Welcome to the second instalment of Adverity’s Strategic Playbook for Data-Driven Advertising Agencies. We’ve produced this three-part guide for advertising agencies looking to capitalise on the benefits of modern data-driven marketing.

In part one, we covered the reasons why advertising agencies should embrace the power of data and modern marketing intelligence. This will ultimately serve as a catalyst for making quicker and betterinformed decisions to improve the ROI of marketing campaigns, ensuring continued client satisfaction and help to scale your business. If you haven't already downloaded part one, you can do so here.

Data-driven marketing is something of a hot topic right now. I dare to claim that 99.5% of all companies are looking to improve their data to get the best insights into their business and marketing performance. While we all know how important this is, there is no consensus on other looming questions:

• What does a perfect dashboard look like?
• What are the most important KPIs to track?
• How do you act on your insights?

In today’s world, the answer “it depends” is mostly correct. While some people would love to have simple answers to all of the above questions, we actually try to help our clients figure out how to find the best solutions and get the most from their marketing data.

Whether you are responsible for marketing or analytics in a startup, e-commerce, agency or large FMCG: there is no way to convey your message without a nice visual representation of your data. After all, our brains struggle to comprehend data presented in tables, they much prefer graphs, arrows and visuals. If you take the time to add some storytelling elements to your reporting, there is no way your audience will miss the integral parts of your findings.

In this whitepaper, we try to uncover the hidden truths of your data: it is really hard to work with it. It lives in endless dark places. Data aggregation and reporting processes are inherently tedious: logging into multiple tools, downloading reports, copy-pasting numbers into spreadsheets. Don't get us started on the issues that too many spreadsheets cause...

It's clear that marketers don’t like this part of their job. In general, analysts spend threequarters of their time cleaning and manipulating data, instead of actual analysis. There simply has to be a better approach to marketing intelligence and reporting. And guess what? There is. We’ve collected a few important points to improve your analytics and I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it.

Alexander Igelsböck
Co-Founder & CEO, Adverity GmbH