Reporting is a critical function of your DAM. DAM support teams regularly run statistics on number of users, number of downloads, user issues, and other important information. DAM teams can and should create algorithms based on this information to demonstrate their return on investment. When I was part of the support team for a major automotive OEM, we submitted reports, usually DAM-related metrics, to clients on a monthly and quarterly basis, often to justify the expense of the DAM. But that’s underselling DAM reporting.
There is gold lurking within the data collected by the DAM team, gold that can actually lead the business! Which assets are being downloaded the most? Who is doing the downloading? Which regions? Which agencies? Answers to these questions can drive marketing decisions, determine where regional participation needs to improve, and identify training needs, among other actions.
Types of Queries
As a start, I would encourage support teams to run queries related to the following.
Asset content:
Which assets are being downloaded most frequently? Does this align to business expectations, or are you encountering anomalies? For example, the business may be expecting that a certain set of assets would be widely downloaded and distributed as a result of a new program. Is this happening? What other trends can be detected by examining the assets that users are actually downloading?
Geographic location of users:
Where are the downloads taking place? Are there regions that are doing more (or less) downloading than other regions? Are regions producing new assets that could be re-used by other regions?
Downloader roles and affiliations:
Who is doing the downloading? Users within the company? Agency users? Which agency is doing the most downloading? Should we be expecting other agencies to do more downloading?
This is hardly a comprehensive list. After considering the possibilities, the DAM team is likely to come up with other items that could be measured.
Is Your DAM Up to it?
It’s important that your DAM has flexible reporting capability. Many DAMs offer “canned” reports that allow the support team to look at number of downloads, number of users, etc. But does the DAM enable reporting on other parameters? Most modern DAM’s will allow read-only queries against their production database, integrating safeguards to ensure an errant query won’t shut the DAM down. Some DAM products limit the amount of reporting to ensure that an errant query won’t impact performance on the DAM database. Other DAM products offer a “mirror” database — a copy of the production database — and allow support teams to query the mirror to minimize impact on the DAM.
And capability is just one dimension; report query functionality is equally as important. Can the user generate reports based on content within specific fields? How flexible is the report generation process? Can the reporting feature accept conditional queries? For example, can a report be generated listing the weekend video-only downloads that marketing agencies made in a specific region? The more elaborate the query, the more value and insight the company will receive. When evaluating DAM solutions, query capability is a critical feature.
Conclusion
DAM reporting should be more than the number of assets downloaded per month, or the number of calls fielded by the support team. Further analysis of the data provides insight into the operation of the organization and can drive business decisions. Marketing mix, training needs, and regional support are just a few examples of the types of business actions that DAM reporting can trigger. A DAM with robust, flexible reporting capability is essential.