So What? Updating your reports for the new year

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on updating your reports for the new year. We walk through how to audit your existing reports, create processes and communicate changes to your stakeholder. Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• How to audit your existing reports
• Creating processes around the maintenance of your reports
• Communicating the changes to your stakeholders

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Unknown Speaker 0:25
Well, hey, happy Thursday, everyone, welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show, I’m joined by John and Chris, I hope you didn’t miss us too much. Last week, we were all on site at an event. But this week, we are back in our respective homes and we are bringing the show to you live. I don’t have my good microphone set up yet. So I don’t know why I’m even bothering. Let’s get ready to podcast. There you go. On this week’s show, we are talking about updating your reports for the new year. And really what we want to do is sort of walk through auditing your reports sort of where they exist, and updating them in terms of the process and the output. If you have new technology. If you’re switching platforms, this is something that you don’t necessarily have to do for the new year, I probably actually would recommend you don’t wait until the new calendar year rolls around. You should probably be auditing, your reporting, at least quarterly at a minimum.

Unknown Speaker 1:25
But we’ll be talking about how to audit them creating new processes around the maintenance of your reports. And, most importantly, communicating those changes to your stakeholders. Because as you make changes, the data itself will likely change. And then what you don’t want is John, you know, reaching out to you at nine o’clock on a Friday night going. Why did all my MQLs drop? Where’d they go? What the heck, Katie fix the report. And I would say go to bed. John.

Unknown Speaker 1:51
That happens all the time.

Unknown Speaker 1:54
So Chris, where would you like to start this week? Oh, that’s up to you. You are the chief executive, you are the stakeholder. So I guess I would start with

Unknown Speaker 2:05
do we do you have specific user stories for the reports that you care about the most because we got tons reports. We got Google Analytics 4 and Hubspot and Tag Manager and Search Console, we got Data Studio Looker studio, we’ve got our own multi channel funnel, multi touch attribution reports we got we got reports galore like we got we are the report superstore. But

Unknown Speaker 2:29
it’s like having a supermarket full of groceries, if you don’t have a recipe and you don’t know what you’re cooking, the groceries don’t really help. Well, I went to the store earlier, and I didn’t have a recipe I was just hungry.

Unknown Speaker 2:40
So I didn’t tell you end up with like four cartons full of hose.

Unknown Speaker 2:45
Fair.

Unknown Speaker 2:48
Been there done that? Yeah. Well, in terms of my user story, it would be as the CEO, I want to update our most used reporting with the latest tools that we’re using to collect data, which is still fairly vague. And I would sort of, you know, point back at myself and say, You need to get more specific. And so I would say,

Unknown Speaker 3:12
you know, if we take a look at formally Data Data Studio, now Looker, which is a moronic name,

Unknown Speaker 3:21
that I would say, you know, I want to update these reports with what our updated KPIs are,

Unknown Speaker 3:32
you know, how do I know so, you know, I’m looking at sessions, I’m looking at active users, that doesn’t tell me if I’m hitting my goal or not, it just tells me what is so that might be a good place to start.

Unknown Speaker 3:46
But also, even before I get to that, I would want to make sure that these reports are using the right data that I’m looking at the right metrics, those kinds of things. Got it. Okay, so from so that’s our purpose, then

Unknown Speaker 4:03
we are we are all the people that would be involved in this presumably, process wise, the first place that you generally go for any report for the auditing is to your point figuring out what data is going into that report. So this one here this is using this report is believe using both Google Analytics 3 Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. So this report is kind of got a blend of the two so that you can see sort of do an apples to apples side by side. And if we go into so in, in Looker studio, if we go to Manage edit data sources, we might want to take a look to see are these are these data sources current so I’m going to hit the edit button here and just hit refresh and say okay, cool. So it’s up to date. There’s there’s no new data that accidentally snuck its way in. So from a if this was cooking, or at least our ingredients haven’t changed, right, we can

Unknown Speaker 5:00
We did not show up in our kitchen one day, and all the apples have been replaced with pomegranates. They are we still have a barrel of apples. I guess the next point then is from a process perspective, what What decisions do you make with this information?

Unknown Speaker 5:20
Well, I mean, there’s two things on on this.

