Switchboard for business teams: transforming messy data into actionable insights

For the business teams we work with, the most important aspect of reporting is knowing they can trust the data they are pulling – that it’s fresh, reliable, and ready to access whenever they need it.

But unless you can wrangle data into an organized, reliable ‘single source of truth’, it’s impossible to extract the insights you need to make better-informed business decisions. And as the burden of manual reporting takes its toll, these teams are now looking to automate. Naturally, they still have important considerations to address before investing in an automation solution.

Take, for example, Google Ad Manager. It’s just one data stream among many that your business might ingest, but it contains so much data that it can be hard to get maximum value from it without the right tools in place. If you have large data streams from multiple sources, your business could be spending days each month collating the data, cleaning it, understanding different metrics and reconciling inconsistencies.

Equally, it’s important to know how a data automation platform can help you leverage – and report – on this data. The quirks of GAM data are just one of the many things business teams ask us about.

Other challenges include how to:

• Integrate social platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok
• Manage partner data across multiple markets and time zones
• Merge programmatic data with direct deal and e-commerce data for more holistic reporting
• Consolidate disparate partner data within a single cloud data warehouse
• Handle inconsistent file naming and ID mapping
• Filter data per SSP or other partner data
• Detect API breaks or changes without constant monitoring for them
• Instantly backfill missing data
• Maintain full control of data in-house

For anyone considering Switchboard as a data partner, these are important questions to ask. As with any investment, you need to know how the technology will support your individual use cases. Only then can you start to see just how much time and resource automation can save you on a day-to-day basis.