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Happy Sunday, Everyone!
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I hope you’re all enjoying the start of fall – the leaves are
changing, football is back, conference season is upon us (well
me) and Thanksgiving is 74 days away (yes, really). Over the next
six weeks, I’ll be speaking at 6 different events - starting with
ShopTalk this coming week in Chicago, then BrightonSEO San
Diego/HeroConf, GroceryShop, Senior Living Innovation Forum,
ClioCon and Senior Care Marketing & Sales Summit. If you’re
attending any of those, don’t be a stranger!
This week, I want to talk about an area that receives precious
little attention – but demands massive amounts of time from most
marketing teams/agencies: reporting. I was genuinely gobsmacked
when I spoke to two fellow mid/large agency owners, who both told
me their teams spend 8-10 hours, per month, per retainer client
on reporting (data pulls, report assembly, actual meeting with
client to review the reporting, post-meeting follow-ups). I
thought - for sure! - this was an anomaly….so I talked to another
10 people (in house + agency) about it, and they all came back
with similar figures when I showed them the itemized breakdowns.
If you run an agency with 10 employees and 15 retainer clients,
that implies you might be spending 150+ staff hours per month
just on reporting! That’s an FTE’s entire capacity and then some.
Before we go further, I want to be clear: just because something
takes a decent chunk of time does not mean it is inherently a
problem. Those teams likely spend similar (or even greater)
portions of their time working in ad accounts, making new ads,
optimizing post-click experiences, etc. It’s only a problem if
the return from the investment (time/resources) does not justify
the cost.
And THAT is the heart of the problem. When I look at reporting,
there’s a power law at work: >80% of the actions/improvements are
driven by That’s categorically insane. And for marketing to be
better, it needs to change.
Every hour spent on one task is an hour that is unavailable to be
used on another task. An hour spent on reporting is an hour that
can’t be used on account updates or new creatives. An hour spent
on building a dashboard is an hour that can’t be used building a
new automation. Time is like money: it’s zero-sum.
That makes protecting + optimizing your time one of the highest
leverage things anyone - in-house, agency, freelancer, whatever -
can do.
As I’ve spent more time thinking about reporting - what it is,
what it ought to be - I’ve come to three conclusions that shape
my approach to it:
* Reporting is only valuable if it contributes to future positive
outcomes – whether that’s understanding a mistake (thereby
enabling you to avoid it in the future) or informing a smarter
future course of action
* The scope of reporting should be limited to the data points
that enable (1). Too many of the reports/dashboards I see are 80%
data pukes / 20% useful insights + analysis.
* Attention is light: focused into a tight beam, it can cut
through the hardest materials in the known universe; diffused, it
will barely increase the ambient temperature a degree. Everything
we do from a reporting perspective should focus attention on the
most critical things, not diffuse it across a thousand
charts/graphics/metrics.
When I share this with other CMOs, (2) is the point that receives
the most pushback – most leaders love to see all the data. They
fancy themselves a modern-day Marketing Indiana Jones, who is
going to dig around and find the golden nugget of insight that
all of the supposedly-smart people they’ve hired missed (though I
can count on one hand the number of times a CMO/VP has actually
done that and surfaced a useful insight, in my 15+ years). The
reality is that this just doesn’t happen – most leaders have too
many demands on their time as it is, and even if they did, they
don’t actually have the expertise, contextual knowledge or
supporting skills (i.e., coding or data science knowledge) to do
it.
Instead, what ends up happening is overly long, hyper-detailed
reports are built that serve no purpose but to collect dust and
take up harddrive/cloud storage space. Reporting meetings devolve
into data puking sessions that could put a ferret on cocaine into
REM sleep. Nothing changes. Everyone eventually gets surprised
that nothing has changed. Sadness (or firings) ensue.
The conclusion I’ve come to is this: reporting is a gas. It
expands to fill the space it’s permitted to take. And too often,
we’ve allowed that gas to expand to progressively larger spaces,
without asking several critical questions: Why are we reporting
on this? How does this information help us going forward? What
should we do next as a result?
That’s all that’s relevant.
What we need is a revolution in how the entire marketing
ecosystem approaches reporting. This starts with two
paradigm-shifting changes: (1) anchor everything from a reporting
perspective around four questions:
* Why did this happen?
* How should we respond/react going forward?
* What impact will doing that have on our business/goals?
* When will that impact materialize and in what form?
And (2) commit to flipping the distribution of your reporting
activities, such that 80%+ of your reporting is leading to
action.
Doing just those two things can (and will) have a transformative
impact on your business (to say nothing of your agency’s sanity +
your team’s happiness).