Unknown Speaker 5:26
On this dashboard, one is goal completions. And so I can see, basically goal completions by Channel and goal completions by source. And so as I’m looking at this, the decision that I am making is which channels are working, which channels need a little bit of love. Now, this is obviously not any sort of a proper attribution report, this is literally a last touch, you know, this is the channel that last, you know, helped convert the person. And so being mindful of that as well, when looking at this, this is not an attribution. When I look at the sidebar, I can see, you know, for the time period, you know, total number of goal completions is down. That’s something I need, I mean, pretty much everything except for returning users is down. And so that tells me that I have a lot of work to do in terms of getting, you know, the figuring out what’s not working on the website that would be causing this, or what change in our overall marketing that’s causing these numbers to go down.

Unknown Speaker 6:37
The challenge, I think we’re running into here, though, is, you know, if you think about your role as a CEO, and our role as marketers,

Unknown Speaker 6:48
do any of these

Unknown Speaker 6:50
measures on here, communicate clearly that we’re doing our jobs that we’re being held accountable or not.

Unknown Speaker 6:59
Not necessarily, because what’s not on here for me is revenue. What’s not on here for me is, you know, total number of active clients and that so I, as much as I care about what’s happening on the website, what I right now, where my head is, is I care a little bit more about, you know, our pipeline and our revenue, which is related back to the website. And so I kind of need a blend of both. And right now, that’s not reporting that we currently have for Trust Insights. Right? So at this point, then, from a process perspective, you have you have a very clear purpose. What would we do to get to that point? What would you direct the marketing team and the analytics team to say, like, yeah, guys, that these reports are not doing the job, I would want to see a

Unknown Speaker 7:55
breakdown of numbers of every stage of the funnel to say, you know, are we up or down in terms of our, you know, are we driving awareness? So that would be, you know, new users to the website? Are we doing that? Are we getting people to fill out a form, that’s our engagement. And so breaking it down that way,

Unknown Speaker 8:15
would be more helpful for me to be able to see, you know, a blend of the website data plus our CRM data

Unknown Speaker 8:25
broken down by our funnel. Okay. How do we,

Unknown Speaker 8:31
if you are, if you are a project manager, how do we build it out from a requirements perspective, because I have, in my head, a whole bunch of things that we could do, right, we could pull data from the Hubspot API, we could pull data from Google’s GA for date API, we could pull data from the Mautic marketing automation system and make a complex model. But I get the sense that that might not be the best approach to just start doing things. And if you’re asking me in terms of what I need to see, I don’t want to or I don’t need to see something complex. To make a decision, what I need to be able to do is look at a set of numbers, be able to digest it quickly and say, Okay, I know what’s not working, what is working.

Unknown Speaker 9:18
And so sort of the way that I would envision it is, you know, I have basically, you know, whatever our you know, sales journey looks like so if all the way from awareness to purchase, breaking it down into like four or five buckets of numbers, and just looking at those numbers and having the conversion rates between each of those things. And then that would tell me, okay, things are going up, things are going down, and then an overall revenue number. Okay? So we’d have to then figure out, if that’s the purpose, we’d have to figure out

Unknown Speaker 9:54
the mechanism, the platform for doing that, because that’s not something that exists for

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Right now, right, which is why I don’t have it?

Unknown Speaker 10:05
And thus, why we’re here. Exactly. But if we’re, I would imagine that probably a lot of other stakeholders have similar requests. How how do how should they communicate those requests to, you know, their teams in a way that’s productive, not just saying, hey, I want this and I want it tomorrow.

Unknown Speaker 10:25
You know, they need to communicate it in a way that explains sort of the five fees, it’s, you know, what is the problem I am trying to solve, because what ends up happening is what I think I need versus what I actually need, or sometimes two different things.

Unknown Speaker 10:42
And so

Unknown Speaker 10:44
I need to be able to articulate what it what it actually is that I’m trying to do. So what I’m trying to do was understand the different steps of our funnel, so that I can fix what’s not working. So if I can share my screen, let me see if I can do this without breaking the whole

Unknown Speaker 11:05
presentation, I have a very basic spreadsheet that I’ve been keeping since 2019, as you can see on the tabs. And so I have and this is last year’s data, I have all these different metrics going down the side, and this is something that I capture twice a month. Because any more than that, it just, I just don’t have the time to do it. And so what I’ve done over here on the side, if you can see is I’ve basically created that very basic funnel. So I have my audience, my awareness, my prospects, leads, deals and closed one. And so this at a very, very basic level tells me

Unknown Speaker 11:48
the,

Unknown Speaker 11:51
the stages, the stages, the conversions between each. And so the good news is we have a great win rate. And something we know from last year is that our data entry into our CRM wasn’t as good as it should be. And that’s something we’ve worked on for this year. And so I would look at this and go, What is going on with these three numbers, what part of the process is broken?

