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The best digital marketers are in complete control of their data. They know exactly what’s happening with campaigns and can let them know where things are up to in real-time. And monthly reporting is effortless because they have the right tools at their fingertips.If you’re drowning in data misery, it’s time to consider investing in better client reporting tools. Our guide reviews five pieces of campaign reporting software, each with a different price point, to give you a way to address your data woes.
Wasted Time = Wasted Money
When your software stack rivals the Burj Khalifa, exporting data from different systems and pulling it together takes time.
According to HubSpot, agency marketers spend around four to five hours on digital reporting per client. If you manage 20 clients that’s between 80 and 100 hours per month. That’s over half one person’s working month.
While spreadsheets might seem like your only option, there are an increasing number of sophisticated online programmes that remove much of the donkey work.
These reporting tools give you the necessary insights to shape and drive your capability to deliver profitable campaigns.
Google Analytics real-time reporting helps you benchmark the campaign performance of up to 100 websites. Track your website and landing page visitors, social media acquisition data and dive into stats on demographics and devices.
Preconfigured reports are available from the start but it’s Google Analytics’ capacity to build bespoke reports that provides greatest insight. Accelerate your learning curve with free add-ons, like the crowd-sourced solutions gallery which provides dashboards and custom report segments.
If you have more than one website to track, you will need to export data to a spreadsheet and combine it. Use Google Sheets to do this (it interacts better with Google Analytics) and use add-ins to make it quicker and easier to produce reports for multiple accounts.
Price: Free
Good For: businesses with low budgets who want to track and measure website activity and digital marketing performance.
Not So Good For: Understanding the bigger picture by bringing together data from other platforms such Facebook and Twitter. Data integration can be time consuming and exporting to spreadsheets runs the risk of user error.
#2 Segment
Fairly new to the market, Segment pulls together data from every customer touch point including mobile, web, server and cloud apps. The data is then filtered through the Segment software which collects and manages your customer analytics into a single meaningful format.
From there, the data is distributed to your email, analytics tools, helpdesks, attribution and data warehouses.
The aim? To generate information that allows you to convert leads into customers.
CEO Peter Reinhardt says that the need for this kind of data platform is growing:
“Companies are piecing together these best-in-class tools rather than these broad suites … People like more and more specialized, niche tools for companies of their size or their geography or their industry.”
Segment means keeping the tools you love and serves as their “central customer data platform”.
Because it’s available by market segment, including retail and B2B, it allows reports to be generated about data meaningful to each sector.
Price: team deals start at $100 per month; business prices are customised.
Good for keeping hold of existing tools that serve niche products, sectors and demographics. Segment connects them to your website to provide the reporting and data sharing you need.
Not so good for customer service – potentially. As a new provider, their customer support remains to be tested and as with all new technology glitches are possible.
#3 Klipfolio
Although Klipfolio promised great looking dashboards to share with your clients and team, the good looks are more than skin deep. Informed by significant combined data sets pulled together from different tools and pieces of technology, you benefit from a cohesive reporting experience.
Pre-built templates and dashboards are available to get you started. And once you’re ready to share you can pull your dashboard up on a TV screen in a meeting. Clients can also be given access to their own reports in Klipfolio reducing email traffic and data-sharing risks.
Price: team access is $199 per month but you may need to purchase add-ons.
Good for creating beautiful bespoke reports with custom visualisations that are more than skin deep. Complex formula capability allows you to take a deep and very specific dive into the data.
Not so good for providing an all-in-one solution without the need to purchase additional services.
#4 Megalytic
Don’t want to have to pull in data from every single platform? Megalytic does it for you by connecting to Google Analytics, Facebook, AdWords and more. It also has customisable reporting capability with full control over market segments and filtering. Reports easily roll up to provide previous month or year KPIs.
Reports are intuitive and streamlined and can be provided internally and to clients directly either on-demand or scheduled. All you need do is check the details, add any annotations and your report’s ready to go.
Price: enterprise level $400 per month.
Good for digital marketers. According to CEO, Mark Hansen, their focus on digital marketing has enabled them, “to make Megalytic extremely intuitive for Digital Marketers to use”.
Not so good for incorporating data from Twitter according to user reports.
#5 Data Hero
Data Hero integrates with wider cloud services to create client-specific reports with bespoke KPIs and meaningful insights for each client. Data can also be uploaded or imported from other systems to provide a single data set to inform reporting.
Over time, as you manipulate and add data, the system’s algorithms learn as you go saving you time in the future as the system becomes more intuitive.
Price: around $500 per month for an agency.
Good for combining datasets from a range of service providers to show how each aspect of the marketing plan impacts the bottom line.
Not so good for data that isn’t held in the cloud.
There are a range of useful campaign analytics tools on the market. The next challenge is to work out which would be best for your needs and, if you need something more than Google Analytics, convince the boss to invest.
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