How LEAP Agency Jumped Ahead of the Competition with NinjaCat Reporting

‍LEAP is a digital agency specializing in strategy, SEO, SEM, social media, and web & mobile design. They have a diverse portfolio of clients across multiple industries including Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, and Food & Beverage. 

“We make brands easy to find and hard to ignore,” says Rashmi Hurst, Director of Analytics and Insights at LEAP. Rashmi and her team focus entirely on performance analysis, working closely with the media execution team to provide them with accurate data and insights. This includes website optimization, SEO, lead gen. 

Trusted by their clients to measure marketing effectiveness, LEAP’s quality client reporting process is essential to their business model. As LEAP’s reputation grew, so did their client list, and so the list of reports needed. 

One of the challenges to scaling the reporting process with their growth as an agency, hinged on the way the analytics team were sourcing and reporting on ad campaign data. 

The Challenge: Scaling Client Reports, Maintaining Data Integrity 

Manual Reporting and Data Stitching

Before NinjaCat, the LEAP analytics team would pull data manually from various platforms and sources. Some campaign data might be compatible with PowerPoint, while other tables were better manipulated in Excel, with all information requiring extra transformation, QA, and data visualization. 

While the analytics team was pulling, compiling, and stitching data, the pipeline towards a finalized report presented issues when trying to scale the process for LEAP’s growing list of accounts.  

Also, due to the complex nature of data integrations and adding APIs to their current reporting efforts, LEAP was experiencing frustration with the lack of support from their marketing analytics vendor.

“A huge issue I had with our previous vendor,” Rashmi says,  “was lack of ongoing support. There are a lot of pain points to figure out how to connect widgets and data sources with API connections, and I felt unsupported.”

When it came to building and updating client reports, Rashmi and the analytics team were frustrated by the design experience, particularly their inability to edit ‘live’ datasets, and easily include images directly in a report or presentation.

What’s worse than lost time? Data loss. 

LEAP’s biggest issue with the manual reporting process was data integrity. Many agencies build their own data pipelines, and LEAP was no different. And as with all in-house API architectures, challenges are associated. They require dedicated data engineering and resources. 

LEAP Agency prides itself on transparency and data integrity. Their client relationships and reputation are built upon this level of trust and laser-sharp performance. This high standard, however, began to present itself as a near-impossible standard for their previous reporting platform. 

With their previous reporting providers, LEAP was often left filling in the data gaps and inaccuracies in their own dashboards. Leading up to client calls, their teams were required to QA their widgets and dashboards, because more times than not, data was not accurately populating. This extra step to manually QA and occasionally re-pull their reports was draining on their team and their hours. Ultimately, they needed a solution and data they could trust. 

Could LEAP find a client reporting solution that could ensure data integrity, decrease time pulling data, increase time for QA, and deliver this all at a scale that matches their upward trajectory?

The Solution: Improved Agency Bandwidth Through A Better Client Reporting Experience

Superior Data Integrity, Automated Reporting That Scales

LEAP used NinjaCat’s reporting platform to address their key challenges and win new accounts. 

“We really pride ourselves on storytelling with data,” says Rashmi. “And to have the tools to have the time back to focus on insights is so critical.” 

Working with NinjaCat, LEAP was able to achieve better data merging and aggregation, customize automated reports, and could now track spend and engagement across channels, all on one platform. 

NinjaCat provided LEAP the ability to quickly duplicate reporting templates with data fields auto-populated and pushed into an annotation cue. This reduced time spent stitching data and increased time dedicated to qualitative analysis and annotations. 

“We wanted to make sure the bulk of our time was on insights and recommendations, and now we’re able to do that as opposed to pulling the data,” says Rashmi.

Higher Quality Reports, Better Opportunities

LEAP also unlocked NinjaCat’s potential to edit finished reports and presentations that would normally be fixed on the page.

“NinjaCat has something very unique that a lot of platforms do not have, in terms of editing an exported presentation,” says Rashmi. “With NinjaCat, I have the ability to go in and edit text, fonts, or images that have been pulled into PowerPoint. This was a huge benefit.”  

By leveraging NinjaCat’s sophisticated product and reports in presentations and pitches, LEAP was better equipped to demonstrate its value to both current and potential clients. 

The Results: A Lean & Competitive Ad Agency, Ready to Grow

“What our reporting functionality looks like today with NinjaCat, versus in the past without NinjaCat,” says Rashmi, “is vastly different in terms of where we were spending the time to make a difference for our clients.”

Key highlights from Rashmi and LEAP, in their first six months with NinjaCat, include:

• Quality of NinjaCat onboarding & support

• Automated data aggregation

• Elimination of manual data pulling

• Editable, export capabilities

• Multi-channel reporting 

• Decrease in hours/staff/data integrations per report

• Higher quality pitch decks

“As a growing agency requiring quality at scale, manual reporting was the hurdle NinjaCat helped us jump over,” says Rashmi. “Now we have the ability to pull data in aggregate much quicker.”

With a decrease in hours, staff, and data integrations per report, 20% of LEAP’s analytics team’s bandwidth is now dedicated to manual aspects of reporting, and 80% focused on robust recommendations and insights. Now LEAP has enough time allocated for thorough QA to ensure data integrity for every client, every report, every time.

Invariably with more clients, analytics budgets have grown significantly. By leveraging NinjaCat data visualizations in their pitch decks to potential clients and prospects, LEAP uses the reputation of NinjaCat to help sell its services, as a reputable reporting platform. NinjaCat has ‘elevated LEAP’s tech stack.’

“NinjaCat has become such an integral part of our reporting functionality,” says Rashmi. “The way to retain clients isn’t through better reporting, it’s through better analysis, insights, and recommendations.”

The level of support NinjaCat offers is something LEAP did not have with other platforms. This was a major deciding factor in changing from Google Data Studio, to TapClicks, to NinjaCat. Onboarding and account reps from NinjaCat helped LEAP get more organized in their own data, preparing them for the level of templatizing and scale they were planning. 

“Data pulling is a beast when you have a ton of different platforms,” says Rashmi. “And having support, and being organized is the only way to go about it. I’ve been really happy with NinjaCat!”