising platforms: Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Bing, Hulu, Quora, YouTube, etc.
CRM tools: Salesforce, CallRail, HubSpot Analytics, TapeLeads, Temetrics, etc.
SEO tools: Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz, SEMRush, Google Analytics, etc.
And thousands more.

We can also pull in on-premise data that no software will have an active API connection with, such as the in-house metrics of one of your clients or your own agency data.

You can even get data into your reporting dashboard by having it emailed into TapClicks.

The point is, with TapClicks, agencies never have to worry about the reporting tool only helping with some of their data while some is handled manually, the tool can be relied on to report on all of their data.

Improvement #2: Easily Filter Through Your Data

Most agency reporting tools will give you access to your data in a way similar to how it was originally presented in its native platform. For example, if you use a reporting tool to look at data from Google Ads, you’re seeing all your campaigns as they’re organized within the Google Ads platform.

But TapClicks lets you easily segment and filter through your data however is most convenient or useful.

Let’s say you’re running a series of paid search, paid social and radio, or broadcast ads to increase foot traffic at brick-and-mortar stores and you want to see how those campaigns are affecting specific locations. If you’re looking at data within Google Ads’ native analytics tool — or most reporting tools — you cannot easily hone in on specific locations or groups of locations.

Instead, you’re stuck searching through hundreds (if not thousands) of campaigns.

Your team has to go through each campaign, with data sorted in different ways depending on the platform it came from, import it into a spreadsheet, and segment by location. Then, your team needs to aggregate that data, from the individual location level, to see how an overall region is performing. Depending on the size of your agency, you could be facing hundreds of campaigns for just one location.

Hours and hours of this kind of spreadsheet data analysis is common in most agencies.

But with TapClicks, you can easily zero in on any specific region or location. So if you’re running ads for a car dealership with 50+ locations across the Northwest, you can, in a few clicks, isolate the data to see how the ads are improving sales in the North Portland region and then look at the data in the aggregate to see overall performance.

Improvement #3: You Only Have to Manage One Reporting Dashboard (Across All Clients)

Most reporting software will have you managing a different dashboard for each client. So if you need to make agency-wide changes (such as changing which metrics you’re reporting on or creating a new calculation), you need to do that with every single dashboard you manage. That’s annoying double-work for an agency of any size, and it’s downright infeasible for enterprise-level agencies that are dealing with hundreds of clients.

With TapClicks, you can create a universal reporting dashboard template that works for all clients.

For example, if you’re an agency that works with how Local TV/Radio ads increase eCommerce sales, then you could have just one dashboard template that contains the calculations and datasets needed to track campaign performance, and simply create variations of that template for different clients.

This way, anytime you need to make changes, you only have to change the universal reporting template and those changes will be reflected within all dashboards.

Improvement #4: You Get a Permanent Store of Your Data

Most agency reporting software gives you a “live” data feed with a limited “look back” period, where you can view data that’s a few weeks or months old.

That limits your analyzing capabilities — you can only analyze and visualize data that you currently have access to. If a client drops, you will lose access to all of their data.

But TapClicks creates a permanent store of the data you’ve pulled in.

Think of your TapClicks account as a marketing data warehouse — meaning your agency has a permanent store of all data from all campaigns you’ve run for all clients.

Having a permanent store of your data makes it easier to:

Take data in the aggregate and build compelling case studies.
Look at performance over a much longer timeframe.
Do “benchmark” analysis to show future clients what typical results for different campaigns in different locations look like.
Evaluate the effectiveness of how your agency is running its campaigns.
Pinpoint “breaking points” where your clients start to see the most ROI. For example, if you’re doing SEO-based marketing, it might be around months 5-6 that your clients start seeing the most results. By having a permanent store of data, you can use that as a resource to set expectations with new clients who are still in the first 4 month ramp up.

Improvement #5: TapClicks Will Automatically Calculate Key Metrics

After pulling in data from all relevant platforms, most reporting software still requires marketers to manually calculate key metrics (though they do make it easier than doing this in a spreadsheet).

For example, let’s say you want to report on the “Total Engagement” of a specific campaign.

To do that accurately, you will include the total number of views, likes, retweets, and comments across whatever different platforms you’re advertising on (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc).

You need to do this calculation whenever you have to send out a report. That’s time-consuming — even for a relatively straightforward task (i.e. figuring out engagement).

Plus, it’s unsustainable and completely unscalable if you’re looking to figure out more nuanced calculations, like the total engagement broken down by region, or you want to view total engagement contextualized by the conversion rate of a specific landing page. In that case, your marketers are going to spend even more time getting the calculation right.

With TapClicks, you can automate these advanced calculations, so your marketing team isn’t spending half of their week getting these key metrics.

How to set up advanced calculations in TapClicks

You simply define the calculation in TapClicks once (e.g. “Total Engagement” is the sum of all likes, shares, views, comments, retweets, etc.), and those custom-defined metrics will be available for you to use in all future reports or calculations. You don’t have to manually add up all of those separate “engagement” metrics into “Total Engagement” again. This feature alone can save many agencies dozens of employee hours per week.

With TapClicks, You Can Set Up KPI Alerts to Monitor Campaign Performance

TapClicks also lets you monitor campaign performance. Simply set up an alert for whatever campaign or metric you want to monitor. When a specific metric drops below a benchmark you set, you get an alert, which is a huge time saver when you’re managing hundreds or thousands of marketing campaigns.

Improvement #6: TapClicks Will Automatically Create and Send Out Custom Client Reports (With the Most Recent Data Available)

TapClicks Reporting Example: Our agency reporting software lets you create custom client reports

It’s typical for most agency reporting software to give you a reporting platform. But most of the time, these reporting dashboards are severely limited in what they can do.

Most software requires that you report via a dashboard. In order to send that information to your client, you’d have to either take screenshots of your reporting dashboard or export data out into a CSV where all of your info is in rows and columns and needs to be re-organized. You would need to do this with every client every time they want a report. This doesn’t help you when your clients want their report sent to them as a PowerPoint or PDF.

In contrast, with TapClicks, you can get your most recent data sets automatically compiled into a report-worthy PPT or PDF file.

When you set up a recurring report, TapClicks will build a report with the most recent data and send it to whatever email addresses you’ve specified.

This means you and your team don’t need to spend dozens of hours per week building reports with the most recent data sets. Data is already pulled into TapClicks — any calculations that need to happen will happen automatically — and that data is plugged into your scheduled reports.

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