Often when digital marketing agencies piece together in-house reporting processes to analyze  Facebook advertising data, they eventually end up seeking out a third-party reporting or analytics tool to address the following common issues:

1. In-house processes are time-consuming and error-prone. These two go hand-in-hand as the more errors made, the more time spent fixing them. But even when you've managed to avoid all errors, using Excel or CSV files to manage your data is still a drain on your resources (organizing data within Google Sheets, creating charts and graphs with a free tool like Google Data Studio, etc.).
2. It's hard to view your Facebook data in the context of the rest of your marketing operations. Getting data out of Facebook and into a Google Sheet keeps your Facebook data isolated. This makes it challenging to see valuable trends such as multi-touch attribution. For example, when someone converts through a Google Search Ad after seeing a Facebook ad first.
3. It's more difficult to leverage data to prove value in sales conversations and upsell your existing clients. The inability to get granular with your data limits the valuable insights you're able to discover, and your ability to create compelling stories around your marketing efforts.

But not all of these problems are unique to in-house processes. When marketing agencies are using straight reporting tools (versus tools that do true analytics), they're still quite limited in their ability to manipulate and view data in different ways, to mix and match and layer in different channels, and to view their Facebook data in wider business contexts.

To solve all these problems, agencies need a Facebook Ads reporting tool that is sophisticated in its ability to enable data analysis, connect to a comprehensive list of data sources, and is also intuitive to use. For example, something that gives you the ability to easily pull in data from LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, and Google Analytics, place it alongside your Facebook data, and understand how the platforms are working with each other.

In this post, we're going to discuss the important distinction between tools that do reporting versus tools that do reporting and analytics. Then we'll show how TapClicks can help you analyze data and report to your clients, gain valuable insights, and even help you use those insights to upsell your services.

Looking for an all-in-one reporting solution to analyze not just your Facebook data, but your entire marketing operation? Check out our free 14-day trial.

Facebook Ads Reporting Tools vs. Facebook Ads Analytics Tools

Whatagraph is a good example of a Facebook Ads reporting tool. It has plans that range from $99 a month to $599 a month, depending on how many data sources and users you need.

If you're on the $99 a month plan, you get 15 data sources with 1 user. If you're on the $599 a month, you get unlimited data sources.

A reporting tool focuses on gathering data from select data sources, compiling it into compelling charts and visuals, and automatically sending it off to your clients.

Because of this, a reporting tool really helps solve the time problem of creating reports for your marketing data.

The disadvantage of simpler reporting tools is that they'll always tell more limited stories with your data. For example, using a Facebook reporting tool, you might only be able to segment by campaigns, post engagement, page views, video views, ad sets, impressions, clicks, and spend. Plus, you can't mix and layer your Facebook Insights with your other marketing channels, which means you're not looking at the full picture. This limits the value you can show to your clients. And as your needs and customers' expectations evolve, you will want a way to incorporate these additional metrics into your reports.

A Facebook Analytics tool is going to let you get more granular with your data. With analytics, you can get to the bottom of which ads are performing and optimize your ad spend. If you want to see which ads have the highest post engagement or conversion rate, looking within your ad account is sufficient. But if you want to know how that ad fits in with your other social media marketing efforts, and the rest of the channels you're advertising in, you'll need a true analytics tool.

But, generally, there is overlap between reporting tools and analytic tools, with most major platforms positioning themselves as both. To help find which one works for your agency, let's go over the main benefits of finding the right platform.

1. Organize and Present Your Data in Minutes, Not Hours

If you're using in-house processes to report on your data, then your workflow probably looks a little like this:

1. Export Facebook Ads data from a specific date range into a Google Sheet or Excel file.
2. Within that Excel file, rename metrics, adjust columns and rows and organize the data.
3. Import that data into something like Google Data Studio or PowerPoint, so you can make the data visually appealing.
4. From there, download your report and send it to your clients.

You're likely sending marketing reports weekly or monthly, which makes this a recurring task. Reporting tools can take this recurring task and automate it. Now, your marketing team doesn't need to worry about exporting, re-organizing, and importing data. Instead, your metrics are automatically uploaded into your reporting dashboard, a report is created, and then it's sent to your clients.

At TapClicks, we know there needs to be flexibility in visualizations and the mechanism used to create these displays must be easy to use and intuitive. There also needs to be an easy and reliable way to send this information directly to those that need it. Different users consume information differently some people prefer to log into a dashboard and tinker with the display themselves, while some want a simple PowerPoint deck or PDF report with the salient points. Others want an email that has an excel attachment with all the raw data contained therein.