Unknown Speaker 12:18
And so that’s how I would start to use it. So I think in terms of gathering requirements, having a stakeholder who’s having a hard time articulate what they want, have them do a demo a hands on demo, and you, the engineer or the project manager or whoever, watch what they’re doing, and ask them questions, because it’s, it’s a lot like running

Unknown Speaker 12:44
a usability study or a focus group, you give someone like a physical thing to work with. And you say, and you don’t give them instruction, just say, you know, show me how you fill the cart and check it out on this website. And you watch the patterns that they go through, you watch the steps that they take, and then you can start to figure out, Okay, it looks like they’re having a hard time finding the Add to Cart button. That’s something I need to fix, you know, so you don’t necessarily say, Do you know where the Add to Cart button is personally like? Of course I do. But then it takes them 20 Different clicks to find it. And so it’s a lot like that. So I would say if you’re working with someone who thinks they know what they want, but they’re having a hard time articulating it, have them walk through a demo, or have them show you here are the eight different spreadsheets I use to get to this answer. And then you as the data engineer, and the project manager can be like, Okay, there’s a better way to do this. This is what that looks like. Got it. Let’s talk about auditing reports for a second too, because I think there’s there’s some value in there. Suppose we have this report, this is our multi touch attribution report. How would we go about auditing reports? Suppose like, what would I be trying to do to audit just say that it’s useful? It’s not useful? What what does an audit report involve? The first, the first thing you do is what question Does this report answer? What decisions can you make from this report? So John, you know, you talk a lot with prospects about the digital customer journey report, which is what we’re looking at. So when you’re talking with them, what do you tell them in terms of and then this report answers that question, or what, you know, what decisions can they make? Yeah, this report is huge for them, because it verifies the channels that they’re already working from, you know, when you show them a first cut of it, it’s okay, like, this is where we see your campaign should be prioritized. I mean, if you’re in a budgeting cycle, you’d be looking at this and your percentage of spend would match the returns based on the size of those channels. So the biggest thing is the first gut check of like, okay, you know, we from this, we would presume that you are spending 80% of your time on email, is that the case and that they’re like, oh, yeah, no one person does that on

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Beside, realigning all that kind of stuff is huge, because we see so many clients that, you know, they’re messing around with Facebook ads, and then we run this report and see that it’s less than 1% of their overall marketing activity and stuff that they’re bringing in. It really highlights, you know, what is supposed to be happening in reality. And then the other half of it is just if it opens up questions, you know, they’ll see things and there’ll be like, Oh, I didn’t know that this program was still running. And I didn’t realize that that program was not doing anything at all.

Unknown Speaker 15:28
So it’s, you know, verify what you already know, and then start to ask some more interesting questions. That’s kind of the two biggest gaps that this thing brings to light.

Unknown Speaker 15:37
Does every part of report need to answer a question?

Unknown Speaker 15:43
No, it doesn’t. And that’s, that’s where

Unknown Speaker 15:48
the structure of the report is essential. And so this is why I personally always like to have that executive summary, those key takeaways that you can immediately answer, like, this is what I need to know, if I look at nothing else, I need to look at the executive summary slide. So I know what the heck is in this report. And so to me, that is the most important part of the report is the bullet points of like, what is the data telling me? What actions can I take? What decisions can I make? And then the rest is just context? Got it. So for this report, we have we have two different actions to take. One is for Spotify, and then one was is for removing an ad server. That seems like pretty clear decision making, but it doesn’t make a lot of decisions. It doesn’t, and that doesn’t tell me at a glance.

Unknown Speaker 16:47
You know, organic search is starting to suffer, you need to do something about it, or you’re over indexed on email, make sure you’re balancing a little bit more, and you do get that information in the rest of the report. Absolutely. But in terms of, you know, if you’re asking me my personal use case, I find this report informative, but not actionable. Okay, so how would we change that? Because we’re talking about auditing our reports, and then making changes so that they’re more useful. Like we have this referring sources report, this one tells you where your traffic referring traffic is from? When I see this, I interpret this as

Unknown Speaker 17:30
which sites are giving us extra traffic for free. And the decision I would make is, if there’s a site here that I don’t recognize, to reach out to them, say so like, nps.edu?

