Any good marketer is bound to report the results to their customers. However, there are certain myths surrounding this process that we’ve tried to debunk throughout our careers. In this blog post, we’ll try once more.

Before we start though, you may want to check our video on this matter right below!

It is essential for you and your customer

Reporting is one of the most important elements when dealing with marketing campaigns. Not only because you collect all the data but because you learn from it. If you are working on a customer’s campaigns, you must know what has worked and what has not, so that in a future campaign, you can leverage that.

There is no right formula for reporting, what’s more we are very used to seeing a generic way of reporting based on some myths we’ll try to debunk now.

The report always comes the end

Reporting is often perceived as the last thing you do in a campaign. You’ve implemented the strategy, you’ve run the ads and finally you report on it, right? Well, not quite... in today’s Always-on paradigm, reporting needs to play a more central role on the strategy. As a result you need to make sure your reporting dashboards reflect all the constant changes happening second to second.

Luckily for us marketers, there are now tools like Google Data studio that allow us to have ongoing reports. Build your dashboard and you’ll be able to monitor the results pretty much instantly.

The more the better

Traditionally, reporting dashboards were just a collection of data that was difficult to decipher and contained too much information.

There are a couple of good rules of thumb:

1. Less is more. Remember not to cram your dashboards with all the information available, but only with the one you or your customer needs.
2. Adapt to the reader. You’re used to dealing with data, metrics and so on, but chances are your customer is not as savvy as you, so make sure to adapt the data to the reader.

Reporting is complex to understand

This is probably the biggest myth of all, especially among non marketers and for good reasons. Reporting has been used in the past as a way to make yourself indispensable, by just cramming as much info as you could in the dashboard. However, customers are becoming more aware of the metrics and what to expect, so that behaviour is not valid any longer.

A good reporting dashboard is a value-giving tool, but in order to build one, you need to curate the information displayed and make it readable and pleasant. Otherwise, your reporting will be that moment that your customer dreads.

Tools have come a long way, so get out there and test for yourself. Only by testing, will you be able to find the best solution for your customers.

If you’re in doubt, reach out and let’s have a chat about it!

Thanks for reading!