As you know reporting on the third party advertising performance is often a big frustration for managers and business owners. When the contract is already signed then the creative trafficked goes live and account managers as well as coordinators do their best to reconcile the numbers. I should say that the first challenge may get a login to the vendor tool. It’s clear that one should properly know his vendor reporting tool to navigate it.
From time to time something snags in the business process. It goes without saying that any complicated process has got its own complications and they are always expected. But on the other hand vendors can also generate certain complications. As you might have guessed it’s mainly caused by an inappropriate use of their reporting tools.
Sometimes report formats are changed without notice. A lot of publishers utilize extensive automation of their report processing. They also provide extensive training to their reporting staff. I should emphasize that nothing reacts well to unexpected changes in a report format. I suppose you don’t want to spend several days on writing all the transformation routines for the purpose of normalizing the vendor’s data. Besides this you’ll have to spend about two weeks to put all the routines into use. And suddenly the vendor changes his report format without notifying you on time. It’s clear that in this case your tool breaks outright simply putting out the questionable data.
Of course vendors need to clearly realize that there are certain dependencies on their reports. So having a clear idea of how to add new values to the reporting function and output is a great thing. But anyway the implementation needs to be done only with consideration of all the users. For example one guy is likely to add a column with a placement code. But nobody guarantees that all the users will agree.
The second problem we often come across is certainly the output format of our reporting. In this case I don’t mean the file format per. But I’m talking about the internal formatting. The matter is that some vendors are used to putting much work into so called canned report format. This format is too complicated due to its colors, hard calculations and certainly merged cells. We have to spend too much time on removing all the formatting as well as some problematic features.
When developing your own reporting tools as a media vendor you need to start with basic reporting formats. From my point of view the design should be based on rather a simple header. The same is true to rows of data. I suppose that the tips listed here will help you to cope with possible problems with vendor reporting tools.
Today our world is the world of modern technologies. These days the more your business is automated, the better, especially in respect of Reporting Services. Reporting is a very helpful thing. So if you would like to automate your reporting activities, you might consider trying SSRS solution. Having reporting automated will lead to minimizing manual process and saving time and money. Look through this SQL Reporting Services site to get more details.
And bear in mind that our world is the world of modern Internet technologies. It wouldn’t be smart not to avail oneself of the web network to search for anything on the best terms available on the market. Search engines, social networks, blogs and forums – all this will help you solve many issues.