Tarkenton’s Digital Dashboard: A Smarter Way to Manage Ad Data
Powerful internal reporting tool for centralizing, visualizing, and analyzing key advertising data.
Industry
Services
Outcomes
Timeline
Ongoing
summary
Tarkenton’s Paid Media Director partnered with Tarkenton’s development team to create an internal KPI dashboard capable of streamlining the paid ad reporting process. Our expertise in custom software development put them in the perfect position to create a framework for a digital ads management tool, centralize data from multiple advertising platforms, and implement visualization and export capabilities with the goal of providing ongoing internal support. We call this tool the Digital Ads Reporting Dashboard (DARD for short).
“DARD speeds up my team's ability to pull and analyze client performance data drastically. With the data syncing in real time, we can efficiently analyze ad campaigns so that our clients are aware of what's working, what isn't, and how we plan to improve advertising performance to hit their goals moving forward.”
Josh Cohen, Paid Media Director
the opportunity
For Tarkenton’s digital ads management team, delivering monthly reports to clients was a huge lift. Data would need to be gathered and entered manually into not-so-glamorous spreadsheets, consuming significant time for multiple team members. The team believed that a central KPI dashboard would speed up the process and allow them to focus on the “human” element of the marketing data: analysis and effective recommendations for clients’ future paid advertising campaigns.
Our Paid Media Director would need significant technological support and software building capabilities to bring this dashboard to life.
That’s when he reached out to Tarkenton’s development team.
the process
First, our development team worked with the Paid Media Director one-on-one to understand the custom software development opportunity and the current limitations of the reporting process. We also needed to understand how many clients received monthly reports, general client expectations, the timelines and date ranges required for data analysis, as well as the specific advertising platforms data was being collected from.
With all of the necessary details in place, Tarkenton’s development professionals were able to build the digital ads management tool. Importing data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and TradeDesk via an intermediate connecting service, we devised standardized naming conventions that connected the dots across platforms that were all communicating the same metrics regarding ad performance. This merged marketing language and software language with the acknowledgement that different clients would want different ways to visualize and display their data.
Once the dashboard was up and running, we could engage in a dialogue with our Paid Media Director. Which aspects of the reporting dashboard were working? Which ones weren’t? Custom software development is an excellent opportunity for trial and error style testing, giving both developer and user the ability to provide real-time feedback and refine the features of the final dashboard. In the months that lead up to the project’s completion, we ensured that the overall functionality fit our Paid Media Director’s needs with the following components:
- Customizable date ranges for reporting (daily, monthly, quarterly, annually)
- Export capabilities for PDF and Excel formats
- Multiple data visualization options (pie charts, line charts, etc.)
- Different levels of user access and permissions
- Combined dashboard view of all platforms + individual, platform-specific views
- Intuitive, user-friendly interface
The Tarkenton development team continues to provide ongoing support for the dashboard. As an internal software product, it enhances our digital ads management team’s behind-the-scenes performance and demonstrates Tarkenton’s capability to develop efficient solutions for complex data management challenges in digital advertising.
the outcome
Thanks to DARD, generating monthly paid ad reports takes hours rather than days, giving our paid media specialists even more time to keep clients informed, updated, and advised about the best path forward for their paid advertising campaigns. No more copying and pasting. No more spreadsheet confusion. Plus, our development team is always available to address technological hiccups.
DARD is also poised for future applications, including expanded access for clients and corporate-level reporting with access for individual business locations.