From raw data to meaningful dashboards: Digital marketing meets big data

The result: many companies today have a large number of technical islands that generate their own reporting figures. These have to be compiled manually on a regular basis and laboriously processed in order to make them available to stakeholders. This makes it increasingly difficult for companies to prepare the relevant figures in a timely and meaningful way in order to derive useful insights.

The evolution of reporting

Equipe has been involved in the media sector since its foundation in 2008. Over the years, the specialist areas in media planning and the associated tasks have been continuously expanded. Recently, we have put a lot of energy into the development of a holistic reporting platform.

The platform provides us as an agency with a holistic, well-founded basis for decision-making in the area of campaign reporting and campaign optimization in a simple and clear manner. At the same time, we offer the platform "as a service" to our clients' media and marketing managers in particular. The current advertising and marketing channels are connected at raw data level. The data is prepared as a report and as a dashboard, which transparently and comprehensibly depicts the achievement of media, marketing and business goals on a daily basis using KPIs.

The most important advantages of the new dashboard:

• Daily up-to-dateness without manual work
• Savings in operational expenses (OPEX) for the creation of reports
• Customized solution with a strict business view of the reporting concept
• Unified consolidated reporting across all technical silos
• Use of open technologies enables easy integration of any system
• High scalability and easy expandability

The development required the right mix of skills

An interdisciplinary team with the following specialist skills is needed to develop and operate such a platform as well as the  appropriate range of consulting services required:

• Business and marketing expertise
• Media planning & operations
• Reporting conception & visual presentation of figures
• Ad tracking & analytics integration
• Big data platform development
• DevOps

Equipe has all of these skills in-house, and during the development work promoted even closer collaboration between the specialists. In addition, the accumulation of knowledge and experience resulted in certification as a "Google Cloud Partner" (source). On this essential basis, Equipe can independently ensure further projects and the further development of the platform.

Success factors in dashboard development

The first and most important step is to understand the exact business requirements. This includes documenting the campaign setup, which creates a common understanding for all internal stakeholders. As the methodical approach shows, the business objectives are gradually translated into concrete KPIs, reports and therefore reporting requirements.

The next step is to take a closer look at the tracking architecture. The aim is to understand through documentation and analysis how the individual systems interact in order to determine the source of truth for the measurements. This is the only way to guarantee a correct, reliable database.

The reporting platform is then created from the following components, which are specifically adapted to the respective reporting requirements and the desired presentation method.

Use of the platform as "Reporting as a Service"

The platform can be used for a single use case, for example for generating recurring reports, or as a fully hosted business reporting infrastructure for companies.

Depending on requirements, different levels of complexity can be implemented:

1. Basic report as a BigQuery table in the cloud
2. Generation of Google Spreadsheet reports
3. Dashboards in Google Data Studio
4. Reports in an external BI tool

The platform has a modular structure so that companies can also use individual reporting services in isolation.

Further development potential

If the data is stored on an open platform such as Google BigQuery and is available on a daily basis, additional services can be developed with little effort, for example:

• Alerts that indicate when a limit has been exceeded (e.g. an upper limit for cost per click)
• Optimization suggestions or generation of optimization options (e.g. switching off a subject with poor performance)
• Linking of applications and thus integration of the customer journey (e.g. the website with the CRM system: i.e. when I visit the website, I receive an email from the CRM)
• Machine learning algorithms for the optimization of marketing activities (e.g. I recognize which budget split leads to the best performance on the "lead" measurement point)

There are no limits to the imagination and further development potential here. If you find this topic interesting and would like to find out more, please contact us personally. Martin Widmer will be happy to advise you on how you can take your reporting to the next level.

Reporting assessment
Equipe will be happy to carry out an assessment for you to take stock of your reporting setup and identify potential for optimization.

What does the assessment package include?

• Inventory of the tracking setup
• Checking the consistency of figures and source of truth
• Evaluate degree of automation
• GAP analysis (ACTUAL versus TARGET potential)

This reporting assessment package costs CHF 5'000.