There’s a dirty little secret in the agency world. Those time and effort-intensive client reports and dashboards? Most of them go completely unnoticed by clients, collecting dust in the corner of their inbox.

The team behind xAscent Digital wants to change that. A website design agency dedicated to helping small service businesses grow online had a challenge: making reporting and data-driven goals interesting and accessible for creative business owners.

To learn more about how they use Databox to get more proactive about goals, we talked with Brandon McPeak, founder at xAscent Digital, and Jesse Jones.

The Challenge

Before finding Databox, Brandon and the team used Google Analytics and Data Studio to build client reports. Even with those tools behind them, building reports was super time-consuming.

According to Jessie, clients kept getting into the weeds on the design aspects—asking for color changes or moving graphs and other elements from one spot to another.

Those frustrations sat atop a more significant issue: their reporting wasn’t forward-looking. By the time they had access to data, the campaign was over—they either hit or missed the goal, but they couldn’t change anything now.

Brandon knew they needed an analytics and reporting solution that would enable them to track their goals, access real-time data, and engage clients in a more meaningful way.

Here are the challenges xAscent Digital faced:

• Get more proactive with real-time data: Brandon’s biggest gripe was the built-in delay in their ability to get insights and make adjustments in strategy. They needed to be able to access data in real-time when they could still pivot if needed.

“There’s often so much frustration with analytics. You want Google Analytics to do something it can’t quite do or can’t quite show,” Brandon said. “You end up making things in spreadsheets, and you’re doing manual data entry, and then there’s a delay in your ability to get insights.”

• Set and hit performance-driven goals: The agency is driven by performance, but hitting all their goals was difficult when they were flying blind, without any insight into how they were tracking toward those goals.

“You want to know how things are going right now,” Brandon emphasized. “You want to set goals very intentionally on the front end and see how we’re doing and make tweaks as you go along.”

• Engage clients with the data: When the team used GA and Data Studio, clients were so distracted by design and customization that they didn’t focus on the whole reason for the reports—the numbers.

“Early on, I was working with clients with Data Studio, and I would have to do a lot more design work. A lot of the conversation with the client was more about ‘can you make it look this way?’ or ‘can you put this here?’ or ‘can you make it this color?’” Jessie said. “It wasn’t really talking about the data.”

The Solution

After struggling to make Google Analytics and Data Studio work for them, the team found Databox and got to work connecting Stripe, Zapier, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Shopify, ActiveCampaign, Google Search Console, and Facebook Ads.

“The ability to have the goal alerts is a game-changer,” Brandon told us. “The dashboards are super easy to read and super easy to create. It’s easy to set goals and track how you’re doing against them, so you can actually make changes to that outcome.”

Now, they can custom-build dashboards for all their clients—tailored to each client’s specific niche and customer journey.

xAscent Digital’s Top Integrations

Here are the solutions xAscent Digital found with Databox:

• Get more proactive with real-time data: With quicker access to data, Brandon and the team have more control over their strategy and can take proactive action, both for clients and for their own agency.

“It’s made it very easy for us to pull out funnel-based, customer journey-based categories of data and show them in a way that maps to the way that users and customers are engaging with the business and the way the client is thinking about their business and the different pieces of selling what they do.”

• Set and hit performance-driven goals: The team can track all their goals and progress toward them. Plus, they’re better equipped to change course when hitting those goals requires it.

“We’ll do a lead generation dashboard. Sometimes we might also do a traffic dashboard. Then it might be a revenue dashboard connecting to Stripe or Shopify,” Brandon explained.

• Engage clients with the data: The simplicity and aesthetics of their new Databox dashboards help the team engage with clients on the actual numbers rather than the design of it all.

“Before, clients asked for reporting setups and never used them,” Brandon told us. “Now, they see it and are like, ‘Wow, this looks amazing!’”

“We got Databox and clients know what they’re looking at, so it’s ‘let’s talk about the numbers,’ ‘let’s talk about the data,’” Jessie added.

The Results

According to Brandon and Jessie, Databox has been a game-changer for their reporting setup.

“We immediately saw results, both internally and externally,” Brandon noted. “Just adopting Databox was probably the biggest leap that I’ve been able to make in terms of just actually using analytics to improve how we’re doing things.”

With Databox in their stack, the agency is faster and more effective—and they can better communicate results with clients.

Plus, “it’s much, much faster to spin up useful reports,” Brandon said.

Here are the results xAscent Digital saw using Databox:

• Get more proactive with real-time data: With Databox behind them, Brandon and the team are back in control of their data, their strategy, and—crucially—the results they produce for clients.

“I felt like, for the first time ever, I had the control I always wanted to have—in the moment—to look at what’s happening today to impact what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Brandon said. “That was pretty amazing, and we’ve seen that for our internal efforts, as well.”

• Set and hit performance-driven goals: Goal-tracking and alerts keep xAscent Digital on top of performance and in the driver’s seat when it comes to hitting those goals.

“What’s amazing—that I love about Databox—is the ability to set those goals, have the alerts, see the visuals inside the reports for how we’re doing, and be able to make changes.”

• Engage clients with the data: The agency’s clients are more interested in and engaged with Databox reports and dashboards. So much so, Brandon and the team are even considering offering reporting setups as a standalone service clients will pay for.

“Clients see those reports, and they don’t feel intimidated by them—they want to engage with them.”

For more information on xAscent Digital, click here.

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