Automation is a must-have for most of today’s businesses. In fact,66%of organizations have tried or integrated automation in their business processes.
您的代理商是这些公司之一吗？
如果您想尝试自动化或在工作流程中添加更多自动化流程，则自动报告是代理商的绝佳起点。我们向16位代理商专业人士咨询了他们在报告自动化方面的经验。
In this blog post, you’ll learn more about automated reporting and how our respondents benefit from it.
让我们开始吧。
What Is Report Automation (And Why Does It Matter?)
报告自动化（也称为自动报告）是自动生成和共享报告的过程。
假设您需要报告每个客户每个客户完成的项目数量。没有自动化，您可以手动将每个客户的项目总计添加到报告中。同时，自动报告软件将自动为您跟踪这些数字，并单击几下每月生成报告。
Many data and analytics programs have built-in automated reporting features, but you’ll get the most in-depth capabilities from dedicated reporting software likebeplay体育appios。These platforms combine data from multiple sources to generate more complex reports.
您为什么要关心报告自动化？我们调查的专业人员对四个主要好处进行了排名：
Our respondents mainly value reporting automation for its time and cost savings. They also appreciate its increased data accessibility, potential for growth and support for real-time decision making.
Agency professionals also mentioned the perks of automated reporting in previous surveys we conducted. When we asked them aboutthe best ways to improve profitability，其中一些提到自动执行定期任务，例如报告。
Related:谷歌分析Automated Reports: Everything You Need to Know
5 Benefits of Automated Reporting for Agencies
The experts we surveyed brought up five additional benefits of reporting automation when we asked about its influence on their businesses. Before we dig in, let’s give those answers some context.
这些受访者大多数来自营销机构，而开发机构的一些工作。但是，他们的许多答案都适用于所有类型的机构。
Most of the pros we consulted have a lot of experience with automated reporting, with 81.25% stating they’ve used it for three or more years. They can back their answers up with years of use.
因为大多数的受访者来自营销agencies, their preferred tools lean toward an advertising and SEO focus. More than 3/4 use谷歌分析, while more than half use Google Search Console. But, at least 25% use reporting-dedicated platforms like Google Data Studio and Databox.
It’s also worth noting that all of the platforms mentioned in this question have free versions, so you can try them yourself.
Keeping these factors in mind, respondents named five major benefits of reporting automation:
- Saved Time
- Better Data Accuracy
- Enhanced Competitor Analysis
- 改进的客户协作
- Compounded Benefits
1. Saved Time
Many of the agency professionals we surveyed valued the time savings they got from automating their reporting. In addition to becoming the top-ranked benefit among the choices we provided, saved time also came up often in open-ended answers.
Matt Arceneaux301 Digital Media说：“自动报告影响了我们的代理业务。Since embracing automated reporting through a combination of off-the-shelf tools and custom integrations with marketing data sources, we’ve been able to not only increase the speed of delivery on reporting and insights to our clients but have been able to spend less time aggregating the quantitative data to allow for more time to analyze and provide deep, qualitative analysis to our clients — allowing them to extract the maximum value from their marketing and media insights.”
Matt Weber ofWeber & Co补充说,“自动报告tremendously influenced my agency business. I used to spend hours manually updating client reports every week, but now I can do it in five minutes by plugging in the data into an automated program that automatically updates everything for me. This has allowed me to save both time and money that otherwise would have been spent on hiring someone else or outsourcing the task to another company.”
韦伯还注意到与Arceneaux的好处相似：“此外，我能够通过为他们提供更详细和准确的报告来提高客户通信的质量。通常，自动报告使我更容易发展我的代理业务，因为它提供了一种强大的解决方案，可以真正减少在客户报告上花费的管理时间。”
In other words, when you save time on your data reporting, you’ll get more time to分析该数据。专门针对数据的时间表的部分可以用于从报告中得出结论，而不是首先构建这些报告。
2. Better Data Accuracy
When you’re digging through data manually, it’s easy to miss a figure or accidentally add a zero. Agencies have a lot of numbers to work with, and humans can only keep up with so much.
由于自动报告平台直接从其来源中获取数据，因此您的人为错误风险要低得多。
“With automation, the accuracy of our marketing data improved significantly,” saysCocoFinder’sHarriet Chan. “We have reliable data pipelines taking care of customer data from various channels, and they produce insights that we can use to formulate strategy. The system operates on its own, and we do not need a team of analysts to check its accuracy. The good thing is that it presents data in an organized manner with clear insights for action.”
查尔斯·德马克尔斯（Charles Demarkles）数字化considers data accuracy one of the two main purposes of automated reporting. “It ensures data integrity, in that, you can put a batch of data into your tools and know that there is no risk of human error in writing calculations, etc., which can help especially when training junior staff.” (The second purpose? As you might guess, it was time savings.)
