Hey Mozzers! A quick introduction for those of you who don't know me: my name is Sam Crocker. I work for a global media agency called OMD and am based in London. In addition to our work on (primarily) enterprise SEO clients we also occasionally find time to work on our search and social blog. I am an avid consumer of content in the SEO field and when I'm not doing client work I am constantly working on testing out new ideas, (working on) improving internal processes and reading/sharing SEO and tech stories on Twitter. I am also extremely happy to be writing another post for SEOmoz after a bit of a hiatus.
Introduction
As some of you may well recall, my old boss and good friend Tom Critchlow featured on White Board Friday back on April 14th talking about How to Make SEO Happen. There should be no doubt about the fact that this is an important factor to all SEO practitioners and consultants because at the end of the day it may be nice to give advice and hide behind issues around how "it's the dev's fault" or other classics that we've all been forced to use (let's be honest, sometimes it is the dev's fault). However, the obvious fact is that we are hired based upon our reputation or our price point, but we are retained based upon our ability to deliver results.
Perhaps, more importantly still, we are paid based upon our ability to report on the results we deliver. It is all fine and good if we get some outstanding links to our clients from "well respected" and "authoritative" sources, but at the end of the day, most of our clients are business people and regardless of how hard you worked to get that link from the New York Times, if it hasn't had a positive and quantifiable impact on the site and on their bottom line, you can kiss that retainer goodbye.
However, any of you who are familiar with me and know about my tendency to complain about unnecessary tasks and poor allocation's of resource will know that reporting, much like SEO forecasting, are not the way that I like to use my time or my clients budget. Important as they may be I don't revel in the opportunity to create loads of pretty (and confusing) charts and graphs and then write up copious justifications for what I have done and why it did or did not work. As such, I was more than happy to volunteer when Tom asked me to write a post about saving time on reporting - as he was shocked by the number of Mozzers who seemed not to mind spending too much time on reporting.
The bottom line is this: clients have hired you both to deliver results and communicate those results with them in a manner that they can understand. Reporting is only valuable if the client reads the report (largely dependent on them understanding what they are looking at) and that it is profitable. You could measure the profits of this report in a number of ways - I've even known some to attribute time reporting to "new business" as it is essential to retaining clients. This is not, in my view, the right way to do things.
As with forecasting, SEO reporting kind of sucks, but when it needs to be done, it needs to be done as quickly as possible and be targeted to the relevant audience. I won't go as far as Tom to say that we can eliminate it all together (much as I would like to) but there are clearly a number of ways in which we can cut down on the amount of time it takes.
Speaking of saving time, if you are very short on time and just want the long-term panacea to the reporting-suck click here. The rest of the post should help you improve everything else in the short term though!
[Note from Tom: I'd like to quickly clarify my position here and note the difference between reporting and reports. My original whiteboard friday uses the word reports but is really talking about strategy & recommendation reports. I believe length strategy reports are not good, but I think monthly reporting is definitely a good thing. After all, as I mention in my WBF communication is the key to solve all problems and reporting is part of that. This is totally my fault for not being clear in my whiteboard friday and I'll likely write a follow-up post soon to clarify. My comment here also explains my thinking a bit more clearly. Sam shares awesome tips here on making reporting actionable and clear but I don't want people thinking I'm against all reporting :). Now, on with the post!]
Part I: Tips to Improve Understanding
Odds are, your client receives reporting for a handful of reasons. You may report on your work out of moral obligation (in which case you're likely not confident in your work), you may report as an opportunity to make more money (in which case you are a savvy business person, but you'd be better off reallocating these funds), you may report because every client expects a report (in which case you are wasting your time because they probably don't read it) or, in the best of cases you are reporting because your client genuinely knows why they have hired you and want to see that you are meeting the original goals discussed or can at least account for their investment if goals are not being achieved (in which case you are extraordinarily lucky).
