Marketing

Automated Marketing Reporting from Disparate Data Sources

Deren Tavgac
November 12, 2023
11 min read

Introduction

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, staying ahead requires not only a keen understanding of your audience but also the ability to analyze and interpret data from various sources. Manual compilation of marketing reports from diverse platforms with clunky UIs and no formal REST APIs can be time-consuming and error-prone. This post explores the benefits and steps involved in automating marketing reports from key data sources, empowering marketers to save time, make informed decisions, and enhance overall campaign effectiveness.

The Need for Automation in Marketing Reports

  • Data Overload: With marketing initiatives spanning across multiple platforms, from social media to advertising platforms and SEO / SEM tools, the volume of data generated can be overwhelming. Most marketers analyze data across 15+ sources and don’t know how to write code, so are heavily reliant on strapped engineering resources to get the insights they’re looking for. In the absence of engineering resources most marketers rely on doing “shadow analytics” work which typically involves manually collecting data files from ad / marketing tech tools and wrangling data in Excel. Automation streamlines these processes and ensures that marketers can efficiently extract insights without drowning in data. Automation efforts, however, historically require SQL and Python coding expertise which most marketers don’t possess.
  • Real-time Analysis: In a landscape where trends change rapidly, real-time data analysis is crucial. Automating marketing reports allows for immediate access to the latest metrics, enabling marketers to make agile and informed decisions to adapt to market dynamics.
  • Error Reduction: Manual reporting is prone to human error, leading to inaccuracies in data interpretation. Automating the process significantly reduces the likelihood of errors, ensuring that decisions are based on reliable information.

Understanding the Landscape of Marketing Reporting

Diverse Data Sources

  • The modern marketer deals with a diversity of platforms, from advertising platforms and web analytics to CRM and social media.
  • Manual reporting across these channels is time-consuming, prone to errors, and often results in delayed decision-making.
  • Many engineering teams prefer that data lives in a centralized data lake or data warehouse, but lack the resources to take on the growing number of integrations needed to centralize data into these ecosystems.
  • As a result, marketers often engage in “shadow analytics” efforts in Excel and Powerpoint.

The Need for Automation

  • Automation in marketing reporting is not just a matter of convenience but a strategic imperative. When marketers spend their days performing manual, repetitive, low value work, they fail to allocate enough time and energy to the strategic differentiators and creative marketing efforts that truly differentiate their brand from competitors.
  • Real-time data analysis, error reduction, and improved decision-making are crucial for the agile marketer to take the correct next best action.

The Power of Redbird Marketing Reporting Automation

Overview of Redbird

  • Redbird is a comprehensive marketing automation platform designed to streamline marketing data workflows, enhance collaboration, and automate reporting.
  • Its user-friendly interface and robust all-in-one feature set make it an invaluable tool for marketers looking to consolidate and automate reporting tasks.

Key Features of Redbird

  • Integration Capabilities: Redbird seamlessly integrates with a multitude of marketing and analytics platforms, simplifying the data aggregation process. Redbird also works for non-API based sources through its flexible robotic process automation techniques, enabling marketers to infuse data from traditionally difficult to access legacy systems or public sources.
  • Data orchestration: Redbird users can connect all their data across key systems like Google Analytics, Meta, LinkedIn, X, social listening tools, ad platforms like Google Ads, survey tools and CRMs in minutes within a point and click UI that also enables them to flow data back into any data warehouse / storage location (Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, Google BigQuery, Redshift, Oracle, Amazon S3, SFTP, Google Drive, etc) which saves time for IT teams looking to prioritize these data sources on their roadmaps.
  • Advanced data science modeling and applications: Redbird’s purpose-built turnkey marketing science toolkit enables marketers to analyze their data in deeper ways, whether it be Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), segmentation modeling / audience insights, text analytics / NLP, sentiment, multi-touch attribution or general predictive modeling.
  • Unified Reports: Redbird provides a centralized dashboarding toolkit that enables robust visualization across data from all your various platforms, offering a holistic view of marketing and advertising performance.
  • Customizable Reports: Teams can tailor reports to match their formatting needs, specific KPIs and overall reporting requirements. Reports are exportable to Powerpoint or Google Slides for an executive or client audience.
  • Automated Report Scheduling: Users can set up automated schedules for report generation and distribution, ensuring timely delivery to stakeholders.

