Many ad teams still rely on manual and outdated processes to consolidate multichannel data for both internal and customer-facing reporting needs. It’s the main reason reporting remains one of the most tedious workflows for digital advertisers.
Whether you want to automate reports for specific channels, like PPC or Google Ads, or provide leadership with a portfolio-level view of client performance, better reporting starts with bringing cross-platform data into one unified system.
This article highlights the compounding benefits of bringing all your channel data into one place, plus five key ways that automation can make your reporting workflows faster, more accurate, and infinitely more effective at executing insights.
Advertisers need centralized, cross-channel data visibility
Advertising data is often scattered across multiple systems, platforms, or teams. When data lives in different places, the entire reporting process is redundant, tedious, and time-consuming.
Aside from draining resources and missing real-time improvement opportunities, the bigger impact of channel-siloed data is that it’s nearly impossible to tie every channel into one cohesive strategy. You can’t understand performance on a macro level if you’re trying to synthesize data from multiple sources for analysis—especially if you have to do this on a regular cadence for every customer across your portfolio.
Centralizing your multichannel data into a single system eases many pain points associated with building, analyzing, and understanding multichannel data for advertising reporting.
It also means your team doesn’t need to rely on outside tools when building reports from multiple data sources. Everything—campaign management, analysis, and performance report building—can be done in one system.
This is not insignificant: it completely revolutionizes how your advertising team operates. It’s not just a few hours of time you’re saving. For some advertising teams, it may be someone’s entire job to run analyses and put reports together.
One of our clients, Dealer.com, refers to their multichannel data hub as a “coffee cup dashboard” because it’s the first thing their strategists check in the morning. With everything living in one place, the team can get through the most critical tasks of the day by the time they finish a cup of coffee.
“Every morning, our Ad Strats see all the information they need brought directly to them,” said Ben Gilbert, former Senior Director of Advertising Innovation at Dealer.com during an Advertising Week 2024 presentation on using automation to overcome AdOps capacity challenges. “They don’t have to hunt for something that’s broken. The dashboard shows them what needs to be fixed—and how to fix it—in the first moment of the day.”
Curious how these reporting tools work in practice? Here are five key ways a centralized data system, combined with automation, can improve your advertising reporting processes from the ground up.
1. Eliminate task-switching and time-intensive tasks
If you manage multiple campaigns or accounts per channel, you know all too well that performance reporting is not as easy as simply logging in and navigating the data you need. There’s a lot of digging and clicking required to access the right accounts, campaigns, and data to get everything together for deep analyses and customer-facing reports.
The constant task-switching required to adequately manage each step of a reporting workflow erodes productivity and consumes valuable work hours. This leaves less time for more high-value tasks like testing, client growth conversations, or building data-powered strategies for future campaigns.
Working from one data source of truth means you don't have to bump back and forth between individual channels, like Google and Meta. Automation keeps all your data sources up-to-date in one place: no manual effort and no waiting for your sources to sync. This allows you to view everything in one place and quickly access the information you need, no matter where the data is stored.
Tools like Fluency’s Data Explorer also provide filters for narrowing in on data sets quickly. Filters help you parse out what you need to know when building new strategies or finding customer-specific insights, making it possible to easily answer questions like:
- Which channel had the highest overall ROAS for the past week? The past month?
- Across all channels, which campaigns underspent last month?
- Which channels are most effective for reaching women in urban areas (or another key target audience)?
These tools dramatically cut down on the time spent sifting through disparate data sources, enabling you to quickly pinpoint critical insights so you can reallocate their time to high-value tasks. Ultimately, this is how your team can get back time to drive better multichannel results.
2. See team-wide performance in one view
Evaluating team performance is often a complex and time-consuming process for managers—especially if each ad strategist manages dozens of different accounts. When everyone’s accounts are scattered across different platforms, it’s difficult to synthesize accounts and campaigns by individual team members.
However, managers must take time to assess portfolio health metrics to identify top-performing strategies. For example, if one ad strategist’s accounts are pacing at 100% and someone else’s accounts are pacing at 70%, you can use this data to start team discussions about what’s working and what’s not. If you can get other team members to replicate successful parameters or best practices across their accounts, you can move the whole team—and account performance—forward.
A centralized reporting system can help with this, too. For example, Fluency’s Analyst Portfolio Health tool provides actionable data, empowering teams to improve results portfolio-wide with focused, informed strategies. The tool tracks a wide range of critical metrics, such as the number of accounts managed per analyst, spend totals, pacing accuracy, and impression share averages.
Seeing these multichannel stats organized by team members means you can get a detailed view of what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.
