In today’s data-driven world, media organizations have access to vast amounts of data – much more data than was available to most businesses even a decade ago. Fortunately, analyzing the data we own is no longer the onerous, time-consuming task it once was.
Gone are the days when gathering data from different sources took weeks – and sometimes even months – of tedious work. Nowadays, tools like Lineup’s Adpoint media sales solution streamlines reporting by pulling data from various business units together for you. This frees up your team’s valuable time to spend on understanding your data, and deriving invaluable insights from it.
But the question is, are you getting the value you should be out of your data? In this article, we explore why your business data is important, how a solution like Adpoint can simplify the reporting process, and how you as a publisher can make the most of this data to drive strategic decision-making.
Leverage your business data to stay competitive
When it comes to data, most organizations are “leaving value on the table and creating inefficiencies,” according to global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Many business problems still get solved through traditional approaches and take months or years to resolve,” the firm reports.
Your data is one of your media company’s most powerful resources. It’s unique to your business and can help you to stay competitive and ahead of the game. However, gathering together the data you need for making business decisions is just the first step in becoming a market leader. If you want to leverage the power of your data, you need to understand what it tells you.
The data you collect contains numerous interconnections that provide you with a wealth of information. Business analytics give you a deeper dive into your data so you can see and understand the information it offers.
According to the Harvard Business Review, there are four types of business analytics:
- Descriptive analytics. You use descriptive analytics to identify trends and patterns within data.
- Diagnostic analytics. With diagnostic analytics, you examine your data to find out why something happened.
- Predictive analytics. Predictive analytics uses statistics derived from your data to predict future outcomes and events.
- Prescriptive analytics. With prescriptive analytics, you can determine which outcomes will give you the best results.
Each of these methods can provide the crucial information you need to guide you toward optimal choices in your strategic decision-making process.
Let Adpoint streamline the data collection process for you
The first step in the data analysis process is to gather the data your business analysts require to prepare and inform their reports. Adpoint provides media companies with comprehensive media intelligence, giving all your departments the key information they need to make better decisions.
With Adpoint, your business analysts no longer have to spend their days gathering conflicting subsets of data from different applications. Instead, with Adpoint’s Analytics, you can easily obtain the data you need from across multiple sales channels.
Here’s what Adpoint offers to streamline your reporting process:
- Intuitive report-building tool that uses pre-defined data sets
- Clear visualization of your data, presented according to your preferences
- Custom dashboards for ongoing tracking, so you only see the reports you need
- Personally branded reports in a variety of formats
- Ability to search through large data sets with no time-outs or impact on your server
- Combined data from third-party sources, displayed in one place
- Dedicated developers’ platform for the creation of new reports
- Automated testing to identify errors in reports and highlight bad data
Your business analysts play a vital role
Analyzing your data enables you to derive invaluable business insights to inform your decision making. Adpoint’s ability to simplify the reporting process means your team will have more time to spend on the work that drives results: understanding and interpreting your data.
“The next step after Adpoint has streamlined your reporting is to ensure you have someone in place who can see the data, interpret it, and understand how to use it to move your business forward,” says Claire Mitchell, Product Manager (Finance & Analytics) at Lineup.
Your team’s business analysts play a crucial role once you have Adpoint’s reporting in hand. For example, using the data from Adpoint’s reports, your analysts can interpret the data to:
- understand your customers and provide customized recommendations that speak to each individual customer’s needs and preferences
- drive revenue by uncovering gaps and trends that can inform how you expand your portfolio of product offerings
- use past data to forecast future performance and put plans in place to deal with potential upturns or downturns
To fully leverage your data, you need to understand it. And the first step in this process is to streamline your reporting. As an all-in-one analytics solution for media companies, Adpoint is the right solution for this critical first step. Need a refresher on Adpoint reporting (or any of Adpoint’s tools, such as Lead Generator)? Contact us today.