专家提示：您的营销KPI表现如何？
Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. How much traffic and new contact conversions do you get? How many new contacts do you get from organic sessions? How are your email campaigns performing? How well are your landing pages converting? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.
Our Marketing Overview Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:
- Sessions。The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.
- 会议的新联系人。How well is your campaign driving new contacts and customers?
- Marketing Performance KPIs。跟踪MQL，SQL，新联系人等的数量将帮助您确定营销工作如何为销售做出贡献。
- 电子邮件性能。Measure the success of your email campaigns from HubSpot. Keep an eye on your most important email marketing metrics such as number of sent emails, number of opened emails, open rate, email click-through rate, and more.
- Blog Posts and Landing Pages。How many people have viewed your blog recently? How well are your landing pages performing?
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a插件数据库模板beplay体育appiosthat contains all the essential metrics for monitoring your leads. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1:Get the template
Step 2:Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics accounts with Databox.
Step 3:Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
3. Enhanced Competitor Analysis
Agency data analysis doesn’t involve only information from your team and clients — it also uses competitor data.数据驱动的竞争对手分析帮助机构找到改进的机会。自动报告使这些分析通过预测分析更有效。
While most respondents refer to reporting and analytics platforms in their answers, David Farkas from上层commented on CRM platforms’ automated social listening reporting. “We acquired crucial competitor information and kept on top of social conversations as well as industry trends. It has been critical to leverage social listening features in CRM solutions,” Farkas begins.
He continues, “In truth, social listening is a relatively recent practice that is quickly gaining traction among businesses looking to acquire a competitive advantage. Given the significant rise in CRM usage over the years, it’s critical to employ AI-based predictive analytics to better plan for growth and adversity.”
When you perform social listening manually, you have to look through search results for multiple platforms. Meanwhile, automated social listening platforms generate reports for you from across the web. This automation makes it easier to perform social listening for competitor names to see what your audience thinks of them.
4. Improved Client Collaboration
When you automate your reports, your clients benefit from them, too. Your client reporting will become much more efficient and transparent, helping your clients work with you effectively.
AtThe Hawker’s Club更快的数据feedbac,汉娜布莱克本经验k loops and new considerations for automation overload when working with automated reports. She expected that benefit and drawback, but something else happened that she didn’t expect.
布莱克本（Blackburn）解释说：“指标的可用性意味着代理商和品牌都可以更好地了解每个竞选活动。这导致了更多的谈话（并且不太想知道或质疑数据），这最终创造了一种非常协作的蓝天方法。”
By making your data more accessible, automated reporting simplifies client reporting. Just make sure to遵循最佳实践so you don’t confuse your clients with too much information.
5.复利的好处
When commenting on their experiences with automated reporting, many respondents couldn’t list just one benefit. Instead, they saw many interconnected benefits happening. These advantages built on each other to improve their overall data efficiency.
飞轮数字Michael Steele noticed how many of the benefits we covered today lead from one to another. “Shifting from manual to automated reporting has positively influenced my agency because it has resulted in a massive amount of time saved. My team is able to spend less time collecting data and more time analyzing it!” Steele says.
斯蒂尔继续说：“此外，随着所有时间的保存，我们能够在更少的时间内生成更多报告，并每月获得更多有价值的数据。自动报告还消除了人为错误并使数据更加准确，从而使我们能够在一个集中位置的各种来源查看有用的信息。”
Dan Ni frommessaged.comalso saw the connections among saved time, cost efficiency, and data integrity. “Delivering quality work to clients and creating value for them is and always has been one of our main goals, and hence to better optimize this we transitioned to automated reporting. And with that transition came not one but various benefits,” Ni says.
“Firstly, it saved our time and increased our efficiency by eliminating the multiple steps needed in manual report making to a mere single click with the perfect report at the ready. And since with saving time comes saving money, with employees focusing more on more productive tasks we were able to save money from that. And most importantly for our clients, it becomes much more convenient and efficient to gain secure access to reports and since we already work in email automation we further added ease by sending the reports periodically through an automated email.” Ni explains.
Automate Reporting for Your Agency with Databox
Now that you are well aware of all the benefits of automated reporting for your agency, all that is left to do is to choose a reporting software that will help you streamline your reporting processes.
With Databox, you can automate reporting for your agency in just a few clicks.
连接您的数据源以在一个地方可视化最重要的数据，通过我们的大型免费模板快速构建仪表板，并自定义报告的流程，以便您的客户每次分享报告时都会获得完全个性化的体验。
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