How Agencies Can Remove Admin Time With Automated Client Reporting

Many agency owners and their team need to spend at least a few hours per week on client reporting. It’s not their most favorite task, but a necessary one. Instead of treating it as a necessity, why not making the reporting easier for everyone involved?

The crux of agency client reporting is that many of those involved manually generate reports. This task that takes away countless hours per month they could’ve spent on more important work. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to make use of automated client reporting.

Why agencies have to automate client reporting

Generating reports is an essential task most agencies will have to do. After all, they want to show their clients that their money is well spent.

The biggest issue is that many rely on manual client reporting, be it in Google Sheets, Excel, or Airtable. They use Google Analytics to gather data, copy it into a spreadsheet, and use the data sources to generate charts and diagrams that clients can understand.

But generating reports on a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis is too much manual work once you have to do it for dozens of clients.

Here are three key reasons why agencies should automate their reporting:

1. Reduce costs: Copy-pasting isn’t the most efficient way to get things done, nor is it accurate. One little mistake and your reporting is wrong. Automation cuts down on costs and ensures fewer human mistakes.

2. Scale up: Once work picks up, agencies can quickly run out of available hands to handle it. By automating the reporting, they can focus on tasks that require a human touch.

3. Be consistent: Generating the same type of report for every client ensures that every team member is familiar with them. This makes it easy to set up processes, and ensure that data is delivered accurately.

Automating your client reporting in 3 steps

I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that client reporting should be automated at this point, the question is: how do I do it?

Let me guide you through the process step-by-step.

1. Choosing KPIs

What is it that you want to display in your reports? To answer that question, we need to know what kind of client report we’re building, for example:

• SEO client report

• email marketing report

• social media management report

Depending on the report type, the metrics you’ll display, and therefore the data sources, will be different.

Generally speaking, all of them should have the following characteristics:

• Understandable: Charts and graphs are nice, but what do they mean? The main idea of client reporting is not to display data, but to do conclusion from them. Create a summary section showing improvements/losses compared to the previous reporting period.

• Accessible: If you’re one of those agencies who send reports on certain dates should reconsider if that is the best approach. Not everyone has the time to look at them right then. Modern reporting platforms provide access to a dashboard where they could look at their reports whenever they want.

• White-labeled: If you want to impress your clients with your reporting capabilities, your reports should be white-labeled. That means they feature your branding, not that of the developer behind the reporting tool.

2. Selecting a reporting tool

Automating client reporting has never been easier thanks to the many tools available today. Here are four we think are worth a closer look.

AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics helps marketing agencies save time by automating their client reporting. The main benefit of this tool is that it allows you to connect your data and create custom dashboards that your clients can log into.

To help agencies get started, there are a variety of different templates available (both for dashboards and reports). Furthermore, 70+ integrations are at your disposal to ensure that all your data can be funneled into AgencyAnalytics.

Databox

Databox allows agencies to connect all their data points and build dashboards to track performance. In addition to the 70+ supported integrations, you can even send data from SQL databases and via API.

One feature other tools lack is the benchmarking feature. It allows an agency to show their clients how they compare to similar companies. Databox can also calculate metrics such as ROI based on the data at hand.

Looker Studio

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is the most popular tool to generate all kinds of reports. It’s free as long as you connect to the provided Google platforms (Google Sheets, Google Search Console). Extra connectors come at a hefty price tag, though.

For those on a tight budget and agencies who heavily rely on Google’s products, Looker Studio is a good solution to sort out their reporting.

Whatagraph

Whatagraph positions itself as a reporting solution for marketing agencies. As the other options mentioned, templates are available to help you get started as quickly as possible.

A handy feature is that you can set up reports based on team templates. Each report can be fine-tuned within seconds, making it easy to launch reports tailored to each client. Reports can also be shared via a live link—and it updates data constantly.

3. Embedding into your client portal

Some reporting solutions allow you to send the reports via email. While that isn’t a bad option, I think it’s outdated. Let me put it this way: what does your inbox look like right now? Is it full of unread emails? I bet your client’s inbox is the same.

Instead of upsetting them because they didn’t see your reporting email, why not give them access to the report in a client portal? The biggest benefit is that they can log in at any time and visualize your reports.

Automating client reports has never been easier

Agencies have more tools than ever to choose from when it comes to generating and automating reports. Do keep in mind that they all look very similar. But the devil is in the details, as they say. Take your time when you check the different integrations the tools support natively, and if you can connect to the data sources you need.

Lastly, ensure that the reporting can also be connected to other tools you use, for instance a CRM. If you’re not using such a software yet, check out this post about the best CRMs for agencies.