How TapClicks Paid Media Dashboards Help Marketers Scale Reporting (with In-Depth Examples)

Sometimes marketing teams report on their paid media strategies by exporting data out of their advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads and putting that data into an Excel spreadsheet. From there they compile reports manually using PowerPoint, or funnel data into a reporting tool like Google Data Studio and Tableau.

But for marketers that need to scale their reporting and analytics processes, these manual processes become a huge time-suck, requiring tens of hours every week to execute.

Reporting and analytics can become the bottleneck that limits growth and reduces the amount of time marketers can spend focusing on strategy and execution the work that gets actual results for their clients or brands.

In this article, we take a closer look at the challenges involved in these manual reporting and analytics processes. Then we show you how TapClicks's all-in-one reporting and analytics tool works as an advanced, customizable, and scalable paid media dashboard solution.

Note: If you're ready to see how quickly TapClicks can automate your manual reporting and analytic processes, click here to start our 14-day free trial.
 

Manual Reporting and Analytics: The Challenges to Overcome

Manual reporting and analytics processes require such a hands on presence that it's difficult for your agency or brand to grow. Taking on a new client or starting a new campaign can put unsustainable stress on your already maxed out marketing team.

Here are the main challenges we see marketing teams struggle with when they're reliant on manual reporting processes:

• They spend significant amounts of their week on reporting. Marketers are forced to create new reports every time versus scheduling out automated reports (which we cover as a key TapClicks feature below). Plus, any report modifications (due to new metrics or last minute requests from a recipient), can put you seriously behind schedule.
   
• They create bottlenecks for their employees. Marketing teams often have one or two employees who know the in-house reporting process. This means these marketers get saddled with creating and sending new reports. They struggle to find enough time to focus on strategy and optimization, where the real value of their work comes from.
   
• They lay the groundwork for inaccurate reporting. Not only is paid media reporting complicated and tedious, but manual data entry can often lead to errors that adversely affect results. Below, we cover how TapClicks uses data connectors to keep your paid media dashboard up to date with accurate data across all channels you're reporting on.

These are the problems that TapClicks solves by giving our clients access to customizable paid media dashboard templates.

A quick note: This article covers TapClicks, our marketing reporting and analytics product built for scalability. But Google Data Studio can be a powerful tool for many marketing teams, and if you'd like to learn more about how your team can get the most out of it, click here to learn about TapFusion GDS, our Google Data Studio product which helps you easily import all your data sources into Data Studio.
 

How TapClicks Paid Media Dashboards Help Marketers Scale Reporting with Ease

In the sections below, we cover three of the key benefits of using TapClicks for your paid media dashboards.

1. You get an accurate (and complete) understanding of your data
2. Dashboards are easy to make and highly customizable
3. You improve and automate your reporting process
   
    

1. Getting an Accurate (and Complete) View of your Marketing Data

TapClicks offers over 250+ Instant-on connectors. These are connectors we've developed over the past decade alongside our marketing clients. Instant-on connectors can be set up within a day, with your team getting historical data (up to 12 months for some platforms) in a matter of hours.

Plus, we don't limit our connectors to social media and advertising platforms you can also pull in data from CRMs, email marketing platforms, eCommerce sites, and more.

By contextualizing your paid media efforts alongside other ongoing strategies, you get a more accurate review of your digital marketing performance.

Note: Don't see an Instant-On Connector for a platform you're using? That's not a problem. We use Smart Connectors to let you pull data from any platform we don't have a current API integration with. Smart Connectors work through a spreadsheet connector and are refreshed every night, so still you're getting up to date data in your dashboard and saving time.

And while the number of data connectors is important, what's even more beneficial is how TapClicks pulls the data out of your advertising platforms.

With TapClicks, you get more insight into your data points because we pull data out to match how marketing teams build and design their social media marketing and paid media campaigns.

For example, if you were running a split ad campaign on Facebook, you can pull data that shows campaign performance across demographics such as income, audience affinity, race, gender, and more.

Finally, TapClicks adapts to new marketing metrics and trends. Key performance indicators (KPIs) change over time based on user behavior and what advertisers choose to value.

We saw this happen as click-through rates, while still important, became less important for PPC managers. Instead, "share of voice" became the go-to metric every client wanted to know about.

To accurately measure "share of voice," you need the overall impressions and market reach of your ads.

TapClicks has a team dedicated to managing our connectors, so as share of voice became a common need, we developed the tools that let our clients report on this new metric.
 

