There are three key aspects that differentiate a good report from a bad one. All of which are determined well before the first piece of data is even looked at.
The problem with most reports, and the reason that they end up being a waste of everyone’s time, is that these three aspects are often brushed aside or completely ignored.
The three questions that need to be answered before any report is started are:
This sounds unbelievably simple, maybe that is why these questions are so often overlooked – people just assume that everyone is on the same page. From my experience however, this is almost never the case. As they say, assumption is the mother of all f*** ups.
So let’s break each of these questions down.
Who is it for?
This is probably the most important aspect of any report. Designing a report without knowing who it is for is about as useful as one-size-fits-all running shoes. Sure, you have a report, but it’s far more of a pain than it is useful.
It baffles me that in an industry where audiences are defined for every campaign and every ad, it is rare to find a report that is designed for a specific audience.
Your audience doesn’t need to be a specific person (it might very well be though), it could be a team of people or in some cases could include everyone in the company. Nevertheless, defining this up front helps with all of the decisions down the line, as you will see.
What decisions will it impact?
This is closely tied to the previous question. Without defining who the report is for, it can be difficult to recognise the decisions that the report will impact. For example:
As you can imagine each of these reports would contain very different data.
How is it consumed?
This refers to whether the “report” is in fact a report, or whether it is a dashboard – a written document or an excel file? Does it contain raw data, only findings or a combination of the two? Will it be printed or looked at online? Is it interactive?
This is generally impacted by both who it is designed for and the decisions it will impact.
A CEO that struggles to open their email might be best off with a printed PDF that contains a neat summary and some supporting graphs. Someone that is performing daily optimizations on a Google Ads account however, would probably find an online dashboard for more useful.
Putting this to use
Now that you’ve answered the above questions, you can get stuck in with designing your solution. While I am not going to go into the details of how to build a report or dashboard in this blog post, I will leave you with a couple of useful points to consider during the planning phase and how these tie into the questions we have just posed.
If you are able to answer all of the above questions, you are well on your way to creating an impactful report. If you would like help getting answers to these questions or help with putting together a report that drives action, feel free to drop me a message.