Monthly reports. They may not be fun to compile, but they’re necessary-–especially for agencies. At the end of the day, this is the proof you’ve done your job and provided value to your client. 

According to Wordstream’s 2019 State of the Agency report, approximately 94% of agencies spend 1 or more hours developing a monthly client report. Imagine if you have 10 clients, that’s a minimum of 10 hours a month your team spends not doing their own work. 

Like others in the agency world, Stream Creative, an inbound marketing agency specializing in website development, web design, and marketing, had a similar problem with their monthly client reports. Not only was their report building a drain on time but it was an extremely inefficient process.

As Stream Creative grew its business, they needed a way to help streamline their monthly reporting process and that’s when they found the solution in Databox. 

We recently sat down with one of Stream Creative’s founding partners, Steve James, and its Content Director, Janice Dombrowski, to learn more about the challenges they were facing and how a business dashboard software such as Databox was able to help.

The Challenge

Here are the challenges Stream Creative had with its old reporting system:

• Focus Area: Too many online channels made it difficult to interpret and streamline data for all of its clients.

“We would pull data from HubSpot, Google Analytics, and all the other platforms into spreadsheets which were then transferred to Word documents,” shared Dombrowski. “We had all this cumbersome text which didn’t keep our clients engaged because the reports were long and boring.” 

“Every different service line has a different way they present the data so it’s very difficult to combine all of those viewpoints into a spreadsheet,” said James. 

• Client Accountability: Stream Creative’s clients were limited with the data from their marketing campaigns to one text-heavy and lengthy monthly report.

• Campaign Flexibility: Because all the various data sources weren’t in one location, it was difficult to easily assess how client campaigns were performing. As such, this made it even more difficult for Stream Creative to be agile in its tweaks to marketing approaches.

The Solution

As Stream Creative grew its business, they couldn’t create reports the same was as they did in the past. They needed a more effective and straightforward solution and they have found it with a client dashboard software like Databox.

Following the implementation of Databox for Stream Creative’s clients, Dombrowski was able to come up with specific goals based on KPIs determined with clients. In combination with Account Managers, Dombrowski set up client accounts based on client insights and expectations. 

All of Stream Creative’s client data sources that are now connected include Quickbooks, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, YouTube, Linkedin Company Pages, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Facebook Pages, Google Sheets, Instagram Business, Eventbrite, Harvest, Moz, HubSpot, SEMrush, Twitter, HubSpot CRM, and Wistia.

Stream Creative’s Top Integrations

Here’s how Stream Creative used Databox to solve its monthly reporting issues: 

• Focus Area: After implementing Databox, Stream Creative was able to get a better understanding of what areas their clients needed to focus on.

“Databox has allowed us to use specific data to paint a better picture of the long-term organic inbound methodologies,” said Dombrowski.

• Client Accountability: Now, Stream Creative’s clients have direct access to viewing any metrics at any time with a shared link. This provides a level of transparency that wasn’t always there in the past with once a month lengthy reports. 

• Campaign Flexibility: By streamlining all of its clients’ data sources into a single business dashboard, Stream Creative is able to see the peaks and valleys of all campaign activity. 

“If we know part of a campaign is a blog post where we see jumps in organic or email traffic, we can tie those to specific campaign tactics,” said Dombrowski. “This allows us to see which channel is working best for future successful campaign repetitions. The ability to have a campaign Databoard of all the information coming in really gives us a sense of what’s performing in the campaign.”

The Results

More focus. More transparency. More flexibility. 

Stream Creative has taken its campaign monitoring and monthly reporting to the next level with Databox’s features. They offer more accountability and transparency to their clients and have the agility to be as flexible as possible in campaign adjustments.

As an added bonus from the newly available time they got by using Databox for monthly reporting, Stream Creative has been able to take on 13 new clients. 

• Focus Area: Because Stream Creative was able to get a clearer picture of what worked and what didn’t work, they were able to significantly improve their overall marketing approach.

• Client Accountability: Now, clients can hop into viewing their KPI dashboard at any time. As a result, Stream Creative has become even more accountable for each and every decision. If there’s a campaign that’s underperforming, the client now has the capability to proactively view and reach out to alert their Stream Creative Account Manager for campaign adjustments.

“Databox helps us evaluate our past successes, goals, and work together as a team,” said James. “Giving our clients the data they need and the capability to share that with their teams internally has provided an unprecedented level of transparency.” 

• Campaign Flexibility: With Stream Creative being able to see everything in one client dashboard, they can now easily change dates and adjust campaign parameters at any time.

“Databox gives us that flexibility to look backward and forward to change our strategy to a more flexible one,” said Dombrowski. “It’s really helped with our campaign monitoring. We’re able to hop in to change dates or make any other adjustments when needed which is great.”

“When we’re looking at Google or Facebook Ads, Databox gives us that quick transparency to pull up a performance dashboard and look at the top-performing keywords along with what ad sets are converting,” said James. “When you look at those paid channels, it does help us to go in there a little bit more.” 

Internally, Stream Creative itself has seen immense benefits to its team members.

“Creating templates has benefited our internal teamwork consistency and from a time-saving measure,” said Dombrowski. “If we had to build out custom boards for everything, I feel like we would be spending a lot more time focused on report development than our everyday tasks. Databox has saved us 75% in terms of the time we used to spend creating monthly reports.”