Create reports with actionable data

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Create reports with actionable data

welcome to another episode of Weekly Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and today I want to talk about making sure there's a clear purpose in every report you generate or distribute. Your reports need to have purpose. Too many times I see data collection for the sake of just having data. And it's not all that helpful, and many times it can distract from the overall goal. So every report you create must have an actionable outcome and be able to influence change. When you report on something, focus on what you want the takeaway to be, otherwise call out the fact that there needs to be further research to identify that takeaway.

So let's say, for example, I'm going to build a report. And I'm going to take a screen shot of this chart here that shows traffic declining in July. So we know the gist of the report is going to be traffic declined significantly in July from the preceding month of June. And then what? What do you want me to get out of that piece of information? Now we could say this represents a significant problem and further research is necessary to identify the root cause but let's say that we've done the research.

So from there, we need to layer in the context. So we can show this decline, but then we need to show the source of the decline and any supporting evidence as to why we know this is the source. So let's say we show this chart, and we've identified that the problem was due to ad words. So we may pull in a report that shows the sources where ad words is called out, and we can show traffic by source in ad words showing that decline. Then maybe we want to show the ad spend via ad words for that month.

So now we can say, based on this information, we should increase our spending in ad words. The goal is to always tell a story with your data and always have a clear takeaway so that you can take action. If things are bad, explain why and what you need to do about it. If things are good, explain why and how you're going to keep it going well. If the data just isn't relevant to the story you're telling, well, ditch it. You don't need it. Reporting doesn't have to feel overwhelming, and you don't need to summarize everything.


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