Giving a clear picture of the data Your report needs to analyze detail
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:15 am
This way you can limit the poorly attributed traffic polluting your marketing reports. 4. Avoiding bad data To reiterate: Our marketing reports should be useful to their recipients. Safe reports — ones that just cover basic metrics or cherry-pick data— do not add value. When writing your reports, avoid just choosing data that is “bad”. That is, data that obfuscates truth and hides issues. This can be through choosing metrics that, on the face of it, look good (like a low site-wide bounce rate), but in reality do not provide sufficient information to base decisions on.
For bounce rate to be a metric on which to base decisions, a reader would need to know what the bounce rate of individual pages were, or the type of content they contained, or even just whether the low bounce rate is coupled with a high engagement rate. Bad data can also be data that has been highlighted because it's positive, but at the expense of showing data that might reflect badly on the marketing activities. Showing that traffic to a webpage is growing may look great.
Not including the fact that conversion rate has steadily been declining could hide the issue of the decreasing quality of that traffic. For example, look at these two charts. They show the same organic traffic data to a webpage:
Chart showing organic traffic for a website. The first image shows just the organic traffic to the page. If an agency presented this image to a client, it would suggest that their work over the past year had been successful.
Organic traffic has almost doubled during those 12 months. Graph showing saudi arabia gambling data traffic increasing but leads decreasing for a website.
This second image uses the same organic traffic data, but adds in the leads generated by that traffic during the same time period. By adding in the leads generated by that organic traffic, you see a different story emerge of the success of that campaign. The traffic has increased but leads have decreased. There could be several reasons as to why that has happened, but this image would not suggest the recent SEO work has been successful in adding to their client’s business goals.
5. and display the data in a way that tells a story. This is the insight that adds value. Think of your report like a journey. You want to draw your reader into the data in a way that helps them to understand the context, the results, and the conclusions. Consider starting your report broad: What is the context of this data? Depending on your niche, this might include all sorts of related information like political background, weather data, economic factors, societal restrictions, COVID-19 case levels, etc.
For bounce rate to be a metric on which to base decisions, a reader would need to know what the bounce rate of individual pages were, or the type of content they contained, or even just whether the low bounce rate is coupled with a high engagement rate. Bad data can also be data that has been highlighted because it's positive, but at the expense of showing data that might reflect badly on the marketing activities. Showing that traffic to a webpage is growing may look great.
Not including the fact that conversion rate has steadily been declining could hide the issue of the decreasing quality of that traffic. For example, look at these two charts. They show the same organic traffic data to a webpage:
Chart showing organic traffic for a website. The first image shows just the organic traffic to the page. If an agency presented this image to a client, it would suggest that their work over the past year had been successful.
Organic traffic has almost doubled during those 12 months. Graph showing saudi arabia gambling data traffic increasing but leads decreasing for a website.
This second image uses the same organic traffic data, but adds in the leads generated by that traffic during the same time period. By adding in the leads generated by that organic traffic, you see a different story emerge of the success of that campaign. The traffic has increased but leads have decreased. There could be several reasons as to why that has happened, but this image would not suggest the recent SEO work has been successful in adding to their client’s business goals.
5. and display the data in a way that tells a story. This is the insight that adds value. Think of your report like a journey. You want to draw your reader into the data in a way that helps them to understand the context, the results, and the conclusions. Consider starting your report broad: What is the context of this data? Depending on your niche, this might include all sorts of related information like political background, weather data, economic factors, societal restrictions, COVID-19 case levels, etc.