One of the things I enjoy most about reporting is that it moves the marketing conversation away from what we think is happening and gives us an opportunity to look at what is actually happening.
Over the past week, we’ve been presenting reports to a number of our clients, bringing together insights from across their digital presence website traffic, Google activity, social media performance, engagement and search behaviour.
There is a lot of data available to us. But the real value isn’t in producing a report full of impressive numbers. It’s in understanding what those numbers are telling us and, importantly, what we should do next.
Because a big number isn’t necessarily a good number.
We regularly meet business owners who tell us that their Google numbers look great. They’re getting impressions, clicks and traffic, yet they’re not seeing a corresponding increase in meaningful enquiries or business.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Google isn’t working. Quite often, it means we need to look more closely at what we’ve asked Google to do in the first place.
It starts with knowing what success looks like
Before we talk about platforms, keywords, content or advertising budgets, there is a much more fundamental question to answer: what are we trying to achieve?
It sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often marketing activity begins without a clearly defined objective.
Do we want more people to visit the website? Do we want enquiries? Are we trying to generate leads for a particular service? Build awareness in a new market? Encourage repeat business? Reach a very specific type of customer?
Those aren’t interchangeable objectives, and the activity and the measures we use to judge its success should change accordingly.
Ten thousand website visits may look fantastic in a report, but if your objective was to generate qualified enquiries from businesses in Johannesburg and most of that traffic came from people outside your market who left the website immediately, that traffic becomes far less exciting.
The question isn’t simply “How many?”
It’s “Who, why, what did they do next, and did it move us closer to our objective?”
The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input
Platforms like Google Ads are incredibly powerful, but they need direction.
When setting up campaigns, there are decisions to make around location, audiences, search intent, keywords, exclusions and where we’re sending people once they click. If those foundations aren’t carefully considered, you can still generate activity, it just might not be the activity your business needs.
This is something we often uncover when taking over or reviewing campaigns that businesses have been managing themselves. The dashboard may show plenty of impressions and clicks, so understandably the business owner believes the campaign is performing well. But when we dig deeper, we sometimes discover that people are arriving through search terms that aren’t particularly relevant to what the business offers.
That’s where analysis becomes so important.
If certain search terms are consistently bringing the wrong people to your website, for example, we can identify and exclude inappropriate terms. If a particular topic on social media consistently generates engagement from the audience we’re trying to reach, that’s useful information too. It tells us that there is interest there and perhaps we should explore more of it.
Conversely, if we’re investing considerable time and budget into something that isn’t contributing towards the objective, we need to be willing to question it.
Reporting shouldn’t simply prove that marketing happened. It should help us make the next marketing decision better.
Look at the ecosystem, not just the individual numbers
This is also why we believe it’s important to look at marketing as a connected ecosystem rather than a collection of individual channels.
Your social media doesn’t exist in isolation from your website. Your Google activity doesn’t exist in isolation from your content. Your website isn’t simply an online brochure sitting independently from everything else you’re doing.
Someone may first encounter your business through LinkedIn, search for you on Google several weeks later, read an article on your website and only then make contact. Looking at any one of those interactions in isolation gives us only part of the story.
Bringing the information together allows us to start seeing patterns. What is attracting attention? What is creating engagement? Where are people dropping off? Which topics are generating interest? Which searches are bringing the right visitors to the website? And, ultimately, which activities appear to be contributing towards the outcomes we’ve set for the business?
That’s when data starts becoming useful.
Reporting isn’t the end of the process
I sometimes think we treat reporting as the final step in marketing: we did the work, here are the numbers, report done.
For us, it’s almost the opposite.
A good report should be the beginning of the next conversation.
What did we learn?
Perhaps we need to adjust our Google keywords. Perhaps we’ve discovered a topic our audience is particularly interested in. Maybe people are reaching a particular page on the website but not taking the next step. Perhaps one channel is performing significantly better than another and deserves more attention.
Marketing will always involve some testing and learning. We won’t get everything right the first time, nor should we expect to. The advantage digital gives us is the ability to see, learn and adapt.
But that only works if we’re paying attention.
At The Creative Distillery, we believe marketing should be intentional. Set the objective. Put the right foundations in place. Measure what happens. Understand what the numbers are telling you. Then use that knowledge to make the next decision.
Because without that final piece, we’re not really measuring marketing performance.
We’re just counting things.
And perhaps that’s the question worth asking of your own marketing:
Are your reports showing you good numbers or giving you useful information that is helping you make better business decisions?
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