Unknown Speaker 17:43
Who is that? And maybe it’s somebody if it’s a school, you know, should we be talking to them and saying, like, hey, or do you need more of our contents? If that was something we cared about Content Marketing Institute, we know, we know who those folks are, we know that.

Unknown Speaker 17:59
When they ask us for contributed content, it does well, it sends traffic back to us. So that would be an opportunity, we want to continue to nurture, right, but you have to understand that context of the data on the report in order to make that decision. And so if I’m putting myself in the shoes of someone who’s not in the weeds with the data, like I am with you, then I would look at this and go, What the heck am I looking at? And I think that that’s one of the things that as you’re gathering requirements, and building out reporting and telling those stories with the data.

Unknown Speaker 18:34
That’s the that’s sort of the kiss of death, is if someone says, What the heck am I looking at, I don’t get it, their brain has already moved on to something else, because they’re no longer engaged in what it is you’re trying to show them. And what it is you’ve worked so hard to put together. Gotcha. So what, what should I do differently with this report for someone like you, or someone like John,

Unknown Speaker 18:59
it needs to, at least from my opinion, needs to have some actions. And so in this report,

Unknown Speaker 19:06
you know, part of it is knowing the business and sort of knowing what’s important to the person that you’re sharing it with. And so this particular slide should give me guidance of, you know,

Unknown Speaker 19:20
you know,

Unknown Speaker 19:22
it looks like you’re getting great referral traffic from, you know, whatever that second one down is, see if you can get more content placed on that, or, you know, it looks like there’s some spam on here, have your marketing team reach out to them and see if you can get whatever links those are removed or whatever the actions are. And then I’ll look at that go okay, got it that goes on the punch list. I can delegate that out and I can get that done. So that when I see this report again next month, I can see that those things were taken care of. Got it. Okay, so call outs and then and boiling up how many

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Different action items should you try to cut to to distill, because I mean, from this report alone, there’s probably a good two or three different action items. Well, and so I think that whatever the actions are, are fine. Like, if there’s three actions on this particular slide, that’s great. But that then you, I would take all of those individual actions and roll them back up into the key takeaways, so that it’s matching. And so I can either just look at the takeaway slides, and trust that, that that’s what the data is telling me or I can go through with each individual department and go, Okay, SEO team, these are your actions, here’s why email marketing team, these are your actions. And so for us, we don’t have all those different teams. And so for me, it’s more helpful to see all the actions in one place. So it’s in two places, it’s on the individual slides, and then rolled up into a punch list. Got it? Okay, so from a lead generation perspective, you know, this is what our lead generation looks like, right now we have email being 79% of our leads, followed by public speaking, then slack, Google search, some referral traffic, Twitter,

Unknown Speaker 21:10
that Facebook and LinkedIn. So what for from a your position as as a decision maker? What decisions do you want to make from this? So one of the challenges with this particular report? And I’ve mentioned this, you know, just offline is that I can’t, this doesn’t give me a month over month comparison. So yep, females up, but what was it last minute. So now I have to go back, find the other report. And then try to put the two together and say, Wait, what am I so there’s, I don’t have a sense of if that’s better or worse than the previous period of time. And so I can only say, well, a Slack is doing good, do more of it, that’s great. I can’t say slack is doing better than it was last month. So those five things that you’ve been doing in that channel, are working, keep doing it, or those five things that you were doing, have decreased the number of leads that have come in from Slack. So take a look at that tactic and see if it’s actually worth doing or if it’s worth the time. That’s the challenge I have with this particular kind of report is, I have no idea if it’s better or worse, and trying to compare it to the previous month, is really difficult. And even if you have it like slide one, and then slide two, flipping back and forth. By the time I get to slide two, I’ve already forgotten what was on slide one. And so that to me, as a decision maker, I would have a very hard time making a thoughtful decision without more information. Okay, so as as a developer, then how do we fix this, right? Because the process for the requirement is pretty straightforward. We need we need comparison to the previous time period.