Bonus: With TapClicks, You Can See Live Ads Right In Your Dashboard

TapClicks dashboards also help you save time by pulling in snapshots of your ads and placing them alongside their KPIs. Instead of toggling back and forth between your analytics and your creative assets, you can see it all in one place.
 

2. Easily Customize Your Marketing Dashboard

Above we talked about how TapClicks gets all of your data into your dashboard in a way that works best for marketing teams.

But TapClicks's paid media dashboard is also highly customizable both the dashboard (from using our templates as starting points and creating widgets within the dashboard) and the metrics themselves.
 

Creating New Dashboards

With TapClicks, you can either create a new dashboard from scratch or use one of our dashboard templates.

Using a dashboard template is just as customizable as creating a new dashboard, but a template has the added benefit of serving as a foundation for your marketing team. We take what most marketing clients need for certain services (such as running Facebook Ads or an email marketing sequence) and create dashboard templates catered to those needs.

Note: With TapClicks, you can edit multiple dashboards at once by editing your dashboard template. This is a huge benefit for marketing teams looking to grow. Instead of manually changing each dashboard to match your updated campaigns, you can just edit the dashboard template and all client dashboards (or campaign dashboards) are updated.
 

Create Widgets in Seconds

When you're in a dashboard, it's quick and easy to make a new widget that displays your data how you want to see it.

Because TapClicks pulls your data into your dashboard in an organized and coherent fashion, you don't have to worry about having any sort of API knowledge. Instead, you just need to select the metrics you want to see, how you want them organized in your widget, the time frame of data you want, and how you want the data displayed (pie chart, graph, etc.).

In the image above, you can see these sections in the red square.

• Title: This is what you'll be naming your widget.
• Data category: This is where you select your data source. For this example, we used Facebook Ads.
• Data View: This is for selecting what you're looking for from your data. Because we are pulling data out of Facebook Ads, you can select dozens of different data views, such as pulling data out by device, region, campaigns, and more.
• Metrics: Here, you pick which specific metrics you're looking for, such as Attentive Impression Conversion Value, Impressions, Clicks, Click Through Rate (CTR), etc.
• Dimensions: Finally, you select how you want your widget organized.

Once you click Save, your widget is done. See below for the end result.

Transform Your Data into Helpful New Metrics

Marketers commonly run into a frustrating problem when manually managing their cross channel reports: how key metrics are named within each platform.

Let's say you want to compare what you're spending on ads versus what you're recouping. But you specifically want to see this data across all advertising platforms, not just Facebook Ads or Google Display Ads or LinkedIn. What you're looking for is a high level overview of your paid media strategies. But this is difficult to do manually because different platforms have different ways of labeling ad spend.

TapClicks solves this problem by letting you transform different data sets that reflect spend across their respective platforms.

For example, you can roll disparate data points into a new metric and call it Total Campaign Ad Spend. Agencies can also do this across all clients and brands can do it across all campaigns including different regions.

Plus, if you have access to sales data or Google Analytics, you can now compare Total Campaign Ad Spend with your conversion rates side by side.
 

3. Improve (and Automate) Your Reporting Process

With TapClicks, we significantly improve your reporting process by centralizing your disparate data sets in a highly customizable dashboard.

When you use TapClicks, you get access to recurring and automated reporting.

For example, every Friday, you can set up TapClicks to send out PDF reports on paid media performance to assigned stakeholders.

Note: With TapClicks, you can create custom white-label reports for different recipients. You can easily provide different levels of detail for your head of marketing versus your CFO or founder.

Plus, because you can quickly edit your paid media dashboard, including which metrics are displayed and over which time period, you can create a last-minute report in a matter of minutes.

Without TapClicks, you'd need to create a last-minute report from scratch, a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially because these report requests are often made just hours before the weekend.

With TapClicks, simply select the metrics that you want, select how you want the report saved (PDF, CSV, etc.), and then send the report to the appropriate party.
 

Final Thoughts: Scaling Up Your Reporting with TapClicks Paid Media Dashboards

When your marketing team relies on manual reporting and marketing analytics processes, it creates a domino effect of inefficiencies, from gathering data out across all relevant marketing channels, to organizing that data into a dashboard for analysis, to creating and scheduling recurring reports.

By using TapClicks's paid media dashboards, you can:

• Easily pull in all relevant data sets (and keep your data updated in real-time)
• View your data in a highly customizable dashboard
• Edit all client or campaign dashboards at once
• Combine data sets into new metrics
• Set up KPI notifications for when metrics drop or rise above a specific benchmark
• Schedule recurring reports

Note: If you're ready to see how quickly TapClicks can improve your manual reporting and analytic processes, click here to start our 14-day free trial.