Avoid This (via)
Step 1: What Are Your Shared Goals
Most SEO projects start with some sort of goal in mind. Sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing (I can't tell you the number of times I've had to challenge a prospective with "yes but what do you want the website to do?"), but it is important to establish what the client's goals for the project are and to lead them to the factors on which they should be focused.
Note: You may have to tell them what they should be looking for. These clients are not always the most fun to deal with and it is important to agree these things before starting work.
Step 2: Identify the Target Audience
If the project you are undertaking is for one person, you better be prepared to get to know this person well and learn what they expect, how to talk to them, etc.
However, there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.
*Bonus timesaver - be realistic with the client. If you can get them to admit that they will only read a report once every three months send over a "status sheet" once a month and run quarterly reports face-to-face.
Step 3: Create Reports Relevant to the Target Audience
The first month or two is always going to be a bit difficult and your client will likely have plenty to learn depending on their experience. If you are patient with the client in the first month, build a report-style based upon the recipient of the report's knowledge base and include only the most relevant benchmarks for your campaign you will save a lot of time in the long run.
Make sure you get everyone who will see the reports in the room with you and walk them through the first reports!
Base Level Reporting (for the Board, Head of Marketing or "Monthly Update")
There are certain elements that you should probably plan to include in all reports, these "essentials" are what I like to refer to as "Base Level Reporting" (BLR). A BLR should be as easy to read and short as possible. The important thing to think about is what are the bare minimum metrics on which I should report?
What to include:
- (If applicable) Value of Sales from Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
- Organic Branded Visits vs. Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
- Total Number of keywords sending traffic (Month-on-Month)
- Progression against agreed goals
- "Status Sheet"
Executives of large businesses don't have time to focus on every individual ranking (nor often do they care) and they certainly don't have time to read about every single link that has been built. More importantly - as Justin very adeptly pointed out on the Raven blog - reporting on link building can make your reports suck.
Note- the "status sheet" is in my view one of the most important ways to document who is responsible for what and what the timeline is. This can be incredibly powerful if you are ever dealing with a slightly less motivated client to document the fact that you both have agreed obligations as part of the project and will ensure that you are not always taking orders from the client or grief for "overdue" tasks. It goes both ways and will keep everyone honest.
Quarterly/Yearly Reporting (May be more Regular for In-House SEO Manager, Marketing Directors, Webmasters, etc.)
The quarterly report can be essential and warrants a slightly larger time investment. However, this does not need to become overly onerous, but should include more detail about what you have done (i.e. how your time has been spent, how rankings have performed, etc.). This type of report truly is a measure of performance and effort combined. It is an opportunity to go over your biggest successes and potentially discuss strategy.
What to cover (in addition to the BLR):
- "Visibility metrics" - I would advise against showing every single move for every single term.
- Organic Traffic Brand vs. Non-Brand (Year on Year) + Commentary on seasonal trends
- Top 10 New Terms Sending Traffic
- Links Built - provide list as appendix, report on links by MozRank buckets if required
- Additional organic traffic generated (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
- Performance of engagement metrics or goals (e.g. PDF downloads)
- Performance of individual content (linkbait) efforts
This report will be more time consuming to pull together but still should not be overcomplicated. The vast majority of these items should be supplied as a means to build trust and provide documentation for their investment (e.g. links built) but do not warrant in-depth analysis. I would advise against supplying the full list of keywords and ranking within the report (e.g. visibility metrics) as they can be confusing and over-complicate the situation. This can always be provided as an appendix.
Example "New Links" Chart
*KEY POINT - this should not be a written report. Get together with all relevant parties and talk through some slides - it will take less time if you set an agenda and stick to it. Feel free to provide handouts, but do not write out your entire strategy and try to justify every single task. Firstly, it almost always looks more defensive in person and secondly, it's way too easy for your competitor to use if you ever lose an account.
Project Review Reporting
The BLR should be largely neutral in tone. By all means you should celebrate huge successes as and when they occur by way of a phone call or an email. The Quarterly report allows a bit more opportunity to focus on individual successes, however it is still important to stay mostly neutral. However, at the end of the project or the end of a fiscal year is an opportunity for you to focus solely on your achievements. This is the time to sell so feel free to bust out all of your case studies and be biased here.
