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Is Your Marketing Reports Worthless?

The purpose of a marketing report is to identify what is working and what needs to change. It’s actionable. It’s a snapshot of what happened and what didn’t happen. If you are going to invest money into achieving a specific business objective, it’s worth checking to see if you got what you paid for. Whether that is website traffic, inquiries, phone calls, clicks, engagement, etc.

I think most business managers value good reports, but they unfortunately do not have a list of criteria for the type of reporting that is needed in order to evaluate marketing. 

Marketing reports are worthless if you are not able to: 

1. Trust the data is accurate

2. Understand the data

3. Take action 

The first key to good marketing reports is that you need to accurately collect data. There are a lot of tools that help you in this regard. Some are trustworthy and others are flawed. One of the best “free” tools for data collection is Google Analytics. In fact, many of the paid data collection tools simply take data from Google Analytics and display it in a more aesthetically pleasing way. 

Google Analytics can be very good, but you must be able to properly access and understand this data. 

For example, one of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that most businesses look at when evaluating their website’s effectiveness is “Website Traffic”  It is a great stat and something that is important to look at, but what if your Search Engine Optimization team paid for traffic from a bot or posted a link on a viral website in India? In either of theses cases, your website might have a lot of traffic that is not a true indication of your website’s effectiveness. This extra traffic might increase your “bounce rate” mess up your “conversion rate” or reduce your search engine rankings. 

Understanding what to look for makes all the difference. 

The third key is to take action with your data. Should you fire your marketing manager? Increase your social media budget? Invest in additional website content? Double down on a specific channel? When you understand what is moving the needle, you can increase your investment in what is working and cut your unnecessary expenses. 

How many marketing decisions have you made due to a good report? 

A lot of people have a gut feeling that things aren’t working so they change things. Maybe it works out, but usually they are right back to where they started a month later. You shouldn’t have to trust your gut. The data should be enough to determine your next steps. 

If your data is good, then you will have the confidence to make the right decisions. 

How to get good marketing reports you can trust: 

The best thing you can do is start by requesting a free marketing analysis from us. What we will do is help you discover the best way to collect accurate marketing data and performance. We will then show you the path to interpreting the data and getting real insights from these reports. 

Get a Free Marketing Analysis by filling out the form below.