When your portfolio of clients is small, using Google Drive (Docs, Sheets, and Slides) or Excel to create marketing reports manually is common practice. These free tools keep costs down and work well for getting the job done up until a point. But as you start to grow and bring on more clients, this process can quickly become unmanageable, leading you to spend hours on reporting alone.
Agencies who don’t solve this problem end up having less time to spend on the actions that actually produce value for their clients and their own business. For example:
- Working on strategic planning and technical campaign optimizations for their clients
- Doing their own marketing to bring in new leads for their agency
- Having sales calls with prospects and improving their sales process
In a competitive environment, an agency’s ability to focus on the things that generate the highest ROI for them and their clients is what keeps them in business. That’s why we’ve built ReportGarden to provide an easy way of creating and automating reports.
In this article, we’ll revisit a story about just how draining an exercise manual reports can be, and then describe how one agency has grown from 25 to 500+ accounts in the course of just 4 years while using our product for report automation.
Want to check out our dashboard and reporting tool? Try our 7 day free trial.
The Reality of Manual Reports as You Grow
Weekly, biweekly, and monthly reporting for most agencies means spending hours to manually run reports in-house. When we spoke to Sven from Koia he shared that he was spending at least three hours on report generation each week. That’s three hours where he’s not focused on marketing strategy or growth, he’s just trudging through getting numbers from each data source and inputting them into a spreadsheet.
When you take into account the cumulative time spent compiling a single report by your account managers, it’s troubling to consider just how much time is pulled away from work that truly generates value.
This plays out in different ways for different agencies:
- For PPC Agencies: Your PPC specialists are doing data collection for reports when they could be monitoring and optimizing PPC campaigns, doing data analysis, setting up remarketing audiences, or optimizing landing page funnels.
- For SEO Agencies: Your search engine optimization specialists are manually pulling numbers from Google Analytics and Google Search Console when they could be doing keyword research, monitoring for content decay, reoptimizing older content, or doing backlink outreach.
- For Social Media Agencies: Your social team is plugging new data into spreadsheets when they could be writing new content, strategizing their campaigns using data insights, and directly engaging with client audiences.
And what if one of these people who is accountable for their team’s reporting makes an error when inputting their data? Simple human error can lead to additional man-hours to create a new report, including searching for and fixing the problem. Or worse, lead to overspending or misreporting numbers to your clients.
Rather than letting reporting put a pause on your ability to scale, automated reporting lets you free up your team’s time for tasks that create value and outperform the competition.
How ReportGarden Helped This Client Go From 25 to 500+ Accounts Without Compromising Reporting or Customer Satisfaction
We spoke to Sam, our Team Lead for customer success, about an agency that came to ReportGarden a few years ago, right around the same time that he started with us. They were a small agency of just 5 people who helped their clients with Google Adwords and SEO. At the time, we set them up with a membership that covered dashboards and reporting for 25 accounts.
Our customer success team worked with them to get set up and create client dashboards for their agency’s common use cases. This included connecting their data sources and providing their clients with access to each of their dashboards.
To create their first reports, they used one of our professionally designed report templates as a base. From there, data from their dashboards was automatically populated into each client report, and they could refine and customize as needed based on individual client needs and KPIs. They also took advantage of ReportGarden’s user-friendly scheduler to automate sending out weekly and monthly business reports, saving their team countless hours of pulling and shipping out reports each week.
Staggering Growth in Just 4 Years
Over the course of their 4 years with ReportGarden, this agency has upgraded 9 times to accommodate their growth. By freeing up their time for more focused, revenue generating tasks, they’ve been able to add a handful of new services. In addition to their early offerings of Adwords and SEO, they now offer broad digital marketing services, including search engine marketing, copywriting, website design, retargeting, call tracking, and social media.
While their full headcount has jumped to 15-20 people since they joined us, it still only takes 3 people to handle the reporting for their consistently growing client base. Today, they do reporting for over 500+ accounts using ReportGarden, much of which has been fully automated.
As The Agency Grows, Feature Requests Have Helped ReportGarden Continue to Serve Their Needs
As their team has gotten to know us, they’ve also made requests and offered feedback that have led us to making certain improvements. For example, they voiced their need for a Wildjar Integration, and we were eventually able to deliver this.
While we weigh each feature request carefully and can’t always accommodate them, we always strive to meet our users’ needs the best that we can.
Using Automated Reporting Tools is a Cost-Effective Way to Scale Your Agency
As we’ve seen in the example shown above, automating reports makes scaling your marketing agency much more efficient. This simple change to your reporting process can create cascading benefits for your agency and it’s bottom line.
To recap the benefits from our client success story:
- Scale without needing to increase headcount.
- Avoid human error which may lead to overspend and time wasted on reworking reports.
- Log in to one place, one time. No more logging into multiple data sources to pull relevant data from multiple platforms.
- Schedule reports each week to: run custom reports, send weekly PDF updates to your clients, and set up your templates/ schedules in ReportGarden.
- Easily integrate outside marketing sources using a Google Sheets integration.
- 24/7 support, if things aren’t going right, someone can help you within 15 minutes.
If you’re ready to simplify reporting, optimize your marketing automation, and make the hassle of manual reporting a thing of the past, you can try out ReportGarden for free with our 7 day free trial.
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