Key Data Sources for Marketing Reports

Marketers need to analyze data across a wide range of sources. Cross-pollinating insights across these sources can be time intensive and cumbersome. 

Advertising Platforms

  • Google Ads, Facebook(Meta) Ads, TikTok Ads, Snapchat Ads, Twitter (X) Ads, Google Campaign Manager 360, Google Search Ads 360 to track advertising metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.
  • Reports are generated to compare the performance of different advertising channels.

Web Analytics Tools

  • Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics (Google Analytics / GA4, Universal Analytics), Adobe Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics to capture website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics.

Social Media Platforms

  • Marketers utilize platforms like Facebook, Twitter (X), Linkedin, Tiktok, Snapchat and Instagram to monitor follower growth, post reach, interactions / engagement and identify trends that would impact their marketing efforts.

Email Marketing Tools

  • Email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact to track open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber growth.

Social Listening / Customer Intelligence platforms

  • Tools like Sprinklr, Meltwater, Talkwalker, Synthesio, Sprout Social, YouGov and Brandwatch help customer insights teams track social media metrics and trends for expanded audience insights

Survey Tools

  • Survey platforms such as Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey and Forsta help research and insights teams better understand their target market and deliver exceptional results.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

  • CRM platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot for extraction of customer data, sales performance, and lead conversion rates 
  • Comprehensive reports that align marketing efforts with sales outcomes.

Steps to Automate Marketing Reports

In order to begin your marketing reporting automation journey, you’ll need to follow several steps:

1. Define Key Metrics and KPIs

  • Clearly identify the key metrics and KPIs that align with your marketing objectives.
  • Ensure that the selected metrics provide actionable insights for your marketing strategy.

2. Choose the Right Reporting Tools

  • Explore reporting tools that support integration with your key data sources.
  • Tools include Redbird, Google Data Studio, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI.

3. Integrate your Data

  • Integrating your reporting into the large number of data sources listed above requires either help from your IT team to set up API integrations and RPA-powered approaches for seamless data flow between platforms that don’t have an API, 
  • Work with your IT or development team to set up API integrations for seamless data flow between platforms.
  • Ensure that APIs are configured securely and comply with data protection regulations.
  • For companies that have a resource-constrained or smaller IT/technology team, utilizing a no-code operating system like Redbird for a more point and click self-serve approach can prove highly beneficial.

4. Build Out your Automation Workflows

  • Develop workflows for the automated generation and distribution of reports.
  • Schedule reports to be generated at regular intervals, considering the reporting frequency that suits your business needs.
  • For teams who lack Python or advanced excel macro automation skillsets, Redbird’s no-code toolkit can help enable these efforts.

5. Validate your Data and Perform Quality Checks

  • Implement validation checks to ensure data accuracy and completeness.
  • Regularly review automated reports to identify and address any anomalies or discrepancies.
  • AI-powered automation platforms like Redbird can automatically detect issues with your data workflows and autonomously course correct.

6. Build Custom Visualizations, Dashboards and Reporting Outputs, and Connect These Back to Your Automation Workflows

  • Customize automated reports to present data in a visually appealing and easily understandable format.
  • Utilize charts, graphs, and dashboards to facilitate quick decision-making.
  • Many data collection solutions (e.g. Funnel, Supermetrics, Salesforce Datorama, Segment, Improvado, etc.) lack data orchestration, marketing analytics, and robust reporting capabilities, so you’ll need to work with your IT and data science counterparts to build intricate data pipelines, run marketing analytics, and connect processed data to your Google Data Studio, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI.  A much faster and more frictionless approach is to leverage an all-in-one operating system like Redbird that natively self-orchestrates across the lifecycle.

