Learn how to use automations to create detailed custom reporting on your business processes — and step up your oversight on key performance indicators.
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Home > Reporting in Ontraport > Dashboard reports > Building custom reporting automations
Home > Dashboard reports > Building custom reporting automations
Building custom reporting automations
You'll learn:
- How to build a reporting automation and track live results for any given process
- Our tips for adjusting the automation for your products and goals
- How to interpret the reports you generate
- More ideas for processes you can track using automations
Brendan Dubbels
Building custom reporting automations
Learn how to use automations to create detailed custom reporting on your business processes — and step up your oversight on key performance indicators.
- How to build a reporting automation and track live results for any given process
- Our tips for adjusting the automation for your products and goals
- How to interpret the reports you generate
- More ideas for processes you can track using automations
Course Instructor
Brendan Dubbels
Related resources
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Transcript
In this video I’m going to teach you a really handy way to use automations to give you incredible reporting in your Ontraport account. We call these “reporting automations” or “reporting maps” and they’re essentially just automations built for the sole purpose of telling you what you want to know about your business’s performance.
These “reporting” automations don’t have any actions on the map… they don’t send any emails or messages or tasks. The whole map is just triggers, waits and goals.
If you set this up right, it’ll give you incredible insight into how your various business processes are working overall.
So, I’ll show you how to build this automation first, and I’ll show you how to read the reports you get from it. For an example, let’s say you want to build a reporting map that monitors your various lead sources and your purchases so you can quickly tell which lead source brings you the most buyers.
Keeping that in mind, let’s define our terms:
A lead source is the place where your new leads heard about you for the first time and entered your database. This is typically a form fill-out.
You’ll want to know how many of those leads go on to become customers which, in Ontraport, means they purchased a product.
To start, navigate to Automations and create a New Automation. Then start from scratch to land on a blank canvas for your reporting build.
You’ll monitor your lead sources using triggers, so start by adding in a new trigger.
Since most lead sources are forms, make this a contact submits form trigger. Then select the form from the dropdown. The form you select here will depend on your business, of course, but for the purposes of this example, just use a generic newsletter signup.
Repeat this step as many times as necessary to cover all of the different ways new leads are entering your system. So I’m going to add another form fill-out trigger here for your lead magnet as an example.
Now that you’re monitoring your lead sources, let’s move onto figuring out how many of these new leads become customers.
You’ll answer this with a goal. Add a new goal element here for contact purchases product. Select the product you want to monitor from the dropdown, but you’ll want to pause and think about this for a quick second.
There are a few ways you could go here. You could select any product and monitor everything in one element.
This is nice because it covers you if you add new products in the future. But it’s not great at giving you specific data about which product is being purchased. Depending on how your business is set up, this could be super important or not at all.
For example, if you’re a flower shop, it might not matter all that much whether they bought roses or lilies. What’s important is that they bought a flower arrangement. That’s a business with a lot of different products, without a ton of variance in what that product is. So, something a little more generic might make sense.
On the other hand, if you’re a business coach, the difference between one-on-one coaching and access to your membership site might be massive in terms of how valuable that customer is to you.
So, if you wanted to monitor your products one by one, you could add multiple goals to either side then select one product per goal.
Our next step is to go back up to your triggers and add some go-to elements to converge all of the leads, regardless of source, onto the wait above our goal.
Because your map isn’t actually going to send any communication to your leads and customers, the flow isn’t as delicate as you might be used to. What matters is what the elements represent. Repeating the goals would just be adding unnecessary steps to your situation.
Generally speaking, you should aim to have as few elements as possible on your map while still getting the reporting you’re looking for.
Ok, now with our triggers and goals you’ve answered your initial question: The triggers represent where your leads are coming from, and these goals represent what they’re buying.
At this point, you could add another row of goals down here for whatever important business goal you have for your customers.
For example, if you have a partner program that incentivizes your customers to tell their friends about you, you could add a goal to show what percentage of your customers are participating. Or maybe you have a specific upsell and/or cross sell that accompanies a particular product. A new goal could show you how many people take you up on that offer.
And it doesn’t just have to be sales oriented. You could have a goal that represents whether or not your customers are successfully onboarded and using your product. Whatever matters to you in your business.
But for the purposes of this example, I’ll stop here by inserting an end and then go-tos that bring together your different paths.
Now save and publish your map.
And, just like that, you’ve built a basic reporting map. Now let’s take a look at how you can use it. I’m going to jump forward in time to get some data in here...
From here on, when you open up your live automation, you’ll be presented with performance mode, but in case you need to find it, the button is right here.
This will give you a bird’s-eye view of all the data that has run through your automation in the selected date range.
Ok, you can toggle between different reports and get some great insight into the performance of this automation.
But in this video I’ll concentrate on the main question:
“Which lead source brings you the most buyers?”
To answer, we could toggle on the contact flow report. This will recalculate your data and show you exactly how many contacts entered through each of your lead source triggers and subsequently how many purchases they’ve made.
