Olin Eichler
Product Owner Reporting
Our experience shows that in many companies, there are either no reports or reports that have been painstakingly compiled "by hand" showing data from the various marketing platforms in individual silos instead of providing a holistic overview of all measures. However, especially in light of the numerous channels and campaign formats, this is becoming increasingly important. How about automated multichannel reporting that aggregates all relevant data from all marketing platforms in use and visualizes it in a client-specific dashboard? The most important information about this concept is in this blog post.
1. What is a multichannel reporting dashboard, and how does it work?
A multichannel reporting dashboard is an automated report that ...
... pulls marketing data from different platforms (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Campaign Manager, Adobe Analytics, etc.),
... consolidates the data,
... supplements with additional data (e.g., CRM data, offline sales, etc.)
... and visualizes in a front-end dashboard.
This enables an overview of all (online) marketing measures in use without having to look into the individual ad platforms or manually compiling individual reports.
2. For whom is such a dashboard suitable or necessary?
The dashboard is useful for all companies, large and small, that work with online marketing platforms, follow a data-driven approach, and want to track the effectiveness of their marketing clearly and with little effort. Regardless of whether the focus is on awareness or performance goals, an automated multichannel dashboard keeps track of all KPIs and forms the basis for targeted campaign optimization.
3. What are the benefits of a multichannel reporting dashboard?
- A multichannel dashboard can be used to create a "single source of truth": This means all separate platform data is consolidated and a central measurement of marketing goals and uniform attribution is created via additional linking of analytics data.
- Shared understanding: All stakeholders speak the same language because they all see the same numbers and do not refer to their own reports.
- Individual configuration: It is possible to configure the report and data processing the way you want it (e.g., creating your own dimensions, mappings, summing conversions, conversions, filters, summaries, etc.).
- Fast loading time, asthe data has already been exported, processed, and cached by each channel.
- No repeated manual compilation of reports, as data is automatically updated in the dashboard, which additionally greatly reduces the susceptibility to errors.
Example of a multichannel reporting dashboard
4. What can go wrong?
- Despite the automation, one must be aware there is still a need for data maintenance in the background (e.g., in the areas of data tracking, mapping, or cleaning, and that resources must be planned for this).
- It is absolutely essential that all stakeholders – different teams on the company side, participating agencies, and service providers – work closely together and coordinate well to achieve the common goal.
- Consolidated reporting can relentlessly reveal your own failures of the past. You have to be prepared for this and actively engage with this process.
5. How does my marketing improve when I work with a multichannel reporting dashboard?
An automated reporting dashboard alone will not improve your marketing. But it is the essential basis for efficient and effective online marketing. Only a clean collection and preparation of data makes it possible to interpret the set key figures, to draw the right conclusions, and to optimize the measures – and thus to achieve the marketing and business goals.
Especially in an environment characterized by more and more channels and formats, it is increasingly difficult to keep track of all marketing measures.
6. How much effort should I expect for the implementation, and what do I have to provide for it?
- The initial effort should not be underestimated: What data should your dashboard contain, and how should it be prepared? Once this has been clarified, the next step is to clean up the existing data (e.g., with a cross-channel naming).
- When a company implements the project in-house, the invested work hours are (almost always) significantly higher than with a service provider specializing in reporting dashboards.
- When implementing with a specialized provider, the range, depending on the complexity, is from a few hours to several weeks. In general, you should certainly allow a few hours to days for defining the requirements, preparing the various accounts, tracking setup, etc.
- The development and completion then runs over several weeks to months.
- When planning costs, it is essential to factor in ongoing costs (e.g. for license fees or a possible retainer mandate for ongoing development and data maintenance) and to consider resources for maintenance.
Our solution
Our Data & Technologies team has intensively dealt with the topic and developed its own reporting infrastructure. How does it work? Using our own API connectors, we pull data from various marketing platforms – for example, Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, or Sistrix – process and consolidate it, then upload it to a BigQuery-based data warehouse. The whole thing is visualized via Looker Studio dashboards. Alternatively, the data can be visualized in other ways. Our experts analyze and interpret this data in detail and derive recommendations that serve as a basis for business-relevant decisions. Check it out in our interactive sample dashboard.
