Looking beyond the short-term: using integrated reporting to unlock business value

At Bicycle, we actively challenge the traditional agency approach to reporting. Too often, performance data is reduced to a cycle of weekly reports that fail to tell the full story. These reports tend to focus on short-term platform-based media metrics like reach, CTR, and last-click conversions rather than the bigger picture of how marketing efforts truly impact business outcomes.

We’ve also invested in our technology stack to tackle this problem. Our ambition for reporting is simple but transformative: to build sophisticated dashboards that capture both short and long-term data to give us a richer and truer view of performance beyond siloed data sets.

What this means is that we’re able to recognise the small role of paid media in the marketing ecosystem.

We’ve evolved our dashboarding solution to bring platform data together with high-value business data from the likes of econometrics, brand tracking, controlled experiments and share of search to help our clients understand how a business outcome has been influenced. Beyond business data, we also tap into wider market and consumer insights to get a view on factors like category demand, competitor activity and social listening. All of this adds colour and context to our reporting analyses.

The impact for our clients
Smarter decision-making: We go beyond siloed platform data to deliver insights that drive more incremental strategies.

Real-time accuracy: our platform provides dynamic insights for more informed decision-making.

More time for strategy: Automating reporting frees up Bicycle’s time for high-value strategic work.

"The conventional industry approach to reporting cultivates short-term thinking.”

Smarter Measurement for Smarter Investments

Increasing brand investments are propelling the development of sophisticated measurement tools for campaign effectiveness. Brands now prioritise advanced metrics such as incremental Return on Advertising Spend (iROAS), market penetration, new shopper acquisition, and cross-channel purchasing to precisely evaluate their retail media strategies.

Moving beyond traditional reporting

The conventional industry approach to reporting cultivates short-term thinking. Weekly reports rely on easily accessible platform data, often painting an overly optimistic picture without considering the broader business impact.

This results in siloed decision-making, flawed testing methodologies, and an over-reliance on paid media as the primary driver of success.

Our new reporting dashboards - which can be seamlessly plugged into Looker Studio, Power BI, Tableau, and more - entirely reject this outdated approach. Instead of focusing solely on short-term, platform-led narratives, we’ll provide a more holistic view by supplementing this with valuable data sources, including:

Business outcome data (revenue, profit, market share, brand reputation) to measure real success.

Attention measurement to understand how consumer engagement on advertising translates into long-term value.

Macro insights: Category demand, competitor activity, and market trends that contextualise performance.

A High Value Partnership

Instead of rigid reporting cycles, our dashboards allow us to tailor insights to what’s actually valuable for our clients’ businesses. Whether that means building monthly summaries on brand outcomes, or bi-annual views on incremental ROI from econometrics.

The end-goal is to build greater transparency and understanding around what’s driving success, and foster a culture of collaboration with our clients - where robust data insights that connect short-term results to long-term outcomes empower the way we make decisions together.

Ultimately, we want to ensure that our clients receive more than just repetitive weekly reports full of media metrics that don’t tell them anything valuable.

Instead, they’ll gain access to a host of reporting intelligence that fuels smarter decisions, incremental outcomes, and long-term business growth.