Automating Website Reports – How To Do It
The business world is becoming more digitalized by the day. Companies, great and small, share a common desire to streamline their internal operations and thus maximize productivity. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that people are leaning towards automated reporting tools to achieve these goals. Why Automate Website Reports? No matter which stage of growth a business finds itself in, it needs clear goals to keep it moving forward. These goals are tracked using key metrics, referred to as key performance indicators. And these KPIs allow a business to evaluate its performance and make needed adjustments along the way. KPIs are shared in business reports that are shared daily, weekly, monthly, and perhaps even yearly. But this presents a problem. Companies use different platforms for advertising campaigns, marketing outreach campaigns, marketing reports and website hosting. How can you retrieve accurate data from all these different sources efficiently and accurately? That’s where an automated reporting system comes in. Report automation collects essential data from multiple platforms, or in some cases, websites, and generates an overview report for consideration. There’s another reason why businesses are leaning ever more towards digitalizing things. Professionalism. Imagine, for a moment, a marketing agency meeting with a potential client. Pexels With a lot hinging on the success of the meeting, those on the pitching side of the negotiation table want to give the best first impression. If that agency pulls out a single report with metrics and data in a neatly organized report, they’ll stand a higher chance of securing the job. Let’s now highlight a few other key benefits. The Benefits of Report Automation Saves Time and Money According to a survey of 1000 people working for small and medium-sized companies, 29% said they spend between 4 and 5 hours daily performing core job functions. As if that’s not alarming enough, the same study found that 76% of people spend between 1 and 3 hours a day manually entering data into operating systems. In addition, 73% of workers spend 1-3 hours just trying to find information or a particular document. (1) Automatic reporting frees up valuable time that workers lose by doing manual entry. The entire workforce can then focus their time and energy on more human-centric tasks such as following up with customers or suppliers. Creates Transparency and Accessibility A central software system allows various departments to access the same data. This transparency enables collaboration as different teams can use one report to work from, even from various geographical locations. Allowing team members access to the same reports also builds trust. Employees hate thinking that they’re being left out of the loop. So make sure you grant all the right people access to your automated reports and you’ll notice their confidence in the company grow. Pexels Increases Productivity Automated reporting gives businesses an accurate, up-to-date picture of what’s happening on the ground at any given time. This is especially important if you have departments functioning from different geographical locations. Real-time data = Real-Time decision making You can act swiftly and decisively when you don’t have to wait for reports to be collected from different departments. And as a result, business production or workflow can continue to operate at a steady pace. Reduces Human Error No matter how hard we try, we all make mistakes. And this is even more true when we face anxiety at work. According to a study by AADA, 50% of workers admitted that work-related stress affects the quality of their work. (2) And we all know how much stress chasing deadlines causes. The last thing you want is for the quality of your reports to be impacted because of a stressed employee trying to enter data from various sources manually. Pexels This is especially important during crucial decision-making meetings where companies depend on data accuracy. A misplaced comma or unassigned data entry could potentially have huge consequences for your business, so reduce the chance of human error by canceling manual calculations. So, some serious pros exist to using report automation tools in everyday business. But how do you actually do it? Let’s have a look. Automated Reporting Tools Here’s an overview of how to do it using two web analytics tools, Abralytics and Google Analytics. Abralytics Abralytics is a web analytics tool that has gained popularity, partly due to its ability to marry in-depth reporting with easy-to-use functionality. Unlike other well-known platforms that seem to overwhelm more than make life easier for many users, Abralytics takes a less is more approach to their business, including report automation. With just a few clicks, you can give your team access to the most valuable data in your business. As mentioned earlier, the first step is to identify your business KPIs. You can set these KPIs as key widgets in your Abralytics reports and, in doing so, view only the data you need rather than too much data at once. The platform also helps you save time as the learning curve is super low, and the setup is pain-free. Abralytics also allows you to view data from an infinite number of websites using one platform. It automatically generates weekly and monthly reports for all sites and sends these by e-mail. That’s the kind of initiative that draws so many to Abralytics. Easy, hassle-free automated reporting software. Pexels Google Analytics GA has been the go-to web analytics tool for many years, so it’s reasonable to assume that you’ll want to automate your reports stemming from their products. That’s precisely why Google Data Studio was released in 2016 as a free automated reporting tool for individual users and small teams. Google Data Studio lets you view reports from various data sources in one compelling dashboard. It uses charts, bars, and other