If you’re with me so far, you’re probably wondering how to
accomplish this. What are the concrete steps that take you from
your current reporting to this new paradigm?
You’re in luck. Here’s exactly how I’m thinking about doing that:
* Identify your core KPIs
* Automate + Dashboard
* Trend + Segment
* Forecast + Benchmark
* Connect + Prioritize
* Execute
* Evaluate
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Identify Your Core KPIs.
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Marketers have been too obsessed with vanity for too long. That’s
led to stuffing reports + dashboards with feel-good metrics that
go up-and-to-the-right, but don’t provide insight into the health
of the underlying business.
That must end for reporting to improve.
Start by identifying the KPIs that actually matter to your (or
your client’s) business. For reference: a KPI is a metric that
maps to a critical business function and enables understanding of
the business’ performance vs. your objectives/goals/targets.
I’ve used the below slide to communicate this idea before:
Once you’ve identified your KPIs, delete everything else.
Why?
Because everything that you’ve deleted is a metric. It’s
informative for lever-pulling and small-scale optimization, but
it’s not something that will help you decide what to do going
forward. The people on your team or your agency’s team can use
metrics to improve their day-to-day activities, but reporting on
them will not lead to better outcomes or results – to the
contrary, it will actually siphon attention away from the things
that really matter. Reporting on bullshit is not an innocent or
harmless activity; to the contrary, it actively undermines the
true goal of reporting.
Focus your reporting on what actually matters to the business.
Deep dives, breakdowns, etc. can be done on an ad hoc basis, when
a specific situation warrants it.
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Automate + Dashboard
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Time is the most valuable asset any expert has – but far too many
waste far too much of it on manual tasks like data pulls.
Stop it.
We build every client a dashboard (or series of dashboards,
depending on the brand) at the outset of our relationship. And,
to be candid, we do it because it’s in our best interest: I don’t
want our team expending precious time to pull a rudimentary
report. I don’t want our clients waiting around for said report,
or feeling like they need to ask for it. Dashboards solve both
problems - our team doesn’t have to spend time pulling data (it’s
done automatically), and our clients can ALWAYS see what’s going
on in their accounts. Transparency, accountability + efficiency.
Yes, there are absolutely some clients who have never logged into
their dashboard. It happens. And in those cases, we adapt and
evolve to ensure they are getting what they need. But, in my
experience, allowing the exceptions to drive the SOPs is a
terrible idea.
The reality is that using dashboards has saved our team thousands
of hours over the last few years (very likely more!) AND the
majority of clients LOVE their dashboards. They log into them at
all hours of the day. They ask questions based on what they’re
seeing in their dashboard! And, on the flip side, our team is
more productive than ever, because they’re not having to pull
hundreds of ad hoc reports every year.
Much of the pushback I get to this is optics-related: “won’t the
client think we’re not doing as much?” “clients like when
reporting is personal - it shows effort!” “reporting is how we
show our value to clients/stakeholders”
That’s all hogwash.
You know what shows value? Creating value.
You know what shows clients you’re doing stuff? Doing stuff that
makes their business better.
Time is zero-sum. You can choose to spend time assembling pretty
decks and mile-long reports, or you can spend time working on
your client’s account/business. Choose wisely.
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Trend + Segment
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As we create dashboards, there are two absolutely essential
things we do: trend + segment every KPI on which we’re reporting.
It’s human nature to over-react to the present and to discount
the past. Most of the time, we forget that the same thing
happened last quarter or last year. Just this week, I was talking
to a client who lamented, “PPC just doesn’t work like it used
to…” In this case, he was right - but not in the way he thought.
His performance was actually double what it used to be, with half
the volatility. The difference is perception: he’s gotten so
accustomed to wins that when he goes a few days without one, it
feels apocalyptic.
This is where trending KPIs is essential.
By plotting the KPI over time (days for up to 90 days; weekly for
13 weeks; monthly for 13+ months), you’ll make it easy to spot
when something is within a normal range or an anomaly. This is
the much-needed context and normalization that allows reporting
conversations to be infinitely more productive.
As a general rule, if a KPI is within the normal variation, it’s
not that interesting (unless there’s something else going on -
more on that later!); if it’s anomalous, it’s worth additional
investigation.
The second most common issue I see in reporting is a failure to
understand Simpson’s Paradox (if you’re unaware - Simpson’s
Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where the trend of data
appears different when groups are combined vs. analyzed
separately).
We are in the midst of an audit for a brand now, and they shared
their agency’s reporting - top-level traffic, sales & revenue.