However, painting a rosy picture every month means that the success will begin to mean less and the failures will be more glaring (especially if you are not reporting on them regularly). Save your big "look at us" case studies for the end of the month. You can share these successes over a celebratory beer with your contact at the agency but don't go cluttering up every monthly report talking about how great you are.
Additional Communication (ad hoc)
It is obviously important (particularly if you want to cut down on reporting time at the end of the month) that you stay in regular contact with your clients. Although some agencies rely on a service model "you get one day a week" it's important to deliver education and regular communication. You don't have to be on the phone every day and you need to know when to rein it in, but you should be available to discuss strategy and implementation at least once a week. If it becomes an issue, put a cap on it.
Also, there is no justification for writing an individual email to every single one of your clients whenever something changes. Your client may not have time to monitor every change in the marketplace and in the algorithms (and it's probably best they don't) but you should keep them up to date. If you create a blog and tell them where to find it and update it regularly this should be fine. Alternatively, you could always write a recap newsletter that everyone receives once a month.
Most importantly, and in the spirit of being open and transparent, be ready to jump on the phone when things go south. There is nothing a client hates more than to phone their SEO agency to ask them why they've dropped out of the rankings. If you establish the trust and catch these things when they occur you can drastically cut back on the number of "how come Beth sees us ranking number 4, but I see us ranking first!?" conversations.
Part II: Ways to Increase Profitability, Save Time... and Get Better Results for Your Clients
Alright folks, so hopefully the above has helped you gain a better understanding of the types of things we like to report on and ways to make sure you are speaking to the right person and in a language they understand.
One of the main lessons from the above section is that sometimes it is actually quicker to produce two reports than to try to combine a report designed for an in-house SEO manager with one that is designed for a Head of Marketing who has five other advertising channels to worry about. However, the other lesson that is a bit more subtle is: you do not always need a report.
I hope the following will increase the profitability of your reporting, save you loads of time and will ultimately get better results for your clients. The below are the lessons Tom hoped I would share.
Option 1: Increase your Rate
It's a realistic option. You could always charge more for your reporting. If it is something your client cares exorbitantly about, be very specific about the costs associated with "better" reporting.
We have a dedicated team of data scientists that we could use for reporting and though I'm sure our clients would be impressed with the results, I'm also not sure that they would like the cost associated. More importantly, your client doesn't need that expensive 50 page report.
Increasing your Rate is an option, but not one that I would ever prefer and not one that would likely lead to better results for any of our clients. The only case in which I would suggest increasing your rate would be to allocate that money to building a template, investing in a dashboard, or offsetting a software for reporting.
Option 2: Reduce Time Spent on Reporting
For me, this is clearly the preferred option. Although charging more money for reporting is nice, spending more time reporting is not something I really fancy - nor is it something I would expect anyone else on the team to spend too much of their valuable time on. Below are some of the tactics I've made use of to reduce reporting times.
1.) Be transparent and open with your hours
The benefits to this in a number of other respects is obvious, however it is a powerful bargaining tool. If you are open with your hourly rate and willing to share the previous month(s) breakdown of hours spent on work a strong argument can be made about how much time as follows. If your rate for your time is £100/hr (and you should know your rate) it is as simple as this:
"Last month we spent 6 hours on your report. - at a cost of £600, but more importantly at a cost of 6 hours of my time. You have hired me to consult on and implement SEO which is what I do most efficiently and most effectively. Please consider investing that money in a software to improve reporting or consider reducing the frequency of our reports"
Note, my favourite time tracking software of the moment is Harvest - a big "thank you" to all who suggested it.
2.) Automate as much as possible
This one also seems fairly obvious but it's something that we've all been guilty of at one point or another. We can't all be Excel wizards and building a template can be costly. This is where you can save a lot of time by making use of an expert to build a template for you. If the template is intuitive enough you pretty much copy and paste data/segments from the Google Analytics API and the rest is auto-generated.
