Downloading Reports with Metamarkets – Now Even Better!

The Reporting Challenge

The single biggest challenge faced by most people who work with data is, quite simply, how to get answers to their questions.  These questions may be routine and regular (how much have I spent today?) or unique and one-off (why did CTRs for campaign X just spike in Germany?). Answers are usually obtained through reports – either standardized reports generated routinely or custom reports generated as-needed to answer specific questions.

Reporting sounds simple enough, but the process of generating and accessing reports can be surprisingly difficult, time-consuming, and just plain annoying. Some of the challenges include:

• Extracting data usually requires specific knowledge of the relevant databases and query languages.
• Organizations try to solve this problem by hiring data scientists to intermediate between business users and their data. Each question can take hours or even days for the intermediary to deliver an answer, often leading to more questions and a vicious cycle.
• Another common approach is to deliver summarized data through periodic, standardized reports. These reports may be easy to generate, but they’re generally cumbersome and time-consuming to use.  Moreover, the data in the reports is often out of date – days or even weeks old.
• Communicating to customers introduces another set of reporting challenges, as customers’ demands for data access continue to escalate. Customer reporting brings the added technical challenge of making sure each customer receives the appropriate information, and is only granted access to the data that they’re entitled to see.

The Metamarkets Solution – A Better Approach to Reporting

At Metamarkets, it’s our mission to put data at our user’s fingertips so they can instantly see what’s happening in their business, discover trends, and take action. By providing users with an intuitive, point-and-click interface, Metamarkets has revolutionized how business users interact and analyze data.  We call this technology “Interactive Analytics”.

Our interactive analytics dashboard is built on top of a data store in the cloud that enables users to interactively query and drill down into multi-dimensional data for arbitrarily chosen time intervals. Furthermore, dashboards can be securely shared with both internal and external users through our industry-leading technology for data permissioning and user management.  As a result, users can get their own answers to questions, substantially reducing the need for static reports or data scientists.

Report Downloads with Metamarkets

There are, of course, still times when a user needs to pull data from Metamarkets for a report or download the data for other uses. To that effect, we support two kinds of reports that any user can download, based on size:

• Basic Reports: These include time series and aggregated data for up to 250 rows (the number of rows viewable in the dashboard).
• Detailed Reports: These apply when a user wants to obtain all rows in a result, beyond the 250 rows displayed.

Our Newest Enhancements to Detailed Reports

We recently found the usage of detailed reports to be increasing, as our user’s continue to look for ways to download ever-larger reports. In our previous implementation of detailed reports, the report data would stream to a file in the user’s browser. As the the report downloads get lengthier (such as large time interval), this is not the optimal solution for the users – as it requires them to keep their browser open for an extended time to allow for the streaming to complete.

As part of our commitment to deliver our users with fast, reliable and intuitive access to data, we’re happy to announce the redesigned report download functionality within Metamarkets dashboard.

The detailed reports function within Metamarkets dashboard now allows a user to request a report for 100 days worth of data to be delivered via email. In addition to the delivery method, the redesign offers these user benefits:

• Detailed reports are now generated in the cloud and stored as a file, with a link to that file sent to the user via email.
• The file is accessible for 7 days thus providing the user access to the data whenever it is convenient to retrieve it.
• Users can schedule as many reports as they like and have them delivered automatically to their inbox.
• We’ve optimized the infrastructure to reduce the risk of download failures, especially for extremely large reports.

If you’re interested in leveraging detailed reports today, we’ve put together a brief step-by-step guide to help get you started. You can download it here. Check out the new feature and let us know what you think!

If you are not a current Metamarkets customer, but interested in taking advantage of detailed reports – get in touch!