How To Automate Your Reporting and Create a Real-Time Dashboard Using AciveCampaign, Zapier and Google Data Studio
How can you avoid wasting hours of your days updating spreadsheets and creating reports of your business processes?
Among others, the reporting process is one of the most time-consuming and overwhelming.
This is what I’ve noticed happening:
-The team wastes hours updating spreadsheets
-People get frustrated having to check multiple tools
-It takes hours to create reports manually
In the context of ActiveCampaign, you have different ways to create reports:
- Standard reports feature: It’s great if you need specific data about campaigns, automations, deals and contacts. However, it works in “silos” and in many cases it’s limited.
- Custom reports feature: It offers more advanced reports since you can cross-join data from different tables (campaigns, automations, contacts, deals, e-commerce).
- Build your system: It’s the best solution if you want to fully customize your reports and create a dashboard that gives you an overall view of what is happening in your business.
Let’s talk about building your own system!
To help your team save time and reduce overwhelm, you need to follow these steps:
- Centralize your data
- Automate your data collection
- Create a real-time dashboard with BI tools
Depending on the scenario, this could be done with ActiveCampaign, Zapier, Google Spreadsheet and Google Data Studio.
This is how I implement it for my clients:
I try to simplify what I do as much as possible so you can understand the logic behind it.
- ActiveCampaign: I use it as the single source of truth. When I want to track something in a process, I create a webhook step in the automation. That allows me to create a package of info that is related to a specific contact in the CRM and send it to a URL.
- Zapier: I create a zap to catch that URL and the package of info. Inside the zap, I create several steps to manipulate that data and update a “raw data” tab in a spreadsheet.
- Google Data Studio: I connect this tool to the spreadsheet to create a real-time dashboard.
Watch the video to have an overview of the process and of the real-time dashboard.
Outsourcing the implementation could be a good idea for your business.
In the last few years, I helped several SMEs to make the most out of Business Automation through digital project management services.
If you want to learn more, download the Business Automation guide with the 5 phases I follow:
Or fill out the application form to work with me:
