Enterprise Reporting Tools: The Feature That's Non-Negotiable

Despite their size and resources, many enterprise companies have inefficient in-house reporting processes. They're either working out of Google Sheets and Microsoft PowerPoint, repeatedly exporting data into tools such as Google Data Studio, or using more complex business intelligence tools like Tableau.

These enterprise reporting processes require significant hands-on labor that make it difficult to scale for several reasons:

• They can't get all of their disparate data sources into one dashboard. Enterprise-level companies are managing many data sets and understanding how they're performing in relation to one other is extremely challenging without a unified dashboard.

• They struggle to create visualizations. After the data you need is imported into your dashboard, you now need to work to create compelling  and easy to understand data visualizations across multiple channels. This means blending data from various platforms which is often complex and time-consuming.

• They have more reports than they can manage.  Account managers are often spending most of their week building various reports for different stakeholders. This means your team is going through the same motion for each campaign, client, or region. This busywork keeps your team from more profitable tasks.

• They can't identify current problems and opportunities. In large enterprises, there can be underperforming campaigns that are allowed to stay live for weeks (or longer) due to lack of visibility and actionable insights.

For companies looking for enterprise reporting tools, scalability is the feature that's non-negotiable. Without it, your business not only struggles to grow but is at greater risk of making decisions based on incomplete data. This is because the tools that help your company grow are the same ones that help you make better decisions.

By working with companies across various industries (from digital marketing agencies to large retail brands to media companies) we discovered that to have enterprise reporting software built to scale, you need:

1. An interactive, unified dashboard view that works with a diverse set of data sources. Otherwise reporting headaches arise from trying to handle disparate data sources and juggle multiple dashboards per platform. Collecting all of your data into one dashboard eliminates this problem.
2. Reporting, analytics, and workflow automation. Your reporting software should help reduce the amount of work it takes for your account managers to deliver reports, and free them up to be able to focus their energy on strategy and execution.

Combined, these two features reduce the time it takes to handle reporting, allowing you to scale reporting with ease. At the same time, they enable you to make better and more data-driven decisions (a capability every enterprise business needs).

In this post, we'll discuss how different enterprise-level companies use our all-in-one marketing operations platform to grow their business.

Tired of your teams wasting so much time on reporting? Try our free 14-day trial to see how efficient reporting can be, and free your teams up to spend more time on what gets results in the first place.

Using TapClicks as Your Enterprise Reporting Software

A major use of resources across all industries goes towards data management. Data is usually compiled into dashboards, which means the more data sets you have, the more dashboards you need to manage.

Enterprise businesses with multiple marketing solution providers (from Facebook to Snapchat to YouTube) struggle to aggregate all of their data sets into a single, unified view.

This leads to working with multiple dashboards. A dashboard for Facebook metrics, a dashboard for Google Ad metrics, and so on. There is also going to be different dashboards for different campaigns within the same platform.

With such inefficient dashboard management, it's challenging for companies to grow as they'll need to hire employees to manage new accounts or campaigns.

But this isn't just a growth-issue. If managing your data isn't user-friendly (eg. if it requires knowing SQL or other programming languages) something that can't be done by a non-technical user then you're running the risk of burdening all reporting duties on a small subset of employees.

This makes it difficult to run your business if those employees go on vacation, or leave your organization, and you'll struggle to keep your head above water.

When using TapClicks as your enterprise reporting software, you get access to an all-in-one reporting and analytics solution. This is a highly customizable, user-friendly dashboard that has been used as:

• PPC reporting software. Pay-per-click marketers can get a fuller picture of their omnichannel marketing efforts.

• A solution for bottlenecks between media and analytics teams. With TapClicks, you get streamlined processes for faster decision making. Instead of waiting on analytics teams to create and adjust dashboards for interpreting data, media and ad ops teams can easily manipulate data within their dashboards to generate insights on the fly.

• Advertising dashboards for both agencies and in-house brands. Marketers use our advertising dashboards to see the performance of ongoing marketing campaigns.

Below we're going to take a deeper look at how different enterprises use TapClicks as their go-to reporting tool.

How Marketing Agencies Use TapClicks Dashboards

Without a unified dashboard, your agency won't be as successful as it could be, for two reasons:

1. You're not looking at all the relevant data before making strategy adjustments. Without viewing your data side-by-side, you're going to struggle to get a cross-channel understanding of your marketing efforts. This hurts agencies because it's increasingly difficult to demonstrate value without properly mapping multi-touch attribution.
2. Your team isn't able to take on new clients or campaigns. Inefficient data integration makes it difficult to handle reporting. If your team is spending a significant chunk of their week on report design, or if they have to repeatedly embed their reports into emails for clients, they can't take on new growth-focused opportunities.

With TapClicks, you can view all of your past and ongoing marketing campaigns within one dashboard. We don't rely on data warehouses, where you need to funnel your data into a warehouse and then export it into a reporting tool. Instead, we do it all at once, so the tool that pulls your data is the same tool that you're going to use to analyze your data.

First, we use both smart connectors and instant-on connectors to make sure you get all the relevant business data into your dashboard.

• Instant-on connectors are platforms we have an API connection with. We have over 250 different instant-on connectors that can be set up within a day (from popular sources like Google and Microsoft Ads to more obscure data sources). And we have a team who manages these to ensure they're up to date so you don't have to.

• Smart connectors allow us to pull data from platforms where we don't have an API connection. So for example, if you wanted to pull financial reporting or other non-marketing data into a TapClicks dashboard, you can do that. You just need to transfer your data into one of these different file formats: csv, tsv, csv, xlsx, or odf.

After your data is imported into your dashboard, you can start customizing which metrics you're viewing.

By selecting the metrics you want to see, you can drill down and view campaign performance side-by-side.