As you will see from my last point, my personal view is that this should be taken to the next level.
3.) Report less frequently
Another obvious opportunity. As I've touched on in a number of instances above there is no reason to report on all the metrics listed in the BLR and Quarterly Report every single month. It is important to be accountable for your work but having too many charts and too much analysis month-on-month will almost certainly lead to your clients no longer reading your reports- in which case everyone loses.
This is exactly why it's so important to have a frank conversation with your clients and remind them how valuable your time is and how much better spent (break it down to dollars and cents) your time would be creating great content and getting links than on filling out a report.
4.) Just report ROI
Ranking reports and "new traffic" are great and sometimes necessary for reporting. However, what have we really been hired for? This all comes back to the notion that our audience wants to know what we've been up to, but if you are getting results (the very results that you all agree you have targeted) the rest can be supplied as documentation and potentially never need discussion at all.
In the ideal situation you don't even need all of the metrics from the BLR in a monthly report. In the case of eCommerce clients ultimately you should be reporting on number and value of sales generated from your efforts and perhaps providing an appendix or two to document your linkbuilding activities, beyond this, try to save the other stuff for a quarterly or biannual report.
At the end of the day this should be the main monthly focus of any eCommerce client whilst brand building may be something to keep an eye on and report on less regularly. This isn't always an option but is just one example of how to reduce the intensity and frequency of your reporting.
5.) Present your report (PPT or Prezi)
Another no brainer for me really. How do you feel when you receive an email or document that is 50 pages long? I feel frustrated and overwhelmed. The solution is to set up a monthly phone call (or face-to-face where possible) and present your charts/figures to the client. Send over all of the data a day before the call and make sure they have a serious look through it before you speak on the phone.
Setting up a phone call prompts and ensures action from the clients' perspective (it means they are much more likely to read your report) and also shows that you are proactive. I cannot tell you over the years how many clients I've seen won and lost as a result of poor communication - and sometimes there have been great results to back up the work!
At the end of the day odds are you don't want to spend loads of your time writing pages and pages of analysis, so walk them through the report and let them ask questions!
Biggest Timesavers:
6.) Empower and /Educate
In the long run, absolutely nothing has saved me more time on reporting than speaking with the client at the beginning of a project and getting a feel for what they expect or want out of a report. Questions to ask:
Who else will see this report? What will you (the client) be judged upon? What other things would you ideally like to see in a report?
It's important to revisit this after the first 3-4 months as well to make sure that they are getting all of the data they need, but also that they are not getting loads of superfluous data they don't understand.
For me, it is all about building your template or dashboard based upon their needs, billing the client for this cost and taking the time to teach them what it is they are looking at, when "up" is a good thing and when it is a bad thing so that ultimately they can look through larger sets of data on their own time should they choose.
If you are planning to have a long relationship with this client the 5-6 hours this may take up front will save you loads of time in the long run.
7.) Dashboard, Dashboard, Dashboard
Pro
So, this is a bit of a new one for our team but we have recently been privately testing a reporting solution that we think shows a great deal of promise. These solutions tend to be immensely costly which, again, means having an earnest conversation with the client about footing the bill but as many clients as we can get set-up with this solution we will pursue this option because it makes the most of a scarce resource.
Some of these platforms create dashboards (based on ranking and analytics data) that are truly impressive and, perhaps more importantly, dynamic. These platforms allow you to create which reports are created (see above suggestions in the BLR and QR sections) but the client can then click around and get stuck into the data if they are so inclined.
Once this has been set-up it truly is a "set it and forget it" type situation. It will require more up-front training for the client but it is a must for any tech/SEO savvy client. Some of these products are still early days and have limited support/data for Europe so be very scrupulous and ask a lot of questions if you're thinking of going this route!
*If this interests you have a look at Covario, Bright Edge, Conductor or any others you can find!
Con
The con to going this route is that at the moment the solutions that are actually worth their cost are stupidly expensive and often the cost is set-up on a "per client" basis rather than an "unlimited number for a set cost" basis. The result is, this will rule this option out for almost any SME or local-business clients.
