How to eliminate Myths around Dashboarding and Data Automation

This is my story about how I’ve been eliminating myths around the report automation process in less than 4 months… and lo and behold meaningful dashboards for the business appear by magic!

Data-driven communication has become one of the biggest challenges for digital content creators, marketing teams and media agencies. That is why in my current role as Head of a Digital Intelligence area I’m working to facilitate the decision making process, including different stages of reporting and going through the data to make it easier to visualize everything in universal language dashboards.

Through the creation of data visualization boards which attend to a design thinking process, my team works to integrate the data from different areas, such as creative agency, company marketing and sales teams, and also research and media agency partners, with the aim of helping to make successful business decisions right away.

The collected information is commonly provided to the Marketing and Communication areas inside a company to respond to different objectives: from media mix weights and its adjustments in budget or communication messaging changes, to the analysis of users and brand’s consumers behaviors while they are visiting our websites.

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I’m going to share my story with you. The previous year, I was hired by a digital agency in Mexico City to work with one of their most important accounts. This was going to be my second time working there. I was re-employed to workg in the place where a couple years ago my team and I brought to life one of the most ambitious and promising Digital Command Centers of the region; I had never been so proud about something. Everything was perfect, but I decided to go back to my country (Colombia), open to explore other work fields. After two years working for a TV Broadcaster and being absolutely thankful about everything I learnt, this Mexican agency called me asking me (begging me) to please come back to rescue the account from the two year “hurricane” better known as “bad decisions and underestimation of BI processes”.

I said yes! why not? — After all I was convinced I had the chance to challenge myself, teach to a brand new team everything I learnt in two years and of course “Automate” reporting processes. I moved back to Mexico with high expectations about the new road to walk through. But I was surprised when I arrived, nothing was even close to what I expected, I found an inexperienced team, no technologies, no processes; so I had to take a deep breath and I decided to start from scratch.

While walking through this rough patch, I started to find the better, easier, cheaper, way to automate processes, while I was looking for the technology I hired a person with a large experience using more artisanal reporting dashboards such as Data Studio who helped me with the day by day operation, this way I could get to the “automation dream” faster while all the delayed deliverables got done. Finally it was all aligned, so my team and I fixed a mid-term objective to bring this digital data to a higher understanding that can contribute to the client’s Marketing Mix Modeling and its Engagement Model measurement. So now, I think about a near future, my team will work collaboratively with the client’s Insights & Analytics and IT teams to generate tailormade measurement indicators.

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Now I’m working with a visualization and BI automation platform which is helping me to organize and mix data from different sources, now the challenge is to harmonize this data to pull it and put everything together to be able to produce beautiful, impactful and useful dashboards. It is not easy to read our clients mind, not even ours when we have to figure out what’s the best way to display information. I know all of you are wondering how does our dashboarding process work today?

Well, my team has built two types of dashboards, a General one, which will amaze you when you can see how useful are the filters while navigating a report, and the other one was designed to display social media performance on the TV screens in the Company’s offices.

In the General Dashboard all the data, gathered from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Sizmek Programmatic, Sizmek Video, Twitter and other local vendors, is analyzed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

In the Performance Dashboard, different team members visualize all the big numbers from social media sources such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and Twitter, so our creative and media teams can understand the content’s performance and how effective and impactful it has been for our community.

The creation of each of these Dashboards responds to different types of analysis according to business questions and objectives; there are a few questions that can help you define which type of Dashboard is needed for you and your team:

• What do you want to visualize?
• What is the time range you would like to track?
• What type of analysis do you want to get from it?
• Is this report going to answer the type of business questions you have?
• Are the indicators you track according to the understanding of your brand or campaign’s performance?

While more honest your answers more accurate and organized information you can get from your dashboards and finally you will have eliminated the myths around reports that for our clients eyes sometimes (usually) looks as if it were only about “pushing a button”. Please think first on the needs, the time and resources available and last but not least, make the client part of the process. Remember that a well-thought and built Dashboard gives us the opportunity to transform any numbers into ideas for our business’ growth.

If you are interested in knowing more about how my process is going or about the technology I’m using, please contact me through: linkedin.com/in/paulamvelandia