The data is as real-time as possible based on the API connection with the specific platform. This helps agencies grow because it makes it easier for account managers to spot successful campaigns. You can view how different platforms affect one another, and where you should recommend your clients allocate their advertising budgets.

Note: To give you a more detailed look at how agencies use our tool to analyze campaigns we wrote a post on using TapClicks as an analytics tool.

Marketing agencies also use our dashboard to schedule recurring reports, as well as quickly build any ad hoc reports. Because reporting capabilities are similar across all of our business users, we cover it below in a separate section.

How In-House Marketing Teams Use TapClicks Dashboards

Similar to how marketing agencies leverage the TapClicks dashboard, in-house marketing teams at retail and eCommerce brands use TapClicks to view data and create reports for various stakeholders.

But whereas marketing agencies are using TapClicks to segment by campaign and client, in-house teams use TapClicks to segment by campaign and region.

Now, your account managers can see what is working in one region, create a report to show its success, and make a case that that strategy should be rolled out across other regions as well.

Plus, with all of your relevant data in one area, it's easier for brands to get an overall view of their advertising efforts. If your data is only presented at a granular level, you risk losing sight of whether or not a campaign is profitable for your overall brand.

To help with this, we use our connectors to bring in sales data from your eCommerce or CRM platform. This way you can see how your advertising is impacting your sales.

Finally, if you work at a big brand retailer, you may be interested in our self-service ad platform that helps brands secure revenue streams from smaller advertising vendors that they otherwise wouldn't have time to manage.

How Media Companies Use TapClicks Dashboards

Media planning tools do a lot right, but they fall short in three key areas:

1. Advanced reporting solutions and data analytics
2. Managing ad spend across multiple agencies
3. Automating orders and workflow

With our combination of instant-on connectors and smart connectors, we bring media companies the data they need to evaluate ongoing campaigns. This gives them a better look into the performance of their advertising campaigns.

Plus, our advanced data integration makes it easier for media companies to coordinate cross-agency buys.

Finally, media companies also benefit from our orders and workflow features, which we discuss below in our section on automation.

Enterprise Reporting, Analytics and Workflow Automation

One of the most significant costs to a business is the cost of labor. While labor can pay for itself, especially when the work being produced brings about a positive return on investment for the company, there is unproductive labor the cost of paying skilled employees to manage reports and analyze data when they could be running campaigns or developing new strategies.

But to move those employees to more productive tasks, your enterprise is going to need advanced reporting and analytics automation to free up their time.

Automated Data Analysis

The larger your operation, the more likely it is that underperforming strategies can survive unchecked. We offer a solution to that problem with our data discovery via automatic alerts.

There are three ways automatic alerts make it easier to run several different advertising campaigns across multiple marketing channels.

1. You can set an alert that gets triggered when a specific metric drops below a set goal.
2. You can create custom alerts for each campaign and each marketing channel.
3. You can specify who gets notified for each metric. 

This way, if your campaign goes from profitable to unprofitable, you don't have to wait until your report is generated to find out. Your account managers will get notified and can adjust the campaigns based on data.

Similarly, we offer KPI tracking. This feature outlines whether or not your current strategies are helping you reach your self-defined goals, and helps you increase accuracy in forecasting.

Automated Reporting

A significant source of time is spent on creating reports, whether reports need to be made daily, weekly, or monthly (or all of the above).

We've worked with clients before who have dedicated staff nearly full-time to handle just reporting. This is due to two reasons.

1. The challenge of aggregating disparate data sources.
2. The time it takes to create a visually compelling report that tells a story around the data.

Your reporting software needs to significantly reduce the amount of recurring work your managers need to complete and deliver reports.

Through your TapClicks dashboard, you can create recurring reports that will get sent to the right parties at the right times. Since our reports are so quick and easy to make, ad hoc reporting is intuitive.

Finally, you can also create custom login access for various end-users. Let's say you send a weekly report to a SaaS client but this client also likes to view and manipulate their own data sets. Instead of having that client constantly ask for ad hoc reports, you can share a login which they can open from their web browser that gives this client a custom view of their data.

You get to decide which data they can and cannot see, but the end result for the client is a customizable, interactive report.

Note: Report Studio uses templates with widgets and a drag and drop interface which makes designing reports fun and easy and removes the need to have an in-house report designer.

Orders and Workflow

Enterprise businesses use orders and workflow to expedite the launch of their campaigns.

Let's say you're starting a new campaign using TapClicks. You don't have to reach out to various departments to notify them you're running a new campaign. Instead, you'd have the steps built into TapWorkflow that are specifically catered to your process.

This is significant because as you're scaling your business, every dropped ball between departments becomes more significant.

With orders and workflow, an account manager can submit an order, and then that order gets sent along to the next logical step and person. As departments sign off on their specific task, the order keeps going until the campaign is fully launched.

Once launched, the campaign's results and performance can be pulled into your enterprise dashboard. From there, you can set up alerts and notifications that, when the campaign starts to underperform, signals your account managers.

From there, the notified account managers can make changes based on the data and submit a revised campaign through orders and workflow again.

Are You Ready to Scale Your Reporting with Ease?

Enterprise reporting is part of a large category from business intelligence software to ERP systems to online analytical processing (OLAP). But no matter the purpose, we continuously see otherwise advanced enterprises running their reporting and analytics out of Excel spreadsheets or simpler reporting tools that make reporting severely inefficient.

The key functionality these enterprises are missing is scalability, and a lack of scalability affects all areas of business, from employee growth to profitability.

We built TapClicks to be user-friendly and highly customizable to meet the business needs of enterprises, by leveraging reporting and analytics automation.

Tired of your teams wasting so much time on reporting? Try our free 14-day trial to see how efficient reporting can be, and free your teams up to spend more time on what gets results in the first place.