However, as I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of extraordinarily talented developers and Excel wizards out there. This is something that could easily be created on a microsite for your client(s) and would almost certainly be less expensive in the long run.
For me, dashboarding still has a long way to go, but in mind it will replace about 90% of the time I spend on reporting over the next six months... and I'm pretty happy about that.
I hope you've found this post helpful and would love to hear your thoughts on reporting in the comments. Any other time-saving measures you've taken and care to share with the class would be much appreciated or if you're a bit shy feel free to share them with me on Twitter.
Hey Sam - great post and thanks for including a screen shot of Conductor Searchlight. I wanted to make a comment as it relates to the value of SEO Platforms...if you are purchasing it just for reporting and you are not a very large multi-unit enterprise, you are right - it can be an expensive cost to provide reports. Although I would argue that the ability to understand investment return is a key tenant to why paid search has so much scale (the 2nd being it really works), and that if reporting can give your company a greater sense of your returns, and transparency into new investment - it might be worth the cost to enable SEO growth. However, speaking for our platform, we go way beyond reporting to deliver value to our customers. An SEO platform can enable you to grow your top-line SEO through continuous keyword discovery & management, detailed recommendations on which templates and sites to optimize, and how - to drive the best results with the least amount of effort....workflow to streamline making site changes and understand the impact...and also enables you to build out link building efforts with greater insight and recommendations on your link profile, competitor's link profile and top domains to pursue (as an example). I can go on for quite a bit, but just making the point that a great SEO Platform is more then just reporting - its an evolved way for in-house SEO teams to expand the top of their SEO funnel & drive greater results through the middle - while bringing reporting to a new level.
You can download a whitepaper on https://www.seoplatform.com on what an SEO platform can do for your business (Conductor owned website in full disclosure).
Would love to chat more about this with you sometime.
Hey Seth,
Thank you very much for your comment and for being transparent about your relationship with Conductor.
You raise a very good point about the broader value in some of these platforms beyond just as a reporting dashboard and the ones I have seen do indeed provide some valuable insights in terms of recommendations. The platform we have been testing privately, much like yours, does provide considerably more insight beyond just a dashboard. I felt my post was already a bit wordy but you are right to raise this as it could go a long way in further justifying the rather sizable cost.
For the folks who have read this and do work for some enterprise clients (or even just a large number of smaller clients) I would urge you to get in touch with the different platforms I mentioned to learn more about the additional functionality.
Reporting = Bain of my life! Back at my old search company we had a lot more systems in place to have it all automated, but since we set up shop on our own it's been back to the menual old days (for now at least! :p).
Welcome back to SEOmoz anyway, I'm sure you've got a lot more informative posts for us to enjoy
Is there a robot that can do all the reporting for us?
Maybe you can convince Roger to do some reporting for you. But along the lines of point #7 your time may be better spent "building your own" robot.
For me the big 3 are (and you mentioned them), be transparent about the time involved in reporting and costs, once the client knows they are spending x on a bunch of stuff they never read and you could be using that time to increase their ROi by x, the warm fuzzy feeling they had seeing all those metrics (but not reading them) usually wears off. Automate is another big one and report less frequently. Google SERPs are ever changing, I never understand agencies report on keyword movements every week or bi-weekly. Pointless really.
Reporting can be a pain, add the end of quarter SEO reports with end of quarter PPC reports for a search team and it can be a real time sucker with a bunch of metrics saying this goes up and this goes down, but nothing actionable. I think that is the biggest crime in these reports, agencies spend a huge amount of time producing a bunch of stats that have no real actionable data behind them.
Our dev team at Epiphany Solutions have spent many many months creating our own bespoke client dashboard for both SEO and PPC reporting purposes.
It is completely web based and our clients can login to their own private area whenever they wish and see how their campaign is running, all in real time.
I also believe there are whispers of an iPhone app version in the near future so clients can even login from their mobile phone if they so wish!