Executives can also use Analyst Portfolio Health to get a concise, high-level understanding of employee and portfolio performance. The custom goal-setting option allows you to measure employee success using metrics that are aligned with company priorities. You can ensure that every Ad Strat works towards shared goals and moves the needle where matters most.
Empowering leaders and teams with clear, actionable data, the Analyst Portfolio Health tool encourages team collaboration, makes it easier to identify portfolio-wide growth opportunities, and drives consistent improvement across campaigns and accounts.
3. Take action instantly with real-time notifications
When performance data is stuck in individual platforms, it's not just an inconvenience: it can lead to missed insights, sluggish response times, or even costly mistakes. That’s why it makes sense that reporting and real-time notifications go hand-in-hand.
Reporting on multichannel efforts over specific time periods, like every week or month, can help you understand the larger trends at play and what strategic adjustments you should make for long-term success. Notifications enable you to react to the most pressing issues right now, helping you keep strategies and nuanced parameters on track to hit goals. Combined, these tools help teams confidently manage campaigns across multiple ad channels or accounts with far less work.
Syncing real-time data into one place makes it possible for automation to deliver the most critical real-time notifications directly to you from all your channels. Instead of wasting time clicking between Google Ads, Meta, and other platforms, the most critical and timely problems are delivered to the right person for rapid resolution. You’re no longer reacting after the fact: you can make real-time adjustments that keep every campaign, channel, and account running smoothly.
Multichannel notifications cover the essentials, like suspended campaigns, zero spend accounts/campaigns, and when spending has been paused. These tools continuously work in the background, analyzing what’s happening and providing timely, detailed insights directly to the person who needs to see them. These proactive alerts surface trends, risks, and opportunities before you even realize they exist.
4. Use custom notifications to keep KPIs top of mind
Notifications about essential ad functions are tremendously helpful for keeping things on the right track and optimizing performance. But how can teams be sure that they are continuously progressing on the most important goals or objectives for specific customers?
Advanced systems like Fluency enable custom notifications so you can get notified when something directly impacts a customer’s specific KPI or strategy. Custom notifications make it possible to surface the most important insights automatically, without spending too much time analyzing and delivering answers in the form of reports.
Reporting on performance anomalies or customer-specific opportunities means teams can expedite their decision-making processes and improve performance across multiple channels. Custom notifications speed up decision-making, directing teams to optimize in real time.
Custom notifications help you and your teams progress on what matters most: driving results across channels, not digging for what to address next.
5. Quickly build reports for any purpose, from one system
Reporting is unique in that it’s not a one-size-fits-all workflow.vYour ad teams build and deliver different types of reports for different stakeholders. The reports you build for your clients will include different data than the reports your team needs to review when deciding strategic recommendations for the next campaign.
Clients typically want to see where their money went, what’s working, what’s not, and how performance impacts their business. Your AdOps team needs granular details (like high- and low-performing keywords, the most engaged audiences, and spend opportunities) to make daily, incremental improvements to improve overall performance.
Both of these reports are different than what leadership wants to see when they ask for a high-level overview of how your entire client portfolio has changed quarter over quarter. Other teams may have different priorities as well. For instance, the Sales team might focus on identifying opportunities to secure additional budget.
Using one core data hub for all your reporting purposes means you can easily filter, format, and distribute the key data points and insights to each specific stakeholder on an automatic cadence.
“Having performance data from every channel in one place means I can quickly find what I’m looking for, check how things are pacing, and use these insights to guide client conversations,” said Nicole Crisbacher, Senior Marketing Manager at Union Street Media, an agency specializing in real estate advertising. “We’ve even pulled heatmaps from Fluency’s reporting dashboard to show clients exactly where their ads are running to make our value more tangible.”
Reclaim your time and strategies with automated multichannel reporting
Working out of a centralized data hub, like a Digital Advertising Operating System, enables you to start making the most out of multichannel reporting automation. Consolidating data from all your ad channels into one place saves your team time jumping from platform to platform when building reports or analyzing multichannel performance. Plus, by eliminating data silos and the operational inefficiencies of traditional reporting workflows, your team gets back valuable hours to focus on strategy, innovation, and delivering measurable results.
Real-time notifications can supplement reporting efforts by replacing manual “problem hunting” with proactive, AI-driven insights delivered directly to the right person. You and your teams can confidently make on-the-spot adjustments, mitigate risks, and go after timely opportunities as AI identifies them.
These tools help you work more effectively while also improving performance outcomes and leading client conversations with data. Centralized, automated, and AI-powered reporting tools are a must for teams looking to meet the demands of multichannel advertising campaigns.
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