If you're an enterprise-level agency running many marketing campaigns across different channels, you'll likely find a multichannel campaign management tool useful to help you execute those campaigns. We list the 7 leading tools (in the Gartner magic quadrant) for this below.

But marketers also need to measure and report on their performance across multiple channels. While multichannel campaign management tools offer some reporting features, they don't satisfy all the multichannel reporting criteria we believe is essential for marketers, specifically:

1. Gathering data from all the disparate data sources used by marketers (e.g. LinkedIn, radio and CRM platforms) and store it in one accessible location: Some multichannel campaign management tools have restricted integrations with the number of sources they can extract data from and only integrate with databases that require coding experience to access.
2. Setting up advanced calculations once only across multiple campaigns: While you can execute multiple campaigns via a multichannel campaign management tool, measuring the impact of several different campaigns (e.g. all your social media campaigns), which is essential for client reporting, involves repetitive complex calculations. Most tools require marketers to export data and do these calculations every month (or week) in spreadsheets.  
3. Creating powerful multichannel reports that are automatically updated with your latest data in 3 ways: Via dashboards, PowerPoint-style reports or exporting the data to another reporting tool (e.g. Tableau). This flexibility is not offered by all multichannel campaign management tools.

In this piece, we'll consider these 3 factors in more detail and discuss in-depth how our solution TapClicks fulfills each one. We'll also give an overview of the 7 Leaders in the magic quadrant of the Gartner report on multichannel campaign management.

If you're interested in how TapClicks could work as a multichannel campaign management tool for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.

Factor #1: Gather Data from All Your Data Sources and Access It via Your Own Marketer-Friendly TapClicks Data Warehouse

Agencies or enterprise brands running multichannel marketing campaigns typically handle a lot of data from workflow and customer data (including all the touchpoints of the customer journey) through direct mail, SMS and email marketing, to digital marketing campaigns and traditional broadcast mediums (e.g. TV and radio).

Gathering that data from all these disparate sources and bringing it into one place where it can be analyzed by marketers isn't easy. While many multichannel campaign management tools can aggregate data from multiple sources, some are limited to the number of sources they have integrations with. In addition, some multichannel campaign management tools use separate data warehouse or database facilities that typically require data engineering experience to access.

So, while multichannel campaign management tools are super-helpful at optimizing marketing automation in terms of campaign execution (e.g. content management and customer experience), they don't necessarily ensure that the entire marketing lifecycle is as efficient as it could be. If they don't integrate with every data source, these will need to be collected manually or by using an additional tool (e.g. an ETL Extract, Transform, Load tool), plus, if the data is stored in a database which requires SQL language to access, it won't be accessible to marketers.

Our solution, TapClicks handles the entire marketing data management lifecycle in one place, providing an automated central hub for all the data from your multichannel campaigns in one easy-to-use ecosystem.

TapClicks Smart Connector Tool Aggregates Data from All Your Data Sources

Our customers have built connections to thousands of data sources via our Smart Connector tool which essentially lets you build a connection to any data source you may have (including offline and proprietary data sources).

We also have hundreds of pre-built API-based data integrations to all the marketing platforms you would expect (e.g. Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, etc.) as well as many lesser-known ones (e.g. Genius Monkey and Tiger Pistol).

Once you've set up the connections to the data sources you want, data will be pulled through immediately. TapClicks will extract data from all your sources automatically every day or whenever you choose to refresh it. In some cases, we can pull through 12 months of historical data too, so it can be used in your multichannel or cross-channel marketing if you wish.

And, because TapClicks manages the API connections, you don't need to worry about your developers managing a connection if it breaks, because the TapClicks team will take care of it for you.

TapClicks Stores All Your Data in Once Place, Accessible to Marketers

The TapClicks team will also manage the storage of your data. Once your data is being pulled into our platform, it will be stored in your own TapClicks data warehouse, forever. This is in contrast to some multichannel campaign management tools that store data in databases that are only accessible to data engineers.