It has dramatically cut the manual process time of reporting, meaning our SEO and PPC teams can now be much more proactive using much of the time that we had to previously spend on reporting, actually planning out creative strategies for the campaign moving forward.
Granted this approach can be very expensive if outsourced or technologically demanding if taken in-house, but it is a great tool if you have the capacity to create one.
If a dashboard isn't feasable for you, I'd go down the route of a bit a Excel wizardry and automate as much as possible - but you would still be left with the time consuming tasks of data collection and presentation of the report.
I love reporting! Not only do I enjoy the process of gathering and analyzing data, formulating conclusions and writing suggestions. This is my time to shine. Show off those results!
Additionally it keeps me on track. Where am I in the process? Am I still on track with regards to my goals? Do I need to finetune any strategies? Without reporting I would be lost in the daily amount of data: links, 301s, indexed pages, html errors... Reporting is essential in my success.
Yes, the process of reporting can be time consuming. So set up your reports wisely as Sam explained and make sure you spent more time thinking than copy/pasting :)
Thanks for the response and it is nice (although always surprises me) to come acorss people so enthusiastic about reporting.
I, and I'm sure everyone else, would be most appreciative if you do have any tips beyond those I mentioned in terms of automating or "setting up reports wisely". I've seen a lot of reports in my day from a number of different agencies but I'm always interested to see what other folks have found as solutions.
Deal. When I have a little more time available I will try to put together something useful for the community. I'll let you know :)
Excellent post Sam!
Some great points I didnt consider until now.
I must thank you for the "Harvest" tip, it looks like a good software for me.
Cheers,
Timo Smeets
Thanks for that concise article. Yes, my niggest issue waqs getting people to understand any reports I sent them. But, over the years I have learned to simplyfy things so that the reports are useful and imformative to the client. When it comes to search engine optimization people usually do not have myuch of a clue so I have found simplicity is pretty much the key.
For me, I think you have to find a happy balance with reporting.
I report for all of my clients once per month. I try to make it fairly simple for them to follow as most clients do not have the time or technical knowledge to understand anything too indepth.
I focus on metrics such as number of linking domains, time on site, bounce rate, unique visits, number of landing pages, number of keywords found with etc, but also try to explain and educate as to why each of these are important.
I also include simple graphs that we can use to compare month on month and year on year if the client is with me for longer than 12 months which is normally the case. I will also include a section on what I will be doing over the next month and why, so that the client has an idea of the effort that is going into their campaign.
Basically needs to be brief and easy to understand or will be a total waste of your/clients time and money.
If any one is hiring you for $100/hour than I am sure he or she is not going to invest their one hour time in reading your long SEO reports and understanding them.
Instead of writing or making long reports with that blue and red dots, high rises building and all ... I would ask them how they would like to see the impact of our task and work on their business and on their website through search engines.
May be your clients do not know about SEO and all ... but one thing they sure understand is positive ROI. Simply show them that :)
Yes, reporting sucks - especially with all the different marketing channels we're using. Tracking facebook ad performance, likes, comments, twitter posts, multiple phone numbers for web vs print as well as different locations, adwords, backlinks, not to mention analyzing actual visitor performance - and then compiling into a report each month can certainly be a bit overwhelming.
I'm also a BIG believer in dashboards, and I agree the SAS solutions are pretty costly so they're a no go for most of our clients. I'm using GAdata-grabber from Mikael at Automate Analytics (with a little tweaking here and there) to automate as much as I can. The cool thing about that is it's a one-click refresh of all your predefined metric/dimension queries, so once you set them the way you want the following month's reports are ready in no time. It'll even export the charts right to Powerpoint, or update them if you've got them linked - pretty cool.
For most of my clients though, I use a simple one-page report that gives them the nitty gritty stats - phone calls, contact confirmations, branded vs non-branded visits, places performance and per visit goal value segmented by referral, visitor type, and keyword queries, automated ranking report. I'll also include a brief one/two paragraph wrap up of activity -listing anything I need from them or an explanation of why something happened. Even with that one page report though, I find myself spending too long - but I think that's my own fault since I'm a data junkie and tend to get lost in analysis.
