Tear up your reports and shift to realtime data dashboards

It’s time for PR to shift from weekly and monthly reports to live dashboards. Google Data Studio is a good place to start.

By Karan Chadda

Digital communications brings with it an abundance of data. This availability of data combined with the increasing importance of measurement means monthly reports are getting larger, more cumbersome and, frankly, less useful.

It’s time to review your reports.

Obviously, reviewing how reports are built and delivered isn’t the sexy end of communications, so if you’re going to do it, you need to invest some time and thought to do it right. The first question to ask is: what’s the purpose of the report?

If a report is simply there for tracking KPIs, then I’d argue it’s ripe for automation. This is for three simple reasons. The first is that if you’re tracking metrics, you want the latest numbers at a keystroke.

Monthly tracking will only tell you badly you did after the fact. Live tracking enables you to act to fix issues as they arise. They give you the gift of immediacy.

Secondly, automated reports are a one-off cost. If you’re using tracking data, what’s the point in paying agency fees or spending your own time to build some dull PowerPoint every single month?

You’ll either end up with a poorly labelled, time-consuming set of charts or a bunch of pointless screen shots.

Finally, if you’re hoping to glean insights from your reports, then less time spent building them equals more time spent understanding them, which should mean you’re able to generate better, more useable insights.

Shift to Google Data Studio

If you’re reporting exclusively relies on Google Analytics, then build and share dashboards within it. However, if you’re pulling in data from multiple sources, then Google Data Studio is a better option.

Data Studio came out of beta just over a year ago and it lets you pull in data from Google’s marketing suite of products, additionally either through Sheets or third party tools you can pull in data from a variety of other digital marketing tools.

Data Studio will allow you to view all your measures of progress in a single place. So you can have your funnel metrics alongside search console data, which in turn can sit next to third part data around domain authority or visibility.

At first, you might need some for of manual intervention when bringing in third party data or using Sheets but this can be automated over time.

Pulling data and building dashboards

Data Studio is a brilliant and relatively simple tool. It might, however, not be able to deliver more technical analysis. Here, you can use more advanced data query tools, such as Microsoft’s Power BI.

A word of warning though, unless you are a data specialist it might be wiser to invest in paying someone to automate the process of pulling data into Data Studio or to build dashboards in more advanced tools.

I’m in the early stages of changing a range reports for SEO and content performance from PowerPoint and Excel to Data Studio. It’s saved me time and allowed to better invest resource more productively.

I’d love to learn from you about the challenges you’ve faced, the tricks you’ve learnt and about your successes too, drop me a message on Twitter @kchadda.

About Karan Chadda

Karan is the Senior Digital Communications and Content Manager at at Ageas UK.