Standardizing, Optimizing and Automating Reports (Turnkey Reports)

About the Client

A performance-driven digital marketing agency offering a broad range of services, including SEM, SEO, Shopping & Feed Management, Performance Display, Paid Social, CRO, and Insights & Analytics.

Background With Analytical services, client provides their customers with analytical reports helping them make data driven marketing decisions based on the Ad Campaign performance across various channels and platforms. Basically, these are cross channel reports to understand how campaigns are performing across channels such as Paid Search, Social, Marketplaces etc.,

With a big list of customers in need of such reports and expectations of sharp turnaround to see their campaign performance data. Client wanted to have a reporting service that would,

• Standardize offering
• Optimize turnaround time
• Ease of standing up the reports

This is when client reached out to DF to help them with this requirement and here's how DF exactly helped client

• Approach
• Data transformation and integration with Tableau reporting
• Dashboard design, creating data story, creating user experience
• Distribution of these reports

Our Approach

As the requirement is to standardize the offering and templatize the reports, our first thought was to provide a holistic view of the data at channel and platform level by limiting the number of segments and the metrics that we would show on the report. This would help ease the process of extracting data from the sources and transform them accordingly to suit the reporting needs.

Data Transformation and Integration With Tableau Reporting:

Client already had a repository of data extracted from various platforms and transformed it to suit the cross-channel reporting needs using DBT models. The set up that they had was to transform the data for each customer and use it as input to stand up Tableau dashboard respectively for each of them. This was time consuming process and would take lot of efforts.

In order to solve this issue, DF suggested client to load transformed data for multiple customers into a single data repository and maintain an identifier to distinguish data for each customer. We would use this data table as input to the Tableau dashboard and use the feature of "User Filter" in Tableau to provide row level security and show only client specific data on the dashboard to the user logged into server. This way we would avoid the process of standing up dashboards for each of the customers.

Create Story Around Data and Design User Experience:

First thing we wanted to do, was to build a story around the data and segment different operational touch points into sections on the dashboard. So, dashboard was segmented into 3 different views.

• Overview of the KPIs: Key metrics and their trends
• Performance by segments: Analyzing key metrics broken down by segments (Channel and Platform)
• Pacing Summary: Understand how the actuals are pacing towards the targets

Design Areas Mainly Comprised of Efficient Ways to

• Navigate between the views
• Interact with the dashboard using filters, controls, breakdowns etc.,
• Use brand guidelines for the colors, customer logos, backgrounds etc.,
• Call out important references to give much better context of the dashboard contents
• Provide options to retrieve data to an excel/csv and PDF versions of the dashboard on adhoc basis to capture customized observations

Distribution of Reports:

Once the dashboard is ready to be published on the Tableau server, the important question is, how to distribute reports and allow specific data access to the users (Client A, will be allowed to access only the data related to A).

As mentioned earlier we have managed keep an identifier (client name) in the data table, we would now use that column to enable the user filter on the dashboard.

Tableau Server side: Create user groups specific to the users belonging to spcific clients (EX: Create User Group A and add all the users belonging to A to that group)

On the Tableau dashboard: Define a user filter which will try to match the Client Name column in the data with the Group Name created on the Tableau server.

Result and Impact:

Standardized analytical report offerings that provides customers with holistic view at their Media Ad channel performance to drive key marketing decisions.

The solution turned out to be TurnKey offering of the analytical reports that can be quickly delivered to the customers and enables upsell opportunities. We were able to achieve quantifiable benefits such as

• 35% reduction in the turnaround time
• Much reduced efforts from the developers that would save atleast 20 hours per customer deliverable.
• The setup process for the dashboard has become remarkably easier, and we've achieved a significant reduction in errors, nearly reaching zero errors per deliverable.