Month-over-month, it seemed pretty normal – but when we dug into
the underlying distribution of that traffic + sales, we saw a
radically different picture: organic search was driving more and
more of the sales, while paid was spending more with lower
performance. The net was the same (higher organic sales offset
lower paid sales), but the insight was in the underlying
distribution.
The solution? Segment your data! If one KPI is CAC, segment it
down by channel/campaign. If a KPI is churn, segment it by
cancellation reason or cancelled service. If a KPI is
appointments booked, segment by location, campaign or service
type.
If you’re wondering how to segment your data, the easiest way to
figure it out is to ask: if I told the client/boss this top-level
KPI, what would s/he ask next?
The combination of trends (which show temporal variation) and
segmentation (which reveal the movements of underlying cohorts)
makes reporting 10x more actionable – it reveals if what’s
happening is actually noteworthy AND what group(s) are
disproportionately impacted. From there, you can move to action!
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Forecast + Counterbalance
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I have a rule: never show a KPI alone. This is Goodhart’s Law in
action – when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
metric.
Instead, show your KPIs vs. your forecast AND a reasonable
benchmark (historical, industry, competitor, etc.). This allows
everyone who looks at the dashboard to contextualize the KPI. We
refer to these as “metric trios”. We then counterbalance each KPI
with a corresponding one (also presented with forecast +
benchmark).
The end result? A much clearer understanding of what’s actually
going on.
A case in point: one of our clients has a KPI of cost per SQL.
The value of this KPI was $512 last month.
Is that good? Bad? Mediocre? IDK.
But, if I present this data using the methodology above:
Cost / SQL: $512
Forecast Range: $551 - $674
Same Month Last Year: $793
SQLs: 82
Forecast: 63-77
Same Month Last Year: 59
Now, things are crystal clear. You know that you’ve exceeded both
last year’s performance AND your 2025 forecast.
The other benefit? You can’t over-optimize one KPI.
If you just presented the cost per SQL, you could simply set
super-conservative targets, spend less and make the metric look
awesome. But….that would come at the expense of volume, which
hurts the business overall (since you can’t take efficiency to
the bank). Conversely, if you just presented total SQLs, you
could simply spend more and drive the number through the roof –
even if doing so resulted in SQLs coming in at costs way above
what’s profitable for the business.
Presenting both together, alongside both a forecast + a
historical anchor (where available), allows everyone to see
what’s going on AND the natural tension between metrics (i.e.
efficiency degrades with scale).
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Connect + Prioritize
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The thing - to me - that makes reporting magical is the ability
to connect what happened to why it happened to how we move
forward. Put another way, reporting is instrumentally valuable:
it has value when it helps us improve going forward.
This is where marketers must be better. We must intentionally
connect what happened + why it happened (what you reveal via your
segments, trends + KPIs) to how to move forward.
The easiest way I’ve found to do this is ask, “So, now what?”
Take the following example, from a real client report: we’ve
found that CPA has increased 19% among our adult children
segment, which is 74% higher than forecasted and a ~43% increase
vs. same month last year.
Ok, so what comes next? What are you going to do about it?
This forces you to confront two things: (1) why it happened (the
drivers of the outcome) and (2) the path forward.
In this case, the drivers were a combination of anomalously low
conversion rates and higher-than-expected costs (likely a result
of the above). The recommended action was to revise the
post-click experience to include the form at the top of the page
AND a phone number, plus add two more CTAs at key drop of points
on the page.
Expected result?
Conversion rates should revert to the previous level of 4.25% -
5.35% within the next week.
Observation → Cause → Action → Outcome
These are the kinds of conversations I want every report to
inspire…because if they don’t, the report isn’t worth doing.
If this process is done well, every report should surface
multiple of these opportunities – we might find under-performance
among one segment, overperformance in another, an opportunity
over there, etc. But time is zero-sum. Every minute we spend
fixing the landing page is a minute we can’t spend on ad creative
or content creation or email flows.
That’s where prioritization comes into play.
Once you’ve identified all of the relevant opportunities, go a
step further: suggest what to do next, and what to do after that,
and so on. You’ve now transformed something boring and low value
(reporting) into something strategic and high leverage
(prioritization + roadmapping).
Execute
-------
Everything up to this point matters exactly zero IF you fail to
execute. Once you’ve identified what to do, you have to do it
well. It’s really that simple.
Forecasting + Reporting are exercises in operations. If you can’t
execute, none of this matters.
Evaluate
--------
The final, fatal flaw I see in most reporting is inflexibility –
we report on this because we have always reported on this.
It’s absolutely insane.
Businesses change. People evolve. Priorities shift. Your
reporting + KPIs absolutely must do so as well.
