Nowadays, there’s so much effort and innovation around creating highly visual reports and pumping out data, often without any insights or actionability. This week alone, I saw multiple LinkedIn articles on learning Python to mine data and create amazing visualizations. None of these articles mentioned mining insights for actionable activities.
My other pet peeve is reporting for the sake of reporting. So much so that I’d say, probably for the past ten years, I’ve been anti-report and only will do them when there is something meaningful and actionable to report.
I recently met with a prospect, and they were concerned that there was no reporting with Hreflang Builder. I asked them what reports they expected to see. They wanted performance reporting to show how well hreflang was doing, the application’s ROI, and the number of pages with hreflang.
I explained that their existing analytics and ranking tools should indicate how well hreflang worked. The same goes for the ROI, assuming an increase in correct market visits and minimizing cart abandonment, which comes from their analytics.
I told them we have reporting that directly relates to what we do with the application. The update report tells you how many and what pages were mapped and increases and decreases with each update. Turns out they wanted charts, not just numbers. They also wanted to import these graphs easily into their other reporting. They needed to show that the software was “doing something for them” to justify its cost. By the way, they were paying $25 per month for the subscription. If you justify the ROI on a $25 subscription, you have bigger problems.
They wanted a chart of changes month over month, like what URLs came in and what went out of the system. We have a change report of the number of URLs and URLs mapped. They wanted a report to tell them how many errors we found in their XML sitemaps, the number of pages without alternates, and a master list of unmapped pages. All of these can be exported. There is just no dashboard or graphs. Turned out they wanted us to build all of these so that they could stop licensing other SEO tools.
A few of these are interesting reports, and we could build them, but we have our hands full trying to develop ways to match pages to each other and do it at scale. That is far more important than creating pretty charts and graphs. Like many things recently, I have been trying to figure out why I resist certain topics. I believe one reason goes back to when I was a kid, working for my father. There were reports on service call trip reports, but they were often tossed into a cabinet and never used for anything. I asked my father why, and he said that operations guys used to look at the data to try to make things more efficient. However, the next guy didn’t believe in it but never told us to stop doing them.
I encountered a similar reporting frustration with my first job out of the Marine Corps. There was a report that took just about a week to do and would result in a three-inch binder. My group would collect all the reports from all the different departments, clean them up, organize the information, and create the big district report. During the first few months, I pulled out key insights, action items, and requests and added them to the front of the report.
Once I knew our performance metrics, I called them out and plotted how we were doing. I saw that our two key KPIs were declining. I tried to align them with various documented issues, ideas, and recommendations from multiple teams. Like a proper assistant manager, I added post-it notes to flag key issues and areas of concern. The next day, the binder was in her outbox with a note to send it to Corporate HQ and file our copy. The following month, I gave her the report, and wanted to review some of the issues I had identified. She said she trusted me and didn’t need to look at it and send it to HQ. It was a great ego boost, but at the same time, I realized that if she wasn’t looking at it and the regional director was not looking at it, how would they be aware of the issues?
About six months later, I was at corporate and brought our reports and asked who to give them to. I was told to remove the oldest, put it in the archive file box, and add the new one to the shelf. I looked at the review sheet for the previous year’s report in the front of the binder, which had the rolls of all the people who were supposed to review and initial it. None had initials. It seems no one was reviewing them.
I questioned why we had to do the reports if nobody looked at them and if there were sections we could remove. A week later, the person I spoke to was gone, so I started doing interesting things with the report. I would put a picture of a cat, something from Disney, or a section with music lyrics. Once, I even included a list of winners from the Academy Awards. I did these sorts of silly things, assuming that, at some point, someone would read the report and question the nonsense I added.
Months and months went by, and I got a call from the latest of many HQ senior directors. She stated that “somebody on your team was being funny with the reports.” Your reports have music lyrics or Disney characters. I just said, “In 18 months, you’re the first person that’s ever said anything about it, which means you’re the first person, other than those who spent a week building this report, to look at it.” She’s told me to book a flight to San Francisco for the following week to go through the reporting, meet with some folks, see what we need, what we don’t need.”
Interestingly, none of the people we met with had any idea this report existed. Half of them thought there was one or two pieces of data in it that would be helpful; half of them said they already got that data from other sources. So, in the end, we didn’t need to spend a week collecting data.
Ten years later, at IBM, we would take 10-12 days to aggregate data. Depending on whether it is monthly or quarterly, I would produce a 30 to 100-page deck on all the great things we did: insights, traffic changes, high-performing phrases, and how we were tracking the various KPIs. What frustrated me was doing this work for a report, and maybe they would use two graphs from the report, and the actual report element was summed in one calculation on the executive dashboard.
In the quarterly meetings, we would sit through many of these decks bored out of our minds, learning nothing other than we did a bunch of cool things and spent a lot of money. We always ran out of time when it came to my reporting. I used to ask, “Why do I need to do all of this? Who’s looking at this?” The answer was always, “We need it, management requires it” “We must demonstrate value, blah, blah, blah.” But nothing ever happens with it. We never make changes.
In our agency, we tried to streamline reporting to what mattered. Demonstrating what tasks we completed and showing the business impact. We created a set of data mining analyses called “30 Minutes to Search Greatness.” These were a series of data points that identified opportunities and anomalies like warning lights in a car. Oil pressure\’s low – okay, alert tells us we must add oil. More importantly, it also triggered the question of why we are losing oil.
The idea was this set of data points would give us several actionable tasks to work on that week. All of these were measurable and would allow the positive outcome to help show we were actively working on the project and identifying actions that would further move the performance needs.
Many managers don’t question reporting and simply continue to do it because they always have, management wants it, or it makes people look busy. Maybe it is even part of the dreaded consulting by the pound. Either way, maybe it is time to look at your reporting and decide if it is necessary and actionable.
