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We let go of a contractor last week who made reports instead of delivering measurable results. He delivered an impressive number of reports and lists of reports, but couldn’t show business impact– revenue or leads.
Agencies and corporate marketers are most guilty of this behavior. They have a functional requirement to produce a document each week, dutifully delivered to the manager, who in turn delivers it to their boss.
They’re not sure exactly who is using the report or how, but it’s been a time-honored tradition:
- to produce TPS reports, instead of immediate results.
- to deliver fans instead of loyal purchasing customers.
- to focus on irrelevant metrics that don’t tie to ROI.
The antidote?
Use a framework we call Metrics-Analysis-Action.
Instead of focusing on reports, focus on the top 3 things you can easily do to create a business impact.
Those items will change every week, so your system must be flexible enough to accommodate it, instead of looking at the same metrics every week.
Reporting is PAINFUL (and pointless)
Think about your goals and how they apply to you. Everyone’s short on time, especially if you’re an individual business. Think about which of these goals apply to you, and which you have time for.
Making reports is almost always painful, and a waste of time. Unless you’re solving a particular business problem, it’s just a generation of charts- and a production of charts by any particular style won’t mean anything because the problem you’ll be solving will be different each time.
If someone DOES want a report, or you need to make a report, ask yourself: “So what?” – What do you intend to do based on the report? Reporting without some kind of intended action (change your landing page, change your offer, post more frequently) is pointless.
Reporting analytics is a proxy for what you intend to do to optimize your results. If you don’t have any data, then what is there to optimize?
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Here’s a fun example: If you’re the pilot of an airplane, what is the most important? Your velocity? Altitude? or your direction? If you say direction, sure- your plane needs to be pointed the right way, otherwise you’ll end up way off course. That one would be important mid-flight to make sure you’re going in the right direction, but what if you’re mid-flight and only at an altitude of 10 feet? At any point, any particular metric could seem out of whack.
If you say fuel- When you’re taking off and you have no fuel, that’s a problem. If you’re landing, and you have close to a full tank, that’s also a problem because you didn’t plan how much fuel you needed. If your altitude is 40,000 feet and you’re about to land in two minutes, you’re not going to make the runway.
Depending on where you are in the flight, there is a correct number to be at.
People ask us all the time “What’s the right CTR? Cost per fan?” – There is no solid answer. It depends on what vertical and situation you’re in. We wish there were particular numbers, but there’s over 300 metrics you can pull from Facebook (believe it! our database pulls all of the metrics available to us).
Have you ever looked inside of an airplanes cockpit? They’re full of dials, knobs, and gauges. If you’re a pilot, how do you know if any one of them are out of whack from all of these blinking lights and flickering numbers? This is the problem with analytics: Should they install even more gauges and alarms in the most sophisticated airplanes – maybe if there’s twice as many dials and knobs, then it will make everything safe, right? More is NOT better.
If you’re a small business and you do not have many fans (less than 500 ), and you’re spending less than $10.00 a day, analytics will probably not do very much because there’s not much traffic to analyze. This is also true in Google Analytics. If you do not have much data coming to your website like conversions, or if you are a new business, you can safely disregard analytics for now. Remember: without data, there is nothing to optimize, which means few decisions for you to make.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.