Unknown Speaker 23:00
But now we’re talking about, thankfully, this is our own software. But suppose you’re using straight out of the box Google Analytics, it just won’t do that. What what do you do in those cases. So if you scroll up to the previous slide, where it’s the roll up of all the channels, if nothing else, something that would be helpful is some indication of this channel is performing better or worse than the previous month. And then I can dig into the details on the next slide. So, you know, even if it’s like, you know, and please don’t start including this report, but that’s just an example. Even if it’s a goofy, like, you know, a red arrow up or a thumbs up, like, you know, it’s up 2% from last month. And so that would be a manual thing that you would add in, but it’s just to this one slide so that I the decision maker, look at it go. Okay, socials doing better things, got it, keep doing what we’re doing on social and then I can look at the individual channels to see which channels are contributing. I’m totally gonna load the library into our Please do not do this.

Unknown Speaker 24:09
smiley faces everywhere. Exactly.

Unknown Speaker 24:13
Money with wings, you can give me the passive aggressive thumbs up.

Unknown Speaker 24:18
Okay, so that’s auditing reports, then, you know, this is this is the process is looking at each report and deciding what to do with it. Well, and that’s, yeah, essentially. And so there’s, it’s deciding what to do with it, but then also auditing the data sources themselves. And that might not be an exercise that you need to do with the stakeholder. It’s, you know, once you get the information from the person who is receiving the port, the person who is making the decisions with the report, you can then take all of that feedback and go, Okay, we’ve been looking at Google Analytics data, but really, we need to be looking at Facebook data to answer that question. And so that that becomes part of the audit is

Unknown Speaker 25:00
is, you know, is this still answering questions? So it’s sort of the six C’s of data quality, is the data clean? Is it chosen? Is it correct? Is it answering the question being asked, and when you first started creating the report, perhaps it did. But if you are auditing it on a regular basis, the goals are going to change, the questions are going to change, the decisions are going to change. The data source might also change. How do how do we sound? It sounds like there’s a lot of work. How do we create a process around? Well, it’s why people don’t do it. Exactly. And it’s, you know, from a technical perspective, because we’ve not been doing it, we’ve accumulated a lot of technical debt on this, you know, at the moment, right now, this kind of is kind of an opportune time, because we have to rewrite all these reports for Google Analytics, 4, we have to switch data sources, we’re not being given a choice. So as this is happening, we have a chance to reboot things. So how do we create a process around the maintenance of these reports so that

Unknown Speaker 26:05
they don’t continue to accumulate technical debt? Well, once we’ve made these changes?

Unknown Speaker 26:12
I mean, you really put me on the spot today, my my friend, I am because you are the master of all things. I am just the, the the ball of barely chaos.

Unknown Speaker 26:27
And John, where do you fit into this equation? I always get the end result of the report. So

Unknown Speaker 26:33
here’s the thing, let’s do it. Well, and I guess, as a stakeholder, John, you know, before we move on, are there things you know that you would want to have different? Because you know, it’s and that sort of where digging into this is helpful, because I’m not the only stakeholder of this report. I’m a stakeholder in terms of decision maker, John’s a stakeholder in terms of he needs to convince other stakeholders that they also need this report. And so is there anything missing from the report that you would need or anything that’s not useful?

Unknown Speaker 27:06
No, it’s interesting, though, the thing that made me think about is that there’s kind of another class of reports, too, because this is all roll up in strategic stuff. But the reports reports that I always live and die by are like the daily notification reports and things that are saying like, Okay, here’s the three that came in last night, let’s go dig into those and see what’s going on. So it’s a lot more like smoke alarm stuff than strategic reports.

Unknown Speaker 27:28
But yeah, and you bring up another great point, you know, with clients, it is it’s all about, you know, are they willing and able to do these strategic looks, you know, a lot of people just don’t even want to go look in the junk drawer or the back closet, because they’re afraid of what they’re gonna find. And so that is a filtering mechanism for us, we kind of know that. Look, if you’re the kind of person that dodges the truth, when it’s inconvenient, then odds are, you’re never going to be a customer for us. Because you know, now and then there’s bad news, and you need to be able to take that.

Unknown Speaker 28:00
But yeah, it’s really just who is brave enough to kind of go in and look at all the channels and figure out where to go. And then unfortunately, we can’t give you any going forward. If there’s some data, we can do go forward predictions, but otherwise, there’s another step to you have to take of like, Okay, do we double down on something we already have? Or do we try and increase something that we think is not doing as well as it should? And so that is one thing that we have seen from prospects is like, they don’t want the full details, they would rather just have like, give me your top three things that we need to do from this stuff. And that’s a blind spot for us, too, because we don’t realize that they’re not reading these reports every day like we are, you know, if they’re getting them thrown at them once a month, it’s a little bit different thing. And so the the summary and handholding is actually a big part of the service.

