5 Problems Custom Data Can Fix

From point-of-sale systems and web analytics to marketing platforms and CRMs, it takes more than one tool to run a business, and getting a complete, clear picture of your business can be tough when you have to jump between a bunch of different platforms. Each of these tools comes with its own built-in analytics dashboards and reports, which are great for understanding one specific part of your business. The real challenge, however, is tying all that information together.

When you're trying to make sense of your business as a whole, you end up bouncing from one dashboard to another. The data is fragmented, the visuals look different, and the metrics don't always line up, making it difficult to get a single, unified view of what's really going on. This segmented approach can make it nearly impossible to spot trends, understand the full customer journey, or make fast, confident decisions.

So how can we fix those issues? With a custom and integrated dataset.

Building a custom dataset that fits your business’ individual needs may sound complicated; however, the payoff is well worth the effort, and I’m going to cover 5 reasons why you should consider going custom with your data.

1. Improve Hygiene and Maintenance

Over time, businesses and their processes change. As templates are updated, new practices are adopted, and standards evolve, so does your data. It can be difficult to go back and update records. Additionally, combining multiple datasets from different systems can also be a challenge. It's a pain to repeatedly make those connections every time you need to do a deeper analysis or update a manually maintained report.

Let’s say you’ve got a couple of email campaigns that ran several years ago, and each email had a series of links that went to multiple pages throughout your site. If you changed your campaign code format to include the date, and you added UTM parameters to your links, how would you go about combining the old data with the new? If you wanted to figure out if your email campaigns had an effect on web traffic but just recently started using UTM parameters, would you ignore your data before the change?

Enter software like Tableau Prep and Alteryx. 

Tableau Prep and Alteryx are both data preparation tools that perform similar jobs; however, I primarily work with Tableau Prep and will focus on that tool in this post.

Tableau Prep allows you to make bulk changes and updates to your data from changing records, to joining multiple datasets, and the best part is that you only have to make the change once. If you see a typo in a data entry, for example a product is misspelt or a date isn't formatted the same way, you can correct it, and that correction will apply to the entire dataset and all calculations that you create.

Going back to that email campaign from earlier, you can easily make changes in the older data that will allow you to seamlessly update how you track and report on campaigns.

If you're interested in learning a little more about Tableau Prep, you can check out this post here.

2. Create Custom Views and Metrics

Many tools offer built-in reports and analytics, which are helpful for basic insights. However, they are often designed to serve a broad user base, not the specific needs of your business. Take Google Analytics, for example. Its standard reports provide a general overview, and it offers some basic custom reports, but you can’t easily connect site performance with marketing activities or visualize things specific to your business.

Moving beyond native analytics allows you to create custom metrics and augment your data to give better answers to your specific questions. Sticking with our Google Analytics example, what if you wanted to see mobile device sale page visits from each state vs your home state? Sure you can use filters and extracts, but with tools like Tableau or Looker Studio, you can create custom datasets and fields that describe mobile device sales per state without the need for filters. Having custom fields for each state’s mobile orders makes using that data much easier, especially if you want a dashboard or want to do more in-depth analysis outside of GA4.

And speaking of dashboards, the best way to really take advantage of custom metrics and data is to build a dashboard specific for your business.

You can take those new mobile device order fields and apply them to visualizations like a map that can easily compare sales in your home state vs sales in other states. You can add filters to dig deeper into specific states or regions you want to compare, or you could add a date picker to investigate certain timeframes. Along with the map, you can create a metric tile that displays the actual sales numbers based on your input.

3. View your entire business in one place

Not only is it easier to see how certain parts of your business are doing with your custom data, but you can also see your entire business in one place without having to switch between different tabs and platforms.

Different datasets from multiple sources can have different formatting, field names, or any number of other things that would make combining everything difficult. By integrating your data from all of your tools, platforms, and other sources, you can blend everything into one single data source that can feed all of your analytics. Besides centralizing all of your data, creating a singular dataset allows you to build connections that can be used to visualize everything in one place, making it so that you don’t have to have a bunch of different tabs open to try and understand what’s going on.

4. Improve Decision Making Through Tailored Views

With custom data and views comes better decision making. It’s simply easier to answer questions specific to your business with tools built specifically for you.

Having the right data visualized in an easy-to-understand dashboard helps you find trends and better understand what’s really happening in your business. If you need to decide when to launch a new product, you can use these tools to look at the best time to send emails, which marketing channel works best, or even estimate your sales. Not only will these insights let you make faster decisions, they will also ensure those decisions are better and made with more confidence.

Built-in analytics tools can help to a certain extent, but you have to look at multiple platforms and the data isn’t connected in a lot of instances.

5. Easily Extract Data

While dashboards are great for routine questions or reports, sometimes you need to look into a unique problem, and you need a specific set of data to answer your questions. Not only do tools like Tableau and Looker Studio help you visualize your custom data, but you can also create purpose-built tables that can be downloaded for other reporting or analysis purposes. A lot of other tools want to try and keep the data within the platform (the more time you spend on their tool, the better), and they make it difficult to get exactly what you need. If you’ve used Tableau Prep to produce an integrated dataset, you can select what you need to extract, apply any necessary filters, and create a single dataset that matches the format you need.

Let’s say you need to measure the quarterly performance of your website and email marketing program. Quarterly reports should be a little higher-level when compared to a daily-use tool, and it’s not something you need to see every time you open your dashboard. Using Tableau Prep to create an extract for this report not only simplifies the process and helps ensure data quality, but you can save the settings used to build the extract file and easily update it every quarter.

This is something you can do, and we can help

Built-in analytics from the tools you use to run your business offer a great starting point; however, you can only go so far with a generic platform built to serve as many people as possible. Creating a custom dataset from all of your tools and source systems tailored to your business’ unique needs is absolutely worth the time and effort needed to build and maintain it. Having data built specifically for how you need it gives you the ability to easily view exactly what you need in a format that makes sense to you.

If you’re ready to move beyond basic reporting and into custom analytics but don’t know where to start or have the resources to build and maintain it, Backcountry Draft is here to help. We’d be happy to take a look at your business’ data and talk about how you can create an integrated dataset capable of giving you the efficient insights you need to grow your business.