Making data reporting more efficient with Pitch

Whether you’re getting ready to give your board a major update on performance, or you’re sharing the past quarter’s wins with your team, you likely need to create reports at some point or another. And let’s face it, the current process isn’t exactly ideal. 

Copying and pasting data. Tracking down and updating the right metrics. Trying to figure out how to show the numbers in the most easy-to-digest manner. These are just a few of the challenges that make reporting workflows overly complex and time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In this post, we’ll look at how real teams are using Pitch to make their reporting workflows more efficient and collaborative. See how Bonzer creates multilingual client reports with ease, how Rows makes preparing for board meetings less painful, and how we track our own performance using Pitch. Plus, get pro tips for using Pitch to create reports like a true power user.

Reporting to clients: How Bonzer demonstrates impact through data

Presenting data is about more than putting numbers on a slide — it’s about making a point. And nothing sabotages great results quite like a poor presentation. No one knows this better than agencies. We spoke with Bonzer, an SEO agency based in Copenhagen, about how they were able to change their SEO reporting workflow to put more time into adding valuable context and education on SEO through data, and less time fiddling with presentation design.  

“Data reports have the power to educate clients and help them understand the process of creating sustainable organic growth,” Fanny Josefine Fredskilde, Director of Bonzer Denmark, explains. “Educating our clients improves the collaboration since we share an understanding of how organic growth works and thus have a strong common ground for more advanced and creative strategies.”

Because SEO is an ongoing process, the only way to display success is to report numbers continuously over time (in their case, every few months). Before discovering Pitch, the Bonzer team would use screenshots from Google Analytics pasted into shared Google Docs. Not only was this form of reporting not very visual, but the charts often hid the importance of changes in the data.

“With Pitch, we were able to create charts that did the data justice”, Fanny says and continues, ”SEO is a complex field with numerous data points and often the key is to look in the right places in order to understand how your SEO initiatives are impacting the business. Pitch helps us to show the points of impact more clearly.”

Servicing global clients also presents a unique challenge: localization. Bonzer creates reports in Danish, Swedish, and English. The pre-Pitch process was tedious, involving lots of careful pasting and restyling. With templates, they're able to keep core reports consistent across languages and enable their strategists to spend more time on insights and less time on formatting.

“I was able to design a gorgeous template without any design skills or background,” Anne Egdal, a Team Lead at Bonzer, says. She went far beyond just using screenshots from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, adding Bonzer’s brand colors and fonts to lay the foundation of how their charts should look like. 

Here’s a real-world example of the reports they use to keep clients up to date.

Pitch improved Bonzer’s daily work in more ways:

• Being able to customize charts helped Bonzer highlight the data that is in focus and shed light on what matters.
• Having templates and shared styles in Pitch made creating presentations efficient and repeatable for the entire team.
• Templatizing the process helped them create presentations in multiple languages faster, which was critical when working with so many international clients.

Pro tip: Import existing data

You can save lots of time when creating reports in Pitch. Upload a CSV file, import a Google Sheet, or connect Pitch to Google Analytics to create up-to-date, error-free charts based on the latest data. Just pick an integration from the charts menu or select Replace chart data when editing an existing chart.

Reporting to the board: How Rows shares insights with investors

Rows is a next-generation spreadsheet tool that combines traditional spreadsheets with built-in integrations to help teams be more productive and get work done faster. Naturally, the team is made up of spreadsheet power users, but even they find themselves turning to presentations when they want to put key numbers into context. 

For instance, when it comes to board meetings, it's important that key numbers are easy to consume and understand. Their Head of Growth, Henrique Cruz, works with the co-founders to create the decks ahead of each meeting. While before, prepping for a board meeting meant lots of unnecessary back and forth. 

With Pitch, one person can create an outline, and — using comments and slide assignments — they can divvy up the work. Best of all, quickly visualizing data in a nice, easy-to-understand way is super simple.

“What I like about Pitch is that it’s easy to build nice-looking charts,” Henrique says, “Normally, what you want to do with charts is to remove gridlines, remove legends, and make the data values big. These settings are one click away in Pitch. With Google Slides, it would take a bunch of clicks.”

As a modern tool, Pitch gives them an equally modern solution that helps them visually highlight the important data without spending too much time on unnecessary back and forth.

Pro tip: Visualize a trendline

Did you notice the trendline in the top chart? The team at Rows has come up with a neat trick to add context to their charts. To create a trendline, duplicate the bar chart, turn it into a line chart, adjust the scale to your needs, and layer it precisely on the original bar chart. Then go to the Design panel and toggle of categories and scale. Make sure only the line is visible. Et voilà!

Reporting to the team: How Pitch tracks company KPIs

Our team uses Pitch for recurring reports like our weekly KPI reports and quarterly product health checks. These reports enable us to quickly align the company on the top metrics we’re tracking around growth, sales, adoption, and customer satisfaction.  

One of the main reasons we love using Pitch to build these reports is that everyone can work together in the same presentation. Using comments and slide assignments, we’re able to easily track ongoing conversations and see exactly who is responsible for doing what. Centralizing communication in Pitch makes the process of collecting stats more efficient and seamless between teams. 

And after the presentation has been shared with the company, we use comments to get a conversation going. Anyone in the company can ask questions or share thoughts about the reports. No more staring at stats wondering what they actually mean — Pitch makes reporting truly collaborative, from creation to follow-up.

Since we store these presentations in their dedicated folder, anyone inside our company can easily see where we stand today, as well as look back on historical performance.

Community spotlight: Transforming folders into creative KPI dashboards 

We’re constantly inspired by how our community finds innovative ways to use Pitch. When it comes to reporting, some of our users have gotten creative in making sure key points are seen. Take Florent. 

Florent Merian is in charge of marketing at DynamicScreen. He likes to share reports with his team in Pitch, and he wanted to make it as easy and fast as possible for them to see key metrics at a glance. So, he created a dashboard in Pitch by making a dedicated workspace folder that includes previews of single slide presentations. Each presentation’s preview shows one key metric they are tracking, offering an up-to-date view of where the company stands.

Build a better reporting workflow with Pitch

No matter who you are and what you do, we know there are better things to do than wrestle with charts. We’re here to help you focus on insights, so you can spend time driving results, not struggling with how to present them. 

We hope you’ve picked up a few new tips to streamline your recurring reports. We’ve just released four new chart types and got lots of updates for charts, tables, and data integrations on the way. Be sure to follow our What’s new page to track the latest releases. Got a great tip? Share it with us on Twitter.