Marketing Reports

Most Marketing Reporting leads you into a maze. It’s almost impossible to get an effective overview. It’s either missing the rest of the marketing – or sufficient detail to be useful.

Forty years ago in 1979 Visicalc spreadsheets were invented for the Apple II. During the 1980s software spreadsheets developed rapidly. Soon anyone could generate and print graphs.

This was a hugely important moment. A real democratization was occurring. No longer was costly printing the only way to get neat charting.

However the skills to use this capability well did not increase at the same rate. It became easy to flood the world with badly considered graphs.

Anyone can put a pile of figures into Excel and ask it to produce a chart for them. The charts can look smart. It is far from obvious that the reader will understand the chart or draw the right conclusions.

The problems of user understanding doesn’t only apply to charts in spreadsheets. It applies everywhere.

The weather is rarely constant for those of us living in Britain. In the 1970s our TV screens had weathermen. Back then they were all men. And they showed us maps full of isobars. So we saw high pressure and low pressure areas and cold fronts night after night. As though these meant something?

It took decades for the “presentation” to change. The technology changed from moveable magnetic stickers to huge digital screens. But the underlying communication didn’t improve at anything like the same rate.

It’s only in the last few years that presenters have started to talk about the jetstream. And started to show either this causing

Yellow – warm sun. Blue – cold. Much easier to understand. Fantastic.

Free to anyone who wants to use it. Great. Does this mean everyone gets great value from it? No!

Elsewhere I’ve written how you have to teach Google Analytics what matters. Teach it how to understand your business.

But there’s another problem. There’s a mass of data being collected. It’s easy to assume that everyone wants to see it all. But that’s flat wrong. In fact most people probably don’t want to see any of it. You have to convince them it’s worth their time.

The number of reporting options can be intimidating.

There are 95 standard reports in Google Analytics. Without counting the reports that have multiple sections. For instance like the goal funnel report can have 25 reports under the one heading.

In addition there can be many other custom reports. These can use the hundreds of Google defined dimensions and metrics.

And you can use rules to define segments. To include or exclude particular dimension values. Or to define segments by applying rules in a particular order.

But Google Analytics is just the “front end” of marketing.

If we add reports from CRM and other marketing systems we could have hundreds of reports.

So selecting which reports matter is hard. And marketing will be judged on the decisions made.

Because every report reader muses brutal questions like:

This is the real problem.

Just 3 reports are used to assess the vast majority of companies. These the Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow statements. People accept them to provide the high level overview.

Shouldn’t marketing have a similar overview? Where are the overview charts for Marketing?

That are equivalent to these financial statements?

As you’ll guess I think the answer should be YES. In fact if marketing is to prosper it absolutely needs to be YES.

Whilst it would be the classic end to a magic trick I’m going to suggest a different approach.
Some authors would leap straight in at this stage and attempt to make some choices and then justify them.
Whilst this is legitimate there are serious problems with that approach.

The big picture gets completely lost. People wind up in a zero sum game. The proponents for each chart type can argue their case with religious zeal.

So it’s much more helpful to set out the criteria that these overview charts should meet. I suggest:

What else would you suggest? Please put your comments in the area below…