Delivering insights at short notice is often essential for marketing agencies that want to position themselves as data-driven businesses. Between constant requests to send new reports, answering one-off questions, and running ad-hoc analyses, marketing teams are often stretched thin with all the manual work and responsibilities to clients.
Feb 14 2020 ● 5 min read
On the other hand, a marketing agency should spend more time on what matters most. Saving time whenever possible is highly important for proper time management. While marketing reports are essential, they are time-consuming if done manually.
This is where client reporting software comes to play. With the right reporting solution, you can make your team workflows easier, marketing data more accessible, and the entire business more productive.
This article identifies the five best client reporting software recommended by top marketing experts. They are must-have tools that can help with reporting while you execute marketing projects.
Report automation is the work process of having your client reports automatically updated and delivered through advanced reporting software on a specified schedule. The data is automatically extracted, visualizations are automatically updated, and reports are automatically shared without the need for manual input every time.
The result? Optimized workflows while delivering accurate marketing insights to clients without extra labor.
For any report to be helpful in the long term, it must be consistent because the insights are based on comparing and measuring the same metrics. This level of consistency is difficult to maintain in a manual process, where reports depend on the person who prepares them. Consistency can be even more compromised by role changes or employee attrition within the agency, meaning that different people are responsible for preparing client reports. Such inconsistencies, which could be viewed as incompetent on the client's side, could easily be avoided by using automated client reporting software.
When you delegate manual tasks to technology, you free up resources to focus on other tasks that need attention — such as promotional campaigns, increasing product visibility, and improving sales. By giving the software handle the technical aspect of reporting, your agency professionals can focus on more creative tasks.
Manual reporting is a time-intensive job that requires dedication and extensive human effort. To small agencies, it might seem that it’s cheaper to compile manual reports than use automated reporting. However, the exact contrary is true, as investing in automated reporting software is a small price to pay in comparison to hiring extra people to do the task.
Report automation gives you a competitive edge over other agencies that don’t use this technology. Clients also do believe they'll be more likely to get more accurate and valuable reports from an agency that has automated its services than one that uses manual reporting and Excel sheets.
Automation also helps agencies meet deadlines, which increases the client’s satisfaction levels. Satisfied clients are more likely to renew their contracts or even refer new clients, all owing to data consistency as provided by reporting automation.
With an automated reporting system in place, your agency can generate reports anytime, regardless of the time zone difference, workday, or holiday. Manual reporting, on the other hand, depends on human input:
In both cases, automated client reporting reduces bottlenecks and reliance on employees whose time is expensive.
Reports that you prepare using automated software are visually appealing with a professional touch, as they can be designed to fit the requested data and the client’s branding. While manual reports can also prefer visual elements such as graphs, charts, and gauges, they can hardly compete with their automated counterparts in the visual department.
Now that we know how client reporting software can upgrade your client operations, let’s take a look at five products that others can learn from.
Whatagraph is a marketing data platform for connecting, visualizing, and sharing marketing data that allows agencies to natively pull client data from over 40 marketing channels and create stunning reports and dashboards in minutes.
Automation: Everything related to client reporting has to be quick, optimized, and data-driven. Whatagraph features fully automated reports making it a perfect tool for marketing agencies reporting. Why?
Every report automatically gathers information from any connected source. Whatagraph offers over 40 integrations. Connect them to Whatagraph and start populating your reports with new data.
Cross-channel reporting: Agency clients typically have a couple of marketing platforms and channels, which may not be related at all like Facebook Ads, Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. The great thing about Whatagraph is that it allows you to pull and present cross-channel data in order to track and monitor several marketing campaigns.
This reporting process is beneficial when pulling clients’ data to compare each marketing platform. This allows you to better understand and optimize marketing channels to get the best results.
Customization: As a digital marketing agency, your goal is to create engaging reports and make your clients feel special. With Whatagraph, you can do just that. It’s a client reporting software with highly flexible marketing reporting. Customizable reports allow you to change the theme of the report, change colors and fonts, and even include images related to the client’s brand.
Custom reports also allow users to modify the report itself. Add or remove widgets and data sources, change the layout of visual elements, and even change the color scheme and logos to impress your clients and show them you care.
