Our agency is a big believer in data. We track website metrics, social media metrics, email marketing metrics, and pull in great tools like heatmaps to take things even further. However, a problem that can quickly arise is having too much data. It’s easy to build a giant report that shows everything, but the result of that is often that the key metrics get buried.
My friend Jake Albion recently put it this way on Facebook:
The biggest offenders tend to be digital marketing agencies and SEO agencies that send 100-page reports to their clients. It’s always a big red flag. Usually means it was outsourced by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing.
Experts know how to make things easy to understand, not harder.
It’s not unlike a famous quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter“. It takes work to refine a ton of data down into meaningful bits, but that work is essential.
In our case, we build custom dashboards that pull together the most meaningful metrics that our clients need to be aware of. We can certainly dig into the depths of Google Analytics as needed, but a 100-page report every month will simply be ignored.
Our dashboards work well, but really any method that you use to take lots of data and break it down is an excellent way to provide more value to those you serve.
