How to automate your marketing reports: 3 concrete examples

In August of 2019, Search Station had come to a point where we needed to optimize the efficiency of our time spent on client tasks and our own operational tasks.

We decided to plunge into the shiny world of automated marketing reporting and analytics, with the aim to cut out bulky work and streamline our processes. Our goal was 70% reduction in time spent on business tasks that were necessary but didn’t contribute to direct growth of the business and our clients.

Through the set up of these three automated tasks, we were able to scrape off a day’s worth of work each week. That’s a whole month and a half each year.

1. A daily client-facing Google Ads report

One core component of our reporting is the Daily KPI reporting spreadsheet. These sheets first started out as a request from one of our earliest clients, an SME who wanted a way to see the daily statistical fluctuations on their website and advertising campaigns.

To accomplish this initially, we created a Google Sheet that contained very rudimentary top-level analysis of traffic, sales, sales value, enquiries, and traffic by the different traffic channels.

We filled in this report every day, which required around 15 minutes. As the company grew, they came up with more fields that they wanted to track. They also had three other brand sites that they wanted us to track. After we implemented the same process across all brands, the reporting took an hour’s work per day.

After setting up Supermetrics for Google Sheets, we were able to add more columns that recorded more granular statistical information, without the added hassle of manually filling in extra fields each day. This allowed for greater in-depth knowledge and insight on a day-to-day level.

Now every morning, instead of having to fill in all the stats and with the help of conditional formatting, we can easily highlight and see problem areas, or days where sales were down, and identify the issues quicker.

Automating this sheet has reduced workload from one hour to the five minutes it now takes to look over the previous day or week’s performance.

2. Budget estimations for paid search

The budget estimation sheet for paid search is a great way for us to quickly check budget spend and make sure that we are not overspending on any particular account.

To do this, we pull through the accounts’ costs from the start of the month to now and take it away from the set budget. This divided by the amount of days left in the month, gives us the recommended daily spend we would want to hit.

If we are overspending too soon in the month, we have conditional formatting that will turn the cell text red, so that we can easily spot overspend.

Having this not only saves us time going through each client’s account to check on the spending but also allows us to make quick decisions on whether or not we are going to over or underspend this month’s budget.

3. A CRO library

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an important part of keeping up the health of a website, allowing us to get the most out of traffic. There are a lot of factors that contribute to conversions, and we have picked out our main indicators that help us break down the weak areas in our conversion funnel.

Having all these stats takes out a couple of hours a week in terms of analysis, which frees us up to actually plan which areas of conversions we should tackle.

We built this CRO library following a meeting where we were trying to figure out how to easily identify weak spots on our clients’ websites. With this library in place we could then go to our clients, make them aware of our findings and propose a plan of how to tackle these areas of their website.

With one of our clients, we were able to spot that they had a massive flaw when it came to their basket to checkout rate. With this data we were able to approach the client with a solution, implement our idea, and bam: an improved basket to checkout rate of 10%.

Not only is this table worth its weight in gold, it also is easy to maintain as it updates automatically at the end of each month. This lets us to see the most up to date figures, as well as allowing us to see the impact of our improvements.

Wrapping up

All together, having Supermetrics has freed up an estimated 11 hours a week so far, that’s a total of 572 hours a year or a total of 71 days worth of work.

Investing in Supermetrics has definitely paid for itself ten fold.

We will continue to use Supermetrics in new and exciting ways that will help automate processes, free up time, and allow for greater scalability in the future.