Visualization: There is nothing more terrifying for your client than a spreadsheet with raw data. Keep in mind that, usually, they are not data savvies, or even if they are, they probably want to save time by using your services.
Data visualization is one way to go about it. Whatagraph allows you to present key data and metrics in the form of tables, charts, and graphs. This way, the second your client opens a report, they can see the status of your marketing campaign.
Monetization: Make extra cash with Whatagraph. As Whatagraph provides both client reporting as well as data transfer, you can make the most of it for your own benefit. Due to the above-mentioned customization reporting feature and other functionalities, agencies can sell reports as their own.
How about you try Whatagraph for 7 days for free?
Book a personalized walkthrough to learn more about its features or request a free trial today.
Create a client dashboard or a report, customize it so it feels and looks like your client’s brand, and charge extra for that.
Google Analytics (GA) comes in handy for meeting the demand for reports that quantify the results of clients. It provides a wealth of data that can be shared with clients. Useful metrics that work with Google Analytics include Audience Overview, Average Engagement, and All-traffic Report under Acquisition (ARA).
The Audience Overview reports trends of traffic over time. ARA indicates where the traffic is coming from. Nevertheless, there are metrics that may be more important to your client. Google Analytics will allow you to configure those metrics that suit clients’ specific needs.
One unique feature of GA is Goal Conversions. It’s the absolute way of tailoring it to the client’s needs. You can implement a goal for any visitor’s activity. Reports on goal conversion are what distinguish various clients’ reports that share a standard report template.
Despite Google Analytics being free, it’s the most robust system for traffic analysis. It’s easy to use if set up properly. The best part of Google Analytics is that it keeps getting better!
This software provides elaborate white-labeled client reports. It can save your marketing agency labor cost by about $12,000 per month. Wordsmith provides a report with over six pages that include notes, charts, and tables.
You get to know how every channel is driving conversions. Areas of coverage include SEO, social media, content marketing, and advertising. Before sending the report, the agency can review it for any edits. You can schedule it for dispatch to the client weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
This software by Automated Insights provides roughly 500 reports per month.
The marketing agencies that have used the custom reporting tool have reported loving its use of natural language generation. It’s a technology that converts sophisticated data into clear and understandable human narratives. It’s a feature that makes it usable to even non-technical users.
Therefore, Wordsmith for marketing is suitable for any industry. Whether it’s a game, video, or football, it’s easy to generate reports from any data.
Raven Tools are the absolute solution to the marketing needs of any agency. It’s the way to access accurate data important for marketing decisions. You’ll not be disappointed about getting good results for your clients. Raven tools make your effort towards traffic, leads, and customer search fruitful.
This advanced reporting software provides a feature for examining the client’s site against competitors. It helps to analyze and compare domain authority, lead time, backlinks, and others. Furthermore, the research center helps to analyze a competitor’s website.
These WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) reports help you to manage your data as what you see is how your target site is performing. This way, you can know if SEO is performing or if Ads are generating leads as expected. The graph or chart feature serves as a visual aid to monitor progress and conceptualize white-label clients' reports.
TapClicks is a marketing operations platform specializing in marketing workflow, performance analytics, client reporting, and data. This platform allows users to create interactive visual reports and presentations. Its cross-channel reporting presents any data from SEO, social, and PPC on one page.
This platform has more than 250 integrations and automated data warehousing. Meaning that no data source is an issue.
Other benefits include:
Find out why Whatagraph is a better alternative to TapClicks.
Choosing a client reporting tool might seem overwhelming. There are many different options in marketing, offering the best products. But before even looking for one, it is important to identify goals. Without determining goals, then KPIs, and sources, choosing a tool will be inefficient and meaningless.
Here are the steps to take before buying a client reporting software subscription:
Client report tools are here to help out marketing agencies, and client managers raise their reporting operations to a higher level. Find out how else a client and manager relationship could be enhanced by contacting us! We will guide you through the process of creating and optimizing your reports and dashboards so that your clients appreciate your service more. In the meantime, here’s a free guide on how to write an ultimate marketing report.
Published on Feb 14 2020
WRITTEN BY
Gintaras BaltusevičiusGintaras is an experienced marketing professional who is always eager to explore the most up-to-date issues in data marketing. Having worked as an SEO manager at several companies, he's a valuable addition to the Whatagraph writers' pool.
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