4 essential elements of reporting to streamline business intelligence

Whether you’re a small startup with a simple e-commerce system or a global retailer with a complex sales process, clear dashboards and insightful reporting are essential for teams to work efficiently. However, reporting often takes a lot of time and effort, only for the data to be questioned or ignored. Maintaining these reports also uses valuable resources that would be better spent reviewing the results and making informed decisions.

Centralizing and simplifying dashboards helps solve these problems by improving efficiency and delivering better results. At our agency, we work with leading brands to design and implement business intelligence (BI) solutions using a proven approach based on four key factors.

1. Use case methodology

You’ve probably seen reports filled with tables, metrics, and graphs that seem overwhelming. It can be difficult to determine which parts matter most or what to focus on. While it’s tempting to include as much detail as possible, keeping it simple is usually more effective unless there is a clear need for additional data or visuals.

A “use case” methodology helps streamline dashboard views by ensuring each report is linked to specific business decisions. Tailoring reports to their audience is also essential. For example:

Senior management needs clear performance indicators, such as percentage against sales targets or annual comparisons. Operational teams benefit from detailed breakdowns, such as CPA by site and by audience, to optimize ongoing activity.

Start by answering a few key questions, such as:

Who is the target audience? What business decisions should be made after reviewing the report? What are the main KPIs that enable this?

Careful consideration before creating reports will help you deliver an impactful and useful BI view.

2. Data governance

While data governance may not be the most exciting topic, many have been the subject of debate over the accuracy of reporting figures. A strong data governance structure is essential to building trust in the numbers shared across the business.

Two areas are particularly important in data governance: data inputs and taxonomy and naming conventions.

Data Entries

When reporting on media performance, it is crucial to validate conversion tracking tools, such as Adobe, Google Analytics (GA), or other platforms, to ensure confidence in performance metrics. It’s also important to note differences between data sources, such as GA figures excluding returns while backend CRM data includes them.

Taxonomy and naming conventions

Consistent naming allows you to combine data from multiple sources (for example, associating Meta spend with Adobe conversions). It also supports creating custom reporting dimensions, such as tactical, audience, and channel groupings. This requires a clear taxonomy followed by all teams and partners and automated monitoring to detect errors, as errors can occur.

Dig Deeper: How to put marketing data in meaningful context

3. Report Automation

Ten years ago, manually running reports in Excel filled with endless VLOOKUP and SUMIF functions was understandable. Today, there is no reason not to have an automated BI setup.

If you haven’t already, it’s essential to start with a centralized repository for all marketing and analytics data. Whether you use Snowflake, Google Cloud, or another platform, storing all data in one place allows for automated reporting. It also opens the door to advanced applications such as propensity scoring, media mix modeling and customer churn analysis.

Regardless of which platform you choose, it is essential to have dedicated technical experts to ensure the setup is robust, well-maintained and properly documented. These experts also play a key role in creating automated data validation processes to detect and resolve issues quickly rather than reacting to user concerns about data accuracy after the fact.

4. Advanced Analytics

It’s important to make your reports insightful and engaging. While regular summaries of key business metrics are essential, improving them often means providing more advanced insights.

You can try a creative analytics view to identify what drives creative performance, like background color, logo placement, or CTA design. You can also explore forecasting tools that show expected ROI based on different budget scenarios.

Adding this deeper insight gives you and your team a clearer reason to use reports and make smarter business decisions.

Streamline your reporting to boost BI

Insightful and accurate reporting is essential to the success of your business, but few brands feel fully satisfied with their current setup. Reporting will always be a work in progress as your business evolves, but establishing a solid foundation for dashboards now can help you achieve better results and spend less time on maintenance.

Hopefully, these four key considerations have given you practical steps to review your current setup and create more effective, streamlined reporting for smarter decision-making in 2025.

Dig Deeper: 5 steps to get the most out of your reporting and analytics

Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the writing and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.