The TapClicks data warehouse requires no coding experience to access and provides marketers with a central hub where you can do analytics and reports from there or push data out to other destinations (e.g a BI tool).

Feature #2: Set Up Advanced Calculations Once Only across Multichannel Campaigns with TapClicks

Using a multichannel campaign management tool allows you to execute your marketing strategy and focus on campaign optimization across different channels, but analyzing the data from these channels so you can present reports to clients and stakeholders isn't straightforward. You still have to get the data from the different platforms (e.g. radio, social media #1 above), transform it, do calculations on it and combine the data to evaluate performance against your KPIs.

TapClicks allows users to set up or define advanced calculations once only, and then those calculations can be automatically executed across your multichannel campaigns in the future.

Here are a couple of examples.

Customize and Combine Metrics from Multichannel Campaigns

Marketers often deal with metrics from different multichannel campaigns with unique names which effectively mean the same thing. For example, a social media agency may track follows on X (Twitter) or Facebook and subscribes on YouTube as simply engagement and want to report that to clients.

If your multichannel campaign management tool cannot handle this type of calculation (or it's too complicated for marketers to execute without the help of a data team) reporting on a Total Engagement metric like that is tedious: every month, the team has to add up likes here and follows there, and track it in a spreadsheet.

But with TapClicks, you can define an umbrella term once and it will remain available and updated with the latest near real-time data for all future reports you want to create. 

For example, you could create a new term inside TapClicks called Total Social Engagement and define it as the sum of post-reactions on Facebook, views on YouTube, or click-throughs on LinkedIn (see below).

Once that custom metric is defined, it will be available in TapClicks forever, with updated data, so you never have to manually add up those engagement metrics again in order to report on them.

In any dashboard or report you build in the future (see #3, below), you can just drop in the metric Total Social Engagement and TapClicks will automatically calculate it based on how you defined it and have the number or graph ready for you.

This saves a huge amount of time.

Set Up Repetitive Calculations for Multichannels

In addition to defining custom metrics, you can also automate more advanced calculations for your multichannel campaigns in TapClicks.

For example, if you are a tire manufacturer and you want to view your data by brand, but you have multiple ad campaigns running for different brands, you can set up advanced calculations that find the specific brand names in the campaign names and aggregate stats across all of these into single metrics for that specific brand.

In our example below, we can see that there are 266 Facebook Ad campaigns, all pulling in data from our data sources.

We've decided to name a certain segment of those campaigns HNP Campaigns' (see arrow on the right-hand side).

This means we can now pull data for just those HNP campaigns into any report or dashboard we want to create.

In this example, there are 191 of them and it pulls the data for all of those campaigns into one line (see arrow on the right-hand side).

You can use this function to group and view data by all types of location or by any segment you like product, campaign type, group, or customer segment and zoom in and out as you need to.

You can also calculate the overall click-through rate by adding up clicks across many campaigns and dividing by total impressions. You could calculate cost per click for campaigns across a region or specific product lines by adding up total spend and dividing by total clicks. The possibilities are endless.

And, as with everything in the TapClicks solution, you only have to set these up once. From there, calculated metrics are up-to-date and ready for you to report on every week or every month.

Feature #3: With TapClicks, You Can Create Powerful Multichannel Reports in 3 Ways

Some multichannel campaign management tools have limited reporting functionality so you need to push the data out to another reporting tool. In contrast, other multichannel campaign management tools feature sophisticated reporting features which cannot be accessed by marketers without the help of a data team.

But with TapClicks, anyone can create powerful visualizations and reports in 3 ways:

Visualize Multichannel Campaigns via Dashboards

You can create dashboards so you can view multichannel campaign data in near real-time (typically updated daily).

TapClicks dashboard tools are designed to be scalable, meaning single dashboards or visualizations can easily be turned into templates and applied across dozens or hundreds of dashboards.

