Analytics Vs. Reporting: Adding Insight to Data
When someone is speaking, do you simply hear them or are you truly listening?
Listening implies a conscious choice, an investment in the words being spoken. With digital data, some of the same principles apply. Month to month, are you providing analytics to your clients or are you truly reporting?
In the case of analytics versus reporting, analytics is the numbers, the raw data that is captured by a platform like Google Analytics. Whereas reporting indicates an interpretation of that data. It is an effort to extract insights that can drive decisions and actions. The ability to distinguish between the two, and provide the latter, is what can make or break your relationship with clients.
Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, sometimes the closer you are to the analytics the harder it can be to see them through someone else’s eyes.
As an online marketer, it’s all too easy to assume that everyone understands the meaning inherent in the data you’re immersed in every day. Your comprehension of how the AdWords bidding system works or how Google crawls page content is second nature. So when you’re going through reports in Google Analytics and exporting spreadsheets full of information, you may operate in a bubble where you’re ready take action on the data without a translation.
For instance, you may see that a landing page has a high bounce rate and low conversion rate from ads. Instinctually, you know to adjust the content on the page. However, when presenting this to a client, will they understand what bounce rate and conversion rate are, how you determined those metrics were poor and why that made you decide to change the content? Not to mention, do they understand how those numbers relate to whether or not their business is making money from digital marketing?
In this article, we’ll cover a few tips for adding insight to your data to ensure that you’re providing valuable, thorough reporting and not just raw numbers.
Read the full blog post: Analytics Vs. Reporting: Adding Insight to Data