Then if you toggle over to the funnel conversion report, it’ll ask you to select one of your lead source triggers then recalculate your data to show you how many of those leads converted to your sales goal. You could go through your triggers one by one and see how they stack up against one another!
Finally, if you choose your goal conversion report, then you can click on any goal and see what percent of leads from each source ended up achieving that goal which, in our case, was to buy a product.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. You could add more goals and triggers to this map to account for all sorts of various key performance indicators across your entire business.
You could build one to oversee your sales process or your partner programs. The possibilities are endless.
Start thinking about how you could implement this type of functionality into your business so you can stop guessing, and start knowing.
These “reporting” automations don’t have any actions on the map… they don’t send any emails or messages or tasks. The whole map is just triggers, waits and goals.
If you set this up right, it’ll give you incredible insight into how your various business processes are working overall.
So, I’ll show you how to build this automation first, and I’ll show you how to read the reports you get from it. For an example, let’s say you want to build a reporting map that monitors your various lead sources and your purchases so you can quickly tell which lead source brings you the most buyers.
Keeping that in mind, let’s define our terms:
A lead source is the place where your new leads heard about you for the first time and entered your database. This is typically a form fill-out.
You’ll want to know how many of those leads go on to become customers which, in Ontraport, means they purchased a product.
To start, navigate to Automations and create a New Automation. Then start from scratch to land on a blank canvas for your reporting build.
You’ll monitor your lead sources using triggers, so start by adding in a new trigger.
Since most lead sources are forms, make this a contact submits form trigger. Then select the form from the dropdown. The form you select here will depend on your business, of course, but for the purposes of this example, just use a generic newsletter signup.
Repeat this step as many times as necessary to cover all of the different ways new leads are entering your system. So I’m going to add another form fill-out trigger here for your lead magnet as an example.
Now that you’re monitoring your lead sources, let’s move onto figuring out how many of these new leads become customers.
You’ll answer this with a goal. Add a new goal element here for contact purchases product. Select the product you want to monitor from the dropdown, but you’ll want to pause and think about this for a quick second.
There are a few ways you could go here. You could select any product and monitor everything in one element.
This is nice because it covers you if you add new products in the future. But it’s not great at giving you specific data about which product is being purchased. Depending on how your business is set up, this could be super important or not at all.
For example, if you’re a flower shop, it might not matter all that much whether they bought roses or lilies. What’s important is that they bought a flower arrangement. That’s a business with a lot of different products, without a ton of variance in what that product is. So, something a little more generic might make sense.
On the other hand, if you’re a business coach, the difference between one-on-one coaching and access to your membership site might be massive in terms of how valuable that customer is to you.
So, if you wanted to monitor your products one by one, you could add multiple goals to either side then select one product per goal.
Our next step is to go back up to your triggers and add some go-to elements to converge all of the leads, regardless of source, onto the wait above our goal.
Because your map isn’t actually going to send any communication to your leads and customers, the flow isn’t as delicate as you might be used to. What matters is what the elements represent. Repeating the goals would just be adding unnecessary steps to your situation.
Generally speaking, you should aim to have as few elements as possible on your map while still getting the reporting you’re looking for.
Ok, now with our triggers and goals you’ve answered your initial question: The triggers represent where your leads are coming from, and these goals represent what they’re buying.
At this point, you could add another row of goals down here for whatever important business goal you have for your customers.
For example, if you have a partner program that incentivizes your customers to tell their friends about you, you could add a goal to show what percentage of your customers are participating. Or maybe you have a specific upsell and/or cross sell that accompanies a particular product. A new goal could show you how many people take you up on that offer.
And it doesn’t just have to be sales oriented. You could have a goal that represents whether or not your customers are successfully onboarded and using your product. Whatever matters to you in your business.
But for the purposes of this example, I’ll stop here by inserting an end and then go-tos that bring together your different paths.
Now save and publish your map.
And, just like that, you’ve built a basic reporting map. Now let’s take a look at how you can use it. I’m going to jump forward in time to get some data in here...
From here on, when you open up your live automation, you’ll be presented with performance mode, but in case you need to find it, the button is right here.
This will give you a bird’s-eye view of all the data that has run through your automation in the selected date range.
Ok, you can toggle between different reports and get some great insight into the performance of this automation.
But in this video I’ll concentrate on the main question:
“Which lead source brings you the most buyers?”
To answer, we could toggle on the contact flow report. This will recalculate your data and show you exactly how many contacts entered through each of your lead source triggers and subsequently how many purchases they’ve made.
Then if you toggle over to the funnel conversion report, it’ll ask you to select one of your lead source triggers then recalculate your data to show you how many of those leads converted to your sales goal. You could go through your triggers one by one and see how they stack up against one another!
Finally, if you choose your goal conversion report, then you can click on any goal and see what percent of leads from each source ended up achieving that goal which, in our case, was to buy a product.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. You could add more goals and triggers to this map to account for all sorts of various key performance indicators across your entire business.
You could build one to oversee your sales process or your partner programs. The possibilities are endless.
Start thinking about how you could implement this type of functionality into your business so you can stop guessing, and start knowing.
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