I have two rules to this end:
* No more than 5 KPIs per dashboard/report
* If it goes unused, it's no longer useful
The first rule is often the hardest pill to swallow – but it’s
essential. Reporting bloat is real. I recently went back and
looked at the reports for a client over the last 6 years. The
report had grown from a one-page document that focused on a core
set of KPIs to a 28(!!!!) page behemoth. The time required to
assemble the 28-page document was over 12 hours each month. It
didn’t happen all at once – one month, the client wanted to see
X. Another month, they wanted to dive into Y. Then they added
another division and wanted separate reporting. Before long, one
page became 6, then 6 became 11, then 11 became 14, then 14
became 19….and eventually, it ended up at 28 pages.
All because no-one was willing to cut stuff that wasn’t being
used.
The real kick in the teeth? 90%+ of the stuff in that report was
NEVER read.
The solution to that is the 5 KPI rule: if you want to add a KPI
to a report that already has 5, then remove 1. If you can’t
remove one, either (a) the thing you want to add isn’t a real KPI
or (b) you don’t understand the real drivers of your business
well enough, and you need to re-evaluate what you’re measuring.
And second, if you’re doing something and it’s going unused, then
it’s no longer worth doing as-is. If you’re sending a client a
reporting summary every week/month and you see that it is not
being read/opened/used, two things need to happen: (1) have a
conversation about it and (2) evolve your behavior.
Don’t be afraid of either.
There’s nothing wrong with asking a client, “Hey John, I see you
opened any of the reports for the last 3 weeks. Could I send you
a top-line overview of performance on Slack instead to make it
easier?”
John is going to respond in one of three ways:
* Update you on a reason why (i.e., “Hey - sorry! Jimmy is taking
the lead on this now and he’s been reviewing them”)
* Accept your suggestion (“That’d be great!”)
* Refuse/Push back (“Hey - sorry! I don’t read these every week,
but our compliance team needs them.”)
In the case of option 1, you can now reach out to Jimmy and align
on what he needs for your reporting to be helpful + effective.
Option 2 means you’ve likely saved an hour or so of reporting
time and can help your client get the information s/he needs in
the format that works. Option 3 allows you to have a more robust
conversation with the compliance team and streamline/automate
reporting, especially if it is being used for a different purpose
(i.e., you might be able to simply automate a PDF of your
dashboard to the compliance team every month, instead of spending
hours pulling one together).
Then, once you get that clarity, evolve your behavior
accordingly. Align how you’re sharing information to the
medium/mechanism that works with your boss/client. Stop doing
what didn’t work. Take that time and reinvest it into executing
the things that will move your organization/business forward.
This week’s issue is sponsored by Optmyzr.
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If all of this has you nodding along, thinking about how much
time your team wastes on bloated, manual, low-value reporting,
then you’ll understand why I’ve been such a fan of Optmyzr’s
reporting toolkit.
Since we’ve switched to Optmyzr, the amount of time we spend
working on powerpoints and data pulls has decreased dramatically.
The time required to create a dashboard has been cut in half.
Optmyzr’s reporting suite automates the most time-intensive parts
of client reporting: pulling data from ad platforms, blending
cross-channel performance and formatting dashboards so they show
the data that matters in a way that won’t make your eyes bleed.
What makes it different?
* Automation-first design: Reports update themselves, which means
no more 11th-hour data pulls or copy-pasting into decks.
* Customizable KPIs: You can lock dashboards to the 4–5 KPIs that
truly matter, and eliminate the reporting creep that results in a
3 page report ballooning into 28.
* Actionable context: Optmyzr makes it easy to add insights,
annotations, and explanations alongside the numbers, so reports
don’t just show data, they tell a story.
* Client-ready presentation: Every report is clean, consistent,
and shareable. Whether your audience is a CMO, marketing manager
or investor/executive/founder, you can deliver the right level of
detail without reinventing the wheel every month.
* Automated Dashboards + Exports: One of my favorite features -
Optmyzr allows you to build a report once, then share it as a
dashboard (no more Looker studio!) and/or an automated export
delivered via email.
The result? You reclaim hours of wasted time, while clients
(internal or external) get clarity and confidence. In other
words: reporting finally does what it’s supposed to do: drive
better decisions, faster.
If you are ready to spend less time formatting charts and more
time creating value, Optmyzr’s reporting toolkit is worth a look.
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The bottom line: done well, reporting isn’t a time sink - it’s a
force multiplier. The question is whether yours is multiplying
value or multiplying waste.
If you follow the approach I’ve outlined, you’ll transform
reporting from a time waster into a catalyst for improved
performance, happier stakeholders (clients/bosses) and better
outcomes.
Happy reporting!
Until next week,
Sam
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