Eric Siu explains how to build reports that actually matter to stakeholders. Pick the few KPIs that align with their goals, not every metric you can measure. For social media, focus on engagement rate; for SEO, track backlinks, domain authority, and keyword rankings. A client confused by a bloated report became happy once it was stripped down to what mattered.
Hey, how's it going? Today we're going to talk about how to create reports that will dazzle your stakeholders. So let's go. When you think about reporting, it's really easy to get overwhelmed because there's so many metrics out there, right? Engagement rate, how many likes, how many shares, how many downloads, how many clicks am I getting? All this like different stuff. You don't want to get overwhelmed. So my first tip for you is to actually focus on what metrics or KPIs are important to your business. If you're working with clients, for example, it's really important to figure out what their goals are, because if you come up with a bunch of random KPIs, metrics, that they don't care about, they're not going to care about your report. So it doesn't matter how cool your software is when it comes to reporting. Look, there's a ton of reporting softwares out there, right? There's Report Garden, there's DashThis as well. I mean, you can use enterprise-level reporting as well, which would cost you 4 or 5, maybe even 7 figures a year to use that kind of stuff. You got to align first with the stakeholders and then from there you can figure out what makes the most sense in relation to this specific question. For us around social media, it's like what metrics should you— should we look at? So the metrics that I suggest that you take a look at are around engagement rate, because it doesn't matter if you're posting all the time, it doesn't matter if you're getting a lot of followers, if people aren't engaging with you, if the right people aren't engaging with you, you're in trouble, 'cause you're putting all this effort out there, and you're not really getting anything in return. Social media, the point of that is to go out there and engage with people, it's to actually communicate with people. It's not, it's never really changed anything, human connection has always been there, we're always trying to communicate with each other. A couple months ago, we added this reporting tool, and we just threw a bunch of metrics at our clients, right? Someone from the team implemented it, And what we found was that it wasn't that interesting to the client because it was too overwhelming. And when we changed some of our reporting over to just focus on a couple of key metrics, so for example, SEO report, what we did was we focused in on the number of links that were being built, the domain authority of those links, and they got to see every single one of those links and then they got to see the rankings. That's all they cared about. They saw the rankings going up, they saw the metrics, they saw all the links there, and they also looked at Google Analytics and they looked at their traffic is going up and to the right. It doesn't matter all this other stuff we're talking about, domain authority, indexing power, content gap, all this different stuff. People are busy. Make it simple. Keep it simple. Keep it stupid. All right. With that being said, you just learned how to make reports that dazzle. Don't forget to watch the next marketing video and let us know which tools you plan to use for your reporting. Are you going to use Report Garden? Are you going to use DashThis? Are you going to make your own? Who knows? Drop it in the comment. Don't forget to subscribe.
