Every action has a reaction.
Too often in web analytics, we see simple reporting, rather than story telling. If your reports are simply telling you numbers, then you’re leaving a lot of valuable information behind. Anyone over the age of 2 can tell you numbers. What you really need to know is what action was taken to cause those numbers? What is the full story behind them?
When you get reports, they shouldn’t just include graphs and charts about decreased or increased performance, you should also be getting insight as to why there was an increase or a decrease. What changes were made to drive the performance difference? A lot of times, changes will be made to a paid search campaign, but no one will ever know because it wasn’t included in the story of the reporting. This work goes unnoticed, and will hurt everyone in the long run.
I love to see reports with pretty charts and graphs, but only if accompanied by a story that tells me what actions were taken to drive the numbers. Instead of being told the same information in a chart, then a graph, then a summary, what we need to be told is what happened that caused those numbers? Were there any bid optimizations done on our paid search campaign? Did we add/delete keywords from our campaigns? Did we pause underperforming campaigns for pacing that could have impacted our ROI?
There is always a reason for performance changes. It’s up to the people managing your accounts to tell you exactly what was changed to drive that performance increase/decrease.
Next time you get a report that says “Click Through Rate increased by 0.25%”, without an explanation of why it increased by 0.25%, ask for it. You’ll learn from it, and your team will learn from it.
Thanks,
Joseph McConellogue
