Reporting analytics is an under-appreciated subject in marketing and advertising. We all know that campaigns live and die by the trends of their KPIs, but where do those KPIs come from? Are they hand curated by artisan data analysts, laboriously crunching numbers with a slide rule and a magnifying glass? In most cases, no - they’re actually taken from many big names like Google, Adobe, Yahoo!, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and others. These services generally use javascript snippets to trigger events and track sessions on your page, sending the data back to their own servers.

That doesn’t mean that retrieving metrics is easy. You have to be pretty familiar with each service to find the data you want - and if you want to do anything more complicated, like cohort analysis or funneling, you’re going to want to get very familiar with the documentation. It becomes even more difficult if you want to incorporate your own internal data sources into the mix. Are you storing data in a relational database and want that put into Google Analytics? Your developers better know how to integrate your system to the Google Analytics API.In the past, Socialtyze has generally communicated analytics data through email, or what is most often the case, through a google analytics custom dashboard. The problem with email, is that it just doesn’t scale very well. It’s obviously very human intensive, and eventually reporting consumes the majority of the analyst's time - instead of actually doing the analysis! We also played around with using custom dashboards through Google Analytics. This works great for very basic numbers, but it gets very difficult to customize to what you really want to show to the client.

Here at Socialtyze, we decided that it was time to simplify the process. We create a huge number of apps, and we think that clients should be able to have access to those KPIs for each app, any time they want. That’s why we created Qu, a data analytics dashboard that ingests demographic and engagement data from Google Analytics and our own internal sources, and provides it to you in an easy to use display.Qu will allow our clients the ability to actively monitor the performance metrics of their apps, and look back to reference the performance of previous apps that they have ran. It serves as the main dashboard for the client, allowing Socialtyze the ability to focus on creating high quality apps and providing the client with key metrics they can take to the bank.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.