Benefits of Automated Marketing Reports

Automated marketing reports offer several key benefits:

Time and Resource Efficiency

  • Free up valuable time by eliminating manual report compilation. Redbird is able to drive 80% reduction in time spent with data collection, processing, analysis, data science and reporting.
  • Allocate resources to strategic planning and campaign optimization using advanced data science techniques like Marketing Mix Modeling, which tools like Redbird also provide natively as part of the analytics operating system. 

Improved Decision-Making

  • Access real-time data for prompt decision-making in response to changing market conditions.
  • Base decisions on accurate and up-to-date information.

Consistency and Standardization

  • Ensure consistency in reporting formats across different data sources.
  • Establish standardized reporting practices for better collaboration and understanding.

Scalability

  • Easily scale your reporting processes to accommodate the growth of marketing channels, and data sources. Redbird enables agencies to also more efficiently scale their efforts to new clients with copy and paste, reusable workflows.
  • Adapt to evolving business needs without compromising efficiency.

The Marketing Analytics Landscape

Redbird offers several key advantages over other marketing data, analytics and reporting products in the market. The way we think about the market is as follows:

  • Marketing Data ETL solutions: these are somewhat commoditized tools that offer data connectors into key lowest common denominator data sources. Tools like Funnel.io, Supermetrics, Salesforce Datorama, Segment, Improvado and Fivetran would fall into this bucket. Once data has been collected, your team is forced to figure out analytics, data science and reporting which these tools don’t offer.
  • Marketing analytics solutions: Most marketing analytics teams spend their time analyzing raw data in Excel or Google Sheets, which lack the connectivity, flexibility and orchestration with upstream data sources to enable deep automation of repetitive tasks. 
  • Marketing data science providers: Tools from companies like Neustar and Ipsos are leveraged at a hefty price tag to perform marketing data science techniques like Marketing Mix Modeling to determine how to optimize campaign spend. These tools require a lot of manual human involvement and take months to get up and running. Market research consultancies help with segmentation and insights modeling, but these processes are once again human intensive, expensive and slow to get off the ground.
  • Reporting tools such as PowerBI, Tableau and Google Data Studio lack direct connectivity to data connectors, causing marketing reporting automation to fall apart. IT resources have to get involved into years-long projects to integrate into the source systems or data ETL providers in a way that is flexible and adaptive enough to handle the always-on changing nature of marketing team needs.

Enter Redbird, an all-in-one marketing analytics automation platform that handles data collection, processing, analytics, data science / MMM, and reporting within a unified no-code, user-friendly UI. This enables marketers to set up repeatable automation workflows across the full data and reporting lifecycle in a fraction of the time and cost, and without writing a line of code. Given the automation capabilities and advanced analytical building blocks, teams can spin up customized data applications such as Marketing Mix Modeling, segmentation, and multi-source insights that flow directly into reports that are ready for executive or client views (e.g. dynamic dashboards, Powerpoint deliverables, etc).

Redbird also works with non-API integrations into legacy systems or public websites using its proprietary, flexible RPA chrome extension that records your manual steps and automates those processes for you.

Conclusion

Automating marketing reports from key data sources is not just a time-saving strategy; it's a fundamental shift toward data-driven, agile marketing practices. By leveraging automation, marketing analytics teams can extract actionable insights, respond to market dynamics in real time, and optimize campaigns for maximum impact. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, mastering the science of automated marketing reporting is essential for businesses looking to stay competitive and relevant.

Redbird’s marketing automation platform emerges as a powerful ally in this endeavor, offering a unified solution that streamlines, automates, and optimizes reporting workflows across diverse marketing and analytics platforms. By harnessing the capabilities of Redbird, marketers can not only save time and resources but also gain a competitive edge through real-time insights and agile decision-making. Embrace the future of marketing reporting with Redbird, and propel your efficiency to new heights.