Marketing reporting automation
Imagine sitting in the office, manually inputting all the data, being over-careful because one single mistake may make the report completely inaccurate. Then updating all the information again and again… Does it sound familiar to you? There is a solution – marketing reporting automation!
Marketing reporting automation is, basically, creating the workflow that automatically generates marketing reports on your behalf, without manual work with data.
Workflow stages
The automation workflow is the following:
- Collecting relevant marketing data from one or more connected data sources.
- Cleaning, transforming and blending data.
- Push the blended data to a visualization tool.
- Creating reports to be exposed regularly and updating them.
- Scheduling the report delivery to the stakeholders or clients
Let’s have an eye on each of the stages separately.
Collecting relevant marketing data
You have to choose where you want to keep and work on your data. If you have a small company, the perfect solution for you would be Google Sheets, for example. In case you have a lot of data, you can use a personal local SQL data storage or, for instance, cloud Google BigQuery database. After that, you need to determine the list of the traffic sources and choose API connectors for constant automated data update. There are such API сonnectors like Supermetrics, PowerMyAnalytics and many others.
Considering the fact that all of the above-mentioned connectors are paid, you can avoid using them, especially when you need the report for a single use. In this case you can input all the data manually to Google Sheets. And talking about connectors, they can pull up data straight to the tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio. Which one is better to use in your case depends on several factors. We will discuss it in another article.
Transforming data and working in BI tool
Cleaning, transforming and blending data can be done using different tools, for example, Google Sheets, BigQuery or your SQL database.
Pulling data to the BI tools allows you to complete the two more essential stages of the workflow. Personally, I prefer working in Looker Studio. This platform is quite flexible and powerful and allows to solve the majority of tasks in marketing reporting and sales.
If you have connected the above-mentioned connectors, you can set up an automatic updating of the report. In case you need to update the data once a month, you can do it manually. It is important to think about this issue and set everything up, if needed.
And the last stage is scheduling the report delivery to the stakeholders or clients. That’s a great feature of data visualization apps that allows you to send your report presenting the most recent and relevant data.
Conclusion
To create your own report using your data you need to add a data source and then use a template or start from scratch choosing the elements that can represent your data perfectly. As a result you will have an automated report that is updating using relevant data. You can easily share it, schedule the delivery and present it!
If you want to know more about Looker Studio, get practical skills and theoretical knowledge about data visualization, I invite you to my Data Visualization in Looker Studio course! You can read more about and join the course by the link.
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