Marketing agencies can create one dashboard for a specific type of report and filter the data for each client. This has the advantage of letting you make a change to this report in one place and having it instantly apply to all clients. For example, you can select social media as one channel and filter the campaigns you want to be included (e.g. Facebook Ads, X [Twitter] Ads, LinkedIn, etc.).

Here's a video that shows you how to create a dashboard in TapClicks:

Multichannel Reports That Are Always Up-to-Date

Our reporting solution, Report Studio, automatically populates PowerPoint-style reports because they are connected to all your data sources (#1) and the calculations you set up (#2). These can be scheduled to be sent out to your chosen audience whenever you want (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc.).

Here's a short video on how to schedule reports in TapClicks Report Studio:

Deliver Multichannel Data to Any Other Platform

If your multichannel campaign management tool is limited on data collection (#1) and calculation features (#2) but it's great at campaign execution and reporting, you could use TapClicks to collect, store and calculate your data and have that data pushed out to your multichannel campaign management tool or any other destination.

For example, if you use Tableau for analysis and visualization, you can push data from TapClicks there or likewise with Google Sheets.

You can read more about TapClicks integration with Google Sheets in this piece.

Want to See How TapClicks Can Help with Your Multichannel Campaign Management?

TapClicks fulfills the three factors we believe are essential to marketers reporting on multichannel campaigns, namely, (1) Gathering data from all your data sources and storing it in one accessible place, (2) Allowing you to set up advanced calculations for multichannel campaigns from one place and, (3) Creating powerful reports on your multichannel campaigns in three ways.

This means that TapClicks can be an all-in-one solution for reporting on your multichannel campaigns if your multichannel campaign tool falls short in this area, or it can complement your multichannel campaign management tool acting as its data collection, storage and reporting solution.

If you're interested in how TapClicks could work as a multichannel campaign management tool for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.

Gartner Magic Quadrant: The 7 Leaders in Multichannel Campaign Management

Enterprise software evaluation consultants Gartner have selected the following 7 companies as Leaders in its multichannel campaign management magic quadrant. They define the multichannel campaign management (MCCM) market as vendors that "orchestrate customer engagements and marketing content to individuals and segments across multiple channels. You can read more on the criteria in this article.

Let's take a brief overview of the 7 Leaders:

1. SAS

SAS is a fully integrated, open source, cloud-native technology platform that offers reality-tested AI analytics and data management solutions. Used by data scientists, business analysts and statisticians, SAS is a sophisticated tool with advanced business intelligence features.

2. Adobe

Adobe is an advanced analytics platform that can capture data from almost any source. Adobe helps integrate data from virtually any channel, including web, mobile, video, IoT, app, social, and more. It allows you to analyze that data in real-time to understand your customers on a whole new level.

3. Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer-focused software solution that provides customer relationship management and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.

4. IBM

IBM offers a complex AI-driven solution to create customer loyalty, automate business processes, and innovate future ideas The platform utilizes machine learning to offer advanced analytics which can be orchestrated across multichannel campaigns.

5. Oracle

Oracle Analytics is a complete platform with ready-to-use services for a wide variety of workloads and data. Offering valuable, actionable insights from all types of data in the cloud, on-premise, or as a hybrid Oracle Analytics helps business users, data engineers, and data scientists to access and process relevant data, evaluate predictions, and make quick, accurate decisions.

6. SAP 

SAP Crystal Reports is a popular BI reporting software solution that can collect data from almost any data source.

SAP offers a suite of dashboard and reporting capabilities which allow you to use a drag and drop interface so you can optimize your data and provide easy-to-understand reports for clients and stakeholders.

7. Marketo

Part of Adobe, Marketo is a marketing automation system covering lead management, customer journeys and insights. Marketo is challenging to learn how to use but it allows users to collect data out of silos, unify it, analyze it and create reports.

If you're interested in how TapClicks could work as a multichannel campaign management tool for your organization, you can try it free for 14-days or schedule a demo to learn more.

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