Unknown Speaker 28:43
No, and that that totally makes sense. So Chris, to your question about, you know, what is the process for auditing?

Unknown Speaker 28:51
Shocker of all shockers, it starts with documentation? And so Alfred, you’re gonna say that? Well,

Unknown Speaker 28:58
you said in the past,

Unknown Speaker 29:02
in order to audit something and know that you have all the pieces, you first need to know what the pieces are. And that starts with some kind of documentation, you know, who uses it? What decisions do they make? What are the data sources? What is the frequency, what is the, you know, data storage, all of those things, basically, dissecting every piece of the report into some kind of a checklist or an organized document so that as you’re auditing these, you will, you don’t have to redo that discovery. You’ve done it and so it’s documented the requirements as you’re building the thing. So then you have those requirements, say, this is what we built. So then when you go to audit it, you can say, is this still what we need? And then you’re updating that document to say this is what’s changed. That’s the essence of, you know, project management. And so making sure that you’re collecting all of the data, and then delivering back

Unknown Speaker 30:00
What people have asked for.

Unknown Speaker 30:02
So if I am auditing my reports for the coming year, and I’m trying to a reduce the number of reports, because I got 47 reports on my desk every month,

Unknown Speaker 30:14
do you?

Unknown Speaker 30:16
How do you start to winnow that down? Do you construct a user story for every report? Or do you start the other end to construct like a user story for every KPI and then say, do the reports we have? Answer this user story? Definitely the latter. Because I can come up with a reason to keep every single report it’s like, you know, sorting through your clothes, I can come up with a reason to keep T shirts that I’ve had for 20 years, but am I ever really going to wear them? Or is it more of like an assault thing? Probably the nostalgia? I don’t actually need to keep it have i worn it in two years? Probably not.

Unknown Speaker 30:54
You know, and so it’s starting with, because if you ask people report by report, they’re gonna give you reasons to not, you know, start to take that one off the table. But if you start with what is the actual problem that you’re trying to solve? What are the actual goals and metrics and KPIs that you need to track? Then you can say, great, so you have all of these reports? 46 of the 47 do not answer that question. So let’s just start with the one that does answer that question. And so, you know, it doesn’t mean that you have to completely, you know, do like an end of life with all of the other reports, they just don’t get prioritized, right? Now, you can come back to those at another time. And that sort of the other piece of it is if you have, for example, four to seven reports, you don’t need to audit them all at once you can stagger them by priority. What do we do, we have reports that we don’t have control over. So this is a good example. This is Google Analytics 4. This is the attribution modeling, which is somehow in the advertising section. I don’t know why they do that. But and what we’re looking at here is this is lead generation. So I’ve chosen the the conversions and Google Analytics 4, for our website, that that lead to a form fill.

Unknown Speaker 32:09
And what we’ve got is essentially a funnel, right, we can see

Unknown Speaker 32:14
which channels participate sort of early touchpoints. Early on, we have 19% of the conversion occurs here, we have the mid funnel, which is 26%. And then we have the last the late touchpoints, the thing that really pushes somebody over at the end, and we can see organic social is sort of the secondary channel, right pine email, email is the dominant channel across all three, organic social is, is number two, we have organic search number three,

Unknown Speaker 32:42
to your point, we have, we can make at least some cursory decisions here we can say like, for example, it looks like organic search really should be bigger than this, like, clearly, something’s not working well, if organic search is just not is such a tiny fraction. We might not be doing a great job there. But we don’t know compared to the previous period, maybe it’s improving,

