As a digital marketer, you have to create and share reports now and then. In fact, many digital marketers spend most of their time creating reports each month. Some of the established marketers even automate the report creation process.
No doubt, report automation is one of the important aspects that a digital marketer should never underestimate. Whether it’s SEO, PPC, or SMM, report automation is essential, no matter what kind of project you’re working on.
Before rushing to the reasons to use Report Automation, let’s understand what — Analytics Ninjas and Reporting Squirrels are.
Analytics Ninjas — Analytics ninjas are those who mostly spend their time analyzing the reports and getting some actionable insights. The job of an analyst includes — modeling, pulling, segmenting, creating data sets, and so on.
The Reporting Squirrels —
Reporting Squirrels mainly spend 80 of their time in data production. They often engage themselves in creating reports for their team and team leaders. The job includes various aspects such as — pulling data, scheduling reports, asking the IT department for more data.
Anyways, everything boils down to one thing for Analysts — providing actionable insights that help you drive the ROI of data along with analytics.
Reasons Why Digital Marketers Love Report Automation
So let’s dive into details and understand the benefits of report automation.
1) Higher Data Accuracy
Manually creating reports could lead to errors; however, report automation could be prevented. For example, what if you copy and paste a number in the wrong section — this is how you could potentially make errors.
Businesses often use Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and other tools to get reliable data. Things could get complicated with creating reports manually.
The more reports you create manually, the more mistakes you’re prone to make. So, it’s essential to switch to reports automation.
2) Free Up Valuable Time
Manually creating reports could potentially take a lot of time. Building a fully-automated reporting section helps you free up your valuable time.
For example, as a web analyst, you invest around 20 hours in creating and updating reports every month. Those report creations could include various aspects such as building custom email and content reports etc. However, this all could be avoided with the reports automation. You can use this time to do whatever you want to do.
Now it’s evident that switching to automated reports helps you save valuable time.
3) Increased ROI
No matter whether you’re creating reports for your own organization or your clients. If you save up the time invested in creating reports, you could use that time to get more insights into the data.
Let’s take an example here; with the saved time, you could easily invest in doing an A/B test for your client’s website’s landing page. Or even you can figure out the next month’s plan for your client or your marketing agency.
For sure, automating all the points of reports automation helps you save valuable time, which will eventually help you increase your ROI.
4) Flexible & Practical Approach
With the Google Analytics reports, you will get a fresh idea of how things are exactly going. However, custom reports are one of the best options when compared to standard reports; what’s more, with custom reports, you can easily customer it as per your needs and requirements.
What’s more, if you are willing to combine various data sources like — Google Analytics and convert it or MailChimp, you will need to do data manipulation right in external tools.
Somehow if you’re deciding to automate your reporting and easily use an external tool, for sure, you will have flexibility with the report automation.
Overall, with the automatic reports automation, you will better understand all your visitors and their interaction with your website.
5) More ROI on your SERVICES
Let’s say you provide services or work at an agency where you provide your clients — recurring reports and a dashboard. However, the first setup for a client might take up some extra time if you’re new to the report automation thing.
Next time, you will be much quicker to provide similar or even better results. Because now you’re familiar with the stuff you’re dealing with. What’s more, you will also have the option to use your last template as the foundation for your news reports.
With the report automation, you will have more time to do the deeper analysis and analytics. With the detailed insights, you can easily come up with great insights and advice.
6) Easy WINS
No doubt, with report automation, you can quickly implement things on the go. It all boils down to the size and the complexity of the data and reports you’re dealing with.
For sure, if you spend time learning how to automate your reporting easily — it will pay off in the longer run. Somehow if your company has a lot of tools and reports to deal with, you should then follow the following pointers:
- Start by automating all the reports
- Execute and apply the same strategy to all reports your generate
- Continue until all your reports are properly automated
Now you might be wondering how you are going to do that — well, for that, you should go with — Supermetrics for Google Drive. You can make use of this tool to easily automate the reports creation process.
7) Fun & Rewarding
As per our experience automating reports at demands, we would say — it’s fun and rewarding.
The thing is, if you automate all your reports creation, it will help save a lot of your time — that time you can use to invest somewhere. Eventually, you can easily create a data-driven culture where you can easily minimize all your reporting time and focus more on the analysis and insights.
8) High Satisfaction — Data Analyst
Most of the time, the analytics employees are kind of scared. As a data analyst, there are some pros and cons associated with that.
Most of the time, a web analyst gets bored because of doing the same stuff repeatedly. Job satisfaction drastically decreases. However, it could simply ask a data analyst to set the report generation on auto-pilot. This is how the data analysts are gonna get high satisfaction.
9) No More Delays & Waiting Line
Working at DemandSage, I often play with lots of data and reports automation. I have to fill the
Getting the reports on time is on the priority list of DemandSage. Once the report automation module was introduced, I was amazed to see the visible result, and I was able to submit the reports on time without any delay. In fact, I have automated the creation and distribution process. Clients can even access the reports using the important KPIs.
So these are the reasons which depict why digital marketers love reports automation.
