Marketing Agency Help: Scaling Reporting for Multiple Clients Without Scaling Headcount
One of the metrics we’re proud of here at ClearGlance is helping marketing agencies to scale client reporting while keeping the increase in related headcount to a level that’s not tied to the client reporting scale rate.
A key part of making this work is setting up a system within each agency client that enables their existing team to look for new data points, and related insights, starting with what we call a “single source of truth.” In this way, agencies don’t go down the time-consuming rabbit hole of gathering multiple data points from multiple sources – often, from different analytics platforms that don’t “talk” to each other.
Designing efficient systems is 90%+ of the job
Here’s what this looks like in practice for one of our clients, a creative agency for the real estate industry:
Their single source of truth is Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties that receive event data from Google Tag Manager (GTM). Note: both of these tools are free if you haven’t tried them yet!
For many clients of the agency – which we call sub-clients – they also use Google Ads and/or Google Search Console (GSC) properties. However, both of those platforms’ data is sent to GA4.
Within GA4, the agency marks certain high-value events as Key Events. These events can then be used within Looker Studio to create interactive report pages within sub-client dashboards.
We then work with the agency to set up sections in Notion for each sub-client.
How reporting can easily scale within this system – while unwieldy asset creation and additional employee hours are minimized
While it can take some time to work with our clients to set up a design and content framework for sub-client dashboards, this time on the front end yields incredible time-saving dividends down the road. One example of this is duplicating a previously client-approved Looker dashboard as the starting point for a new custom dashboard for a new sub-client of our client.
While the desired metrics to capture for a new sub-client can vary (sometimes by a lot) versus what’s in place for an existing sub-client, our team’s ever-growing knowledge base – plus the technical infrastructure that’s built for existing sub-clients – means that scaling up reports is simpler and less time consuming as we do more work for our clients. This is definitely the case for our real estate-industry creative agency client mentioned above.
Another dimension of scaling reporting is growing with our clients in terms of both logging and responding to technical issues, as well as updating dashboards and other reports based on changing reporting requirements from our clients’ sub-clients. We make this seamless through Slack updates with most clients. For other clients, we use Slack in tandem with Notion to ensure that everyone across businesses – and often, also across time zones – is always on the same page. Both of those apps use email notifications and browser alerts to make sure that no updates go unseen, helping everyone get more done, faster.
Helping to keep headcount manageable
If you’re on LinkedIn and you follow brands or people in marketing and/or technology, you’ve no doubt heard a lot of chatter over the last year-plus that “AI is killing marketing agencies.” That sentiment is more of a scare line than a reality, as AI models and agents, to this day, still generate outputs with enough errors to require at least a minimal amount of human babysitting. Plus, we’ve seen with many of our clients that human strategists continue to deliver much more raw value when it comes to things like paid media campaign management and strategy development and improving sub-client decision making based on robust, highly tailored web and app analytics reports.
But with that said, our marketing-agency clients are still running a business, and they face the pressure that’s common among many industries to do more with less over time. We help in this regard in a tangible way: through highly customized Looker Studio dashboards that do the leg work (that previously took more agency staff hours) of grabbing data from multiple sources and expert, on-demand human support, we facilitate a broad shift in agency staff hours from data research to client campaign and content ideation as well as longer-range planning.
For both new and long-term agency clients (our sub-clients), this shift in manpower focus increases trust in our client agencies – helping to drive more “yes” decisions, and on a faster basis, when sub-client contracts are up for renewal at their agencies. In turn, this improves agencies’ bottom line and revenue forecasting – along with the ability to hire more talent to support key clients and their marketing campaigns.
Ultimately, scaling your agency’s reporting doesn’t have to mean inflating your payroll
By establishing a single source of truth and leveraging automated technical infrastructures like GA4 and Looker Studio, you can shift your team’s energy away from the “grunt work” of data collection and toward the high-value strategy that keeps clients coming back. At ClearGlance, we believe that efficiency is the ultimate competitive advantage; when your systems do the heavy lifting, your talent is free to drive the innovation and results that truly grow your business.