Unknown Speaker 33:05
you’d have to do a little date change and change right there to do that. The fact that you can’t see them together means that you’re already losing the person who needs to make the decision. I am not going to make decisions with this particular report, because to me, it’s just bars. I don’t have enough information to move budgets around or decide whether or not to reallocate people or to say for certain, yeah, you’re doing a great job with email. Because what this doesn’t tell me and I know based on how the goal is set up is all form fills, what I care about is Contact Form fills. And so this is only because I know our system and how it set up. This doesn’t tell me that this could also be people who are sign quote unquote, signing up for unsubscribe or contacting us to like, get me off your list. So for all I know, emails, great for getting people to unsubscribe, I would be making the absolute wrong decision because I don’t have enough context on this particular chart. Thankfully, we don’t count unsubscribes in this form, but you understand, I’m saying, so I don’t have control over the system. And I’m the person reporting to you, what do I do? So I like to I just start manually copying and pasting all the data into an Excel spreadsheet and then making a custom chart just for you so that it meets those requirements, because I can’t do it with this software. I think you just described 100% of the clients that come to us. And that’s exactly the problem is trying to do reporting in a system like this is a losing battle. And that’s why you know, when we talk about Google Analytics, for example, we say don’t try to do the reporting. Inside that system. You need to extract the data into something else like a Data Studio. That is go

Unknown Speaker 35:00
going to give you a little bit more flexibility

Unknown Speaker 35:05
to meet those requirements set by your stakeholder. And so finding the right tool for the job we just did a whole big workshop on this is half the battle, this is not the right tool for the job.

Unknown Speaker 35:19
Got it? All right, well, it sounds like my job as a marketer here is done that I’m not going to do anymore.

Unknown Speaker 35:26
I actually feel like it’s the opposite. I feel like you just gave yourself a heck of a lot of work to do.

Unknown Speaker 35:34
But that use case of I can’t get the tools to do what I want. So everything goes into Excel is 100% of our client base, even with today’s tools, even with tools like Looker studio and stuff, it’s still not meeting those requirements. So it sounds like as much as

Unknown Speaker 35:57
as much as piles of Excel spreadsheets laying around is not a long term sustainable option. It sounds like if you have very specific requirements that you’ve been very clear about. And you can’t get your tools to do that. But you can get Excel to do that. You’ve met the requirements.

Unknown Speaker 36:17
Right? And so then you give that sheet back to me and say, Can you make a decision with this? And I say yes or no.

Unknown Speaker 36:27
And which

Unknown Speaker 36:29
I can make a decision was an Excel spreadsheet. And I know that that, you know, wounds your soul a little bit, but I can, and that’s why people still rely on them. Because you can blend for someone who isn’t a data engineer, you can blend data into an Excel spreadsheet to make a decision, which is, you know, essentially what I showed you at the beginning of this particular episode is what I have, I have an Excel spreadsheet, what I love better metrics that I love something more automated, absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 37:00
But right now, that’s what I have. Got it. So what do we do next? What’s the path forward? If if we know that the existing tools can’t do that? Now?

Unknown Speaker 37:12
I know I have my I have the answer in my head, which is okay, we need to start creating more connections to different API’s and build a big query table that stores the dates, ranges and stuff like that. But that’s

Unknown Speaker 37:24
a and n of one and B probably not realistic for 98% of organizations that don’t have highly technical resources dedicated to marking for somebody who’s not Trust Insights, what do they do?

Unknown Speaker 37:38
Without sounding cheesy, you hire Trust Insights.

Unknown Speaker 37:43
Call John call today. That’s right, call this guy because but that is as you are being asked more advanced questions, you need systems, you need to keep up with it. I’m sure you can automate a Google Sheet with API connections to give someone something that they essentially are used to seeing.

Unknown Speaker 38:07
But there’s limitations to that. And so it’s really getting detailed user service requirements of but what is it that you really need and watching them go through and make decisions? And so you know, where appropriate, says, Show me how you make a decision with this data? Show me from? I have a question to I’m looking at the data to make a decision to I’m taking action, and then that can start to inform whether or not you look at more sophisticated tools. I mean, you know, we’ve been saying it, you know, to an annoying point, there’s over 9000 tools in the marketing tech stack system alone.

Unknown Speaker 38:47
There’s got to be a tool that does something close to what you need. But before you can pick out a tool, you need to know what you need. And it all that is the piece that’s going to take the longest is figuring out what you need. And that need is going to continue to evolve. And so that’s why we say you need to audit it and audit it at least once a quarter if not more frequently, if you have the opportunity to do so.

Unknown Speaker 39:11
All right, John, any parting thoughts before we head on out? Just make sure reports are done on time. That’s it.

Unknown Speaker 39:20
All right, folks. Well, thanks for tuning in. And we will catch you all next week.

Unknown Speaker 39:26
Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Good

Unknown Speaker 40:01
day

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.