And where there's data, there's reporting. Data analysis can often seem like a painful burden, and marketers today are either avoiding it, or going crazy trying to make sense of the data overload by purchasing reporting tools to solve their problem. This leads us to wonder how the Marketing Marys and Analytics Annies of the agency world are solving their own marketing data reporting problems. Let’s take a look at a day in the (reporting) life of Marketing Mary and Analytics Annie, each responsible for client reporting at their respective agencies. Data First, Then Reporting So what’s the difference between Marketing Mary and Analytics Annie? Many might say Analytics Annie has a fancy data visualization tool to make her reporting automated. A Single Source of Truth Solving the underlying media and marketing data aggregation problem is both simple and complex. You need one single location (like a data warehouse or a marketing data management platform) to store all of your media data together. To fix the marketing data problem, agencies need a data engine and a solid analytics strategy. Identify all of the data systems that contain the key data metrics needed to support the measurement strategy and make a list for each system.
Love it or hate it, data is essential to any agency professional’s existence.
And where there’s data, there’s reporting. Marketers can’t and (shouldn’t) avoid reporting, so they have to increasingly become proficient with it.
As clients have become more knowledgeable and demanding about reporting, their analysis and insights expectations have become higher. This adds additional stress to agency teams trying to manage more data, more frequently, and from more media sources.
Data analysis can often seem like a painful burden, and marketers today are either avoiding it, or going crazy trying to make sense of the data overload by purchasing reporting tools to solve their problem.
This leads us to wonder how the Marketing Marys and Analytics Annies of the agency world are solving their own marketing data reporting problems. With the sheer number of data sets to analyze, decipher and review, the life of marketing reporting analyst is becoming ever more complex.
So how are agencies approaching this data problem? Let’s take a look at a day in the (reporting) life of Marketing Mary and Analytics Annie, each responsible for client reporting at their respective agencies.
The Story of Two Marketers
It’s the first day of the month and Marketing Mary is starting the “Data Death March:” the painful task of manually gathering media channel data for month-end client reporting. This can take days — sometimes weeks of effort — only to spit out a basic report recapping what happened last month that the client will hopefully read.
For Analytics Annie, the first day of the month is no different than any other day. She opens a client report (automatically refreshed with current media results), begins to analyze performance and develops timely, insightful recommendations to share with her client.
Annie’s reports aren’t just a spreadsheet of numbers — they are factual bits of information organized in an easy-to-read report that shows not only the state of the union — but what and how to improve their marketing efforts.
Data First, Then Reporting
So what’s the difference between Marketing Mary and Analytics Annie? Many might say Analytics Annie has a fancy data visualization tool to make her reporting automated. And they may be right — or she could actually just be looking at a report in Excel.
The real reason Analytics Annie is able to spend her time on impactful analysis for her clients has nothing to do with her reporting tool of choice. It’s because she solved her underlying media data collection problem by way of automation.
Mary, at some point, likely succumbed to using a data visualization tool for her reporting that promised all the bells and whistles. It looked good, seemed simple to use, and was going to take all the pain away to allow her agency to make reporting for all her clients effortless.
But the tool wasn’t even collecting the necessary data to begin with. The challenge Mary was facing wasn’t a tool problem, it was a data problem. Without having the underlying data in a usable format to begin with, she was still manually gathering and preparing her media data, leaving no time for analysis.
She put too much faith in the tool to solve her reporting problems that in the end, all she had was prettier dashboards, but not better or faster…
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