Flexibility in data sources, visualizations, and distribution is critical so that the platform selected will continue to satisfy the organization's evolving business needs without a requirement to re-train stakeholders on new platforms every year.

If you're doing that level of customization manually, you're going to need to pay someone just to handle your reporting. When it comes to organizing and customizing your data in TapClicks, you can:

• Set permissions and provide different stakeholders with different levels of access (marketing teams, clients, executives, etc.) to view and interact with their data in all of the different ways mentioned above based on their needs.
• Create custom reports using our pre-designed templates (or making your own report template completely from scratch).
• Bring in data from over 240+ marketing-specific data sources. We're focused on digital agencies, media companies, and brands so we make sure that we're able to provide connectors for the most relevant platforms in digital marketing.
• Allow for real-time reporting. We've worked with agencies who stop sending out weekly client reports because their clients can log into the dashboard with the appropriate viewing settings and check metrics such as ad performance, click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate whenever they want.

2. Gain Valuable Insights Across Your Entire Digital Marketing Campaign

One of the biggest differentiators between reporting and analytics platforms is how detailed you can get with your data, as well as how you can view the data from your social media campaigns within the broader context of your marketing strategy.

There are more basic tools that focus on the boiler-plate data sets within an advertising platform. For example, you can find dashboards that let you gather impressions, clicks, and ad spend via your Facebook Ads account. But it's more difficult to find a tool that lets you blend your Facebook Ads data with your LinkedIn ads data. Or, thinking outside of advertising platforms, how has your Facebook ads impacted your margins? Impressive conversion metrics don't necessarily always mean a positive return on ad spend, let alone a positive ROI.

With TapClicks, all of your relevant data sets are within reach and can be blended together to see their impact on one another.

If you're looking to see how much you're spending across Facebook and Google, you can blend Facebook's cost and Google's ad spend into one metric.

If you're looking to see which Facebook ads lead to the highest amount of new customers who were later cross-sold via your post-purchase email sequence, you can pull Facebook ads data and Mailchimp data together to get a better understanding of the long-term benefits of your digital marketing.

By looking at data in this way, you can better quantify brand awareness, whether or not the marketing strategies you designed are hitting with your target audience, and any other KPIs that are deemed relevant.

3. Leverage Facebook Data to Upsell Your Marketing Services

Let's say that your agency has a number of digital marketing packages that they sell, and you pitch a package to a small business for 50 leads in the next 3 months. That package comes with a Local Listing Checkup to ensure that the client's business info is accurate across the web. There is a line item to create a Facebook Page (if one doesn't already exist), and there is a Facebook Ads Campaign with a particular budget.

While the campaign is running, you're going to reach back out to the advertiser and give them an update on campaign progress. For example, you might tell them that the Facebook Ads Campaign brought in 50 leads from the form that was placed on their Facebook Page.

Depending on the campaign performance and how hungry your client is for more leads, they may take advantage of the other available options that you have available (from SEO to more expansive PPC campaigns). As such, each of the channels through which you advertise benefits from being incorporated into your overall reporting platform.

With TapClicks, we streamline the process of upselling for marketing agencies by:

• Helping agencies identify any marketing specific services that their clients may be missing. This is easy to do with TapClicks because through your dashboard you can see what campaigns are being run and what packages have been purchased by the client. Plus, you can see the stats of what is working and what is not.
• Letting agencies create tiers of service for its clients. Your clients can start with the standard analytics dashboard (which you can create custom to match your packages, such as packages for specific social networks). And as a client increases its spend, it's easy to move them to a dashboard with more metrics and data analysis.

Final Thoughts

When you're looking for tools to help with Facebook Ads reporting and analytics, the distinction between tools that just do reporting and tools that do proper analytics is an important one.

So before investing in a tool, you want to make sure to ask yourself: Are we looking for a tool that simply helps us pull in data from Facebook Ad campaigns and make creating and sending reports easier? Or are we looking for a tool with analytics to provide us with powerful ways to view data in different contexts and generate valuable insights?

If the latter is what you're looking for, and you want the ability to view data sources as parts of a bigger picture, then an analytics tool like TapClicks is the way to go.

If you're ready to start seeing how TapClicks can be customized to fit your agency's current — and future — needs, try our free 14-day trial.