I love Excel, especially pivot tables. Many people share my love for Excel, which is why UQube, our product, allows marketers to live between Excel and UQube. Basically, we gave up on getting people to migrate away from Excel and decided to embrace it.

It might surprise you to realize what is managed in spreadsheets. There is a perception that in this day of technology that marketing intelligence is automated and reports that people use to make million dollar decisions is systematically assembled and delivered. In reality, most reports people use to evaluate marketing and to make spending decision are created by a person using Excel. Typically there is a person, multiple people in most cases, on the marketing team that spends 20% to 100% of their time assembling multiple Excel files and other reports to create the reports marketing uses to drive results.

Using Excel for marketing reporting has some pros, it is flexible, has mass adoption and people are comfortable with it but there are some drawbacks worth highlighting.

Flexibility – formulas can be changed, meaning what you thought was cost per sale is not correct. I evaluated one client’s media plan that was managed in Excel as part of validating UQube reports. The cost per sale numbers did not match and after pulling my hair out, discovered the CPS was manually overridden and did not equate to Cost/Sales.

Sharing – marketing consist of both internal teams and external vendors (buying agencies, creative agencies, production, etc), making it difficult to keep everyone updated with the most recent Excel version of a report or media schedule.

Security – security is based on entering a password. With the right expertise, you can creatively control who sees and does what but it can be challenging.

Trend Reporting – typically, the way people create marketing reports in Excel, makes it difficult to track trends.

Timeliness – since most Excel marketing reports are manually created, if there is a great deal of data gathering required to create/update a report, the insight may not be timely, especially if programs are evaluated on a monthly basis because you will have limited time to stop programs that are not working or ramp up programs that are working.

Managing marketing reporting in a spreadsheet is a great first step but organizations, especially organizations that have multiple marketing and response channels, can benefit from a true marketing intelligence system.

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