đĄAccelerate your thought leadership by contributing to our blog. Join our community of experts now!
Jenna Snavely on March 29, 2022 (last modified on October 13, 2022) • 6 minute read
Thereâs 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.
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 aspectsâasking for color changes or moving graphs and other elements from one spot to another.
Those frustrations sat atop a more significant issue: their reporting wasnât forward-looking. By the time they had access to data, the campaign was overâthey either hit or missed the goal, but they couldnât 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:
âThereâs often so much frustration with analytics. You want Google Analytics to do something it canât quite do or canât quite show,â Brandon said. âYou end up making things in spreadsheets, and youâre doing manual data entry, and then thereâs a delay in your ability to get insights.â
âYou want to know how things are going right now,â Brandon emphasized. âYou want to set goals very intentionally on the front end and see how weâre doing and make tweaks as you go along.â
âEarly 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 âcan you make it look this way?â or âcan you put this here?â or âcan you make it this color?ââ Jessie said. âIt wasn’t really talking about the data.â
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.
âThe ability to have the goal alerts is a game-changer,â Brandon told us. âThe dashboards are super easy to read and super easy to create. Itâs easy to set goals and track how youâre doing against them, so you can actually make changes to that outcome.â
Now, they can custom-build dashboards for all their clientsâtailored to each clientâs specific niche and customer journey.
Here are the solutions xAscent Digital found with Databox:
âItâs 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.â
âWeâll 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,â Brandon explained.
âBefore, clients asked for reporting setups and never used them,â Brandon told us. âNow, they see it and are like, âWow, this looks amazing!ââ
âWe got Databox and clients know what theyâre looking at, so itâs âletâs talk about the numbers,â âletâs talk about the data,ââ Jessie added.
According to Brandon and Jessie, Databox has been a game-changer for their reporting setup.
âWe immediately saw results, both internally and externally,â Brandon noted. âJust 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.â
With Databox in their stack, the agency is faster and more effectiveâand they can better communicate results with clients.
Plus, âitâs much, much faster to spin up useful reports,â Brandon said.
Here are the results xAscent Digital saw using Databox:
âI felt like, for the first time ever, I had the control I always wanted to haveâin the momentâto look at whatâs happening today to impact whatâs going to happen tomorrow,â Brandon said. âThat was pretty amazing, and weâve seen that for our internal efforts, as well.â
âWhatâs amazingâthat I love about Databoxâis the ability to set those goals, have the alerts, see the visuals inside the reports for how weâre doing, and be able to make changes.â
âClients see those reports, and they donât feel intimidated by themâthey want to engage with them.â
For more information on xAscent Digital, click here.
Interested in trying Databox to combine all of your client performance data in one place? Create your free account to get started.
Get practical strategies that drive consistent growth
Marketing | Mar 27
Marketing | Dec 22 2022
Marketing | Nov 7 2022