In the end though, I find the clients who are having the most successful campaigns are also the one's who are least likely to bug me about reporting or what I've done, other than to say 'I don't what you're doing, but just keep doing it!' - I like those clients the best.
If you want bespoke seo tools, talk to the guys at orchidbox.com in London. I get to use some of their internal tools which make SEO life sooo much easier.
thanks Stepen..I checked these guys out just then and the tools seem to be really good. I'll give them a go I think. We need all the help we can get in thesearch engine optimization game.
[link removed]
Hi Sam,
Thanks so much for this excellent post! The good news for you and all the people who commented on how time consuming it is to prepare reports is that SEO platforms are getting better every day at automating this task. (Full disclosure that I am the CEO of BrightEdge). And reporting and automated dashboards is just a small part of what you get. Check out our site for more information on social media recommendations, business metrics integration, etc.
One quick point of clarification. You listed BrightEdge as US only but we launched global capabilities several months ago (see https://www.brightedge.com/2011-01-27-brightedge-first-to-take-seo-global). I hope you can fix this in your post.
On a personal note, I am going to be speaking in London at SMX Advanced Mid May and would love the opportunity to stop by and chat if you have a moment.
Best,
Jim Yu
CEO and Founder
BrightEdge
I removed the "(US Only)" verbiage from the post. :)
Thank you very much for fixing that for me Jen and thank you Jim for your comments! Please do feel free to email me or send me a personal message on here to set up some time to meet whilst you are in town for SMX as I think that would be great.
I would love to see some actual reports. They could be totally generic.
Cheers!
Oh man... reporting. This is an awesome article but still won't solve my problems. My entire team moans each time it gets close to reporting and everyone sees it as wasted time that could have been spent on link building or research. They're kind of right expect in a service based business you need to be able to defend your work and justify activities undertaken, celebrate wins and warn about risks... We already do automate most of the stuff but it's the data analysis and interpretation that takes time - and that will never change. You have to sit down, roll up your sleves and do the work on your own.
Also, I find that sending a report is not enough - you gotta followup by phone and go over it together. Good ideas pop up that way.
Reporting for me is done next week when I have some Omniture data to work with. But yeah it does get annoying at times and yeah it can take alot of time thats why you need to reduce time spent as much as possible but it is annoying when you have issues with tracking and what not.
But I agree with some of your points, people often are too busy in big business to go over every point about links and tracking metrics they want the top most important things in very quick fashion.
I guess my advice is to first do a big report see what metrics the client wants to have in future reports, once you take all this advice on hand you will then have a framework for future reporting =)
Reporting sucks! Especially when you know that your clients is not even interested in knowing how many links your get on your website. What are the bounce rate and other things all he is interested to know that what is the sales ratio, ROI and what he should expect in the next coming months.
Unfortunately, most agencies here prefer to send monthly reporting with all the graphically representation data that does not attract client.
The idea is great to create the separate reports for technical staff and a separate report for heads and directors, create each report according to their interest.
Also like the idea of showing the graph representation for links build instead of pulling out a excel sheet with all the links.
Sam, Thank you indeed… for sharing some great information
People who think reporting is just a waste of time just dont understand the importance of how it works. I belive reporting is an important task of organization. As it will show you where your weakness & strength lies in, which even makes reporting more important for the SEO field.
A reports are really useful in solving your problems & getting solutions for them. Sam has laid some simple, but yet most useful points you should while creating reports.
Woah...great post, especially as I'm in the middle of some reporting!
In terms of the monthly reports I'm a big fan of simple and to the point reporting. As you mentioned, catching up regularly with clients is also a big one. To me it all goes back to the very beginning of a project; agreeing on the best KPI's for that particluar client saves so much time (and stress) in reporting and the project as a whole!
Nice one!
Jon
Nice post! Reporting was my arch nemisis when i first got started.