Proper reporting in Data-Driven company
In my opinion for proper reporting you need (at least) a couple of reporting types:
- Dashboard
- Team weekly reporting
- Ads reporting
Dashboard
Dashboard report should have information which are needed “on the fly”. You are the main data analyst in some company and you gets a lot of questions. They are probably often the same. Just create a dashboard which answers it. So anyone in your company can check the data when needed. Of course it should have date range handler. Maybe you will add data range comparison! In this article you can find the beggining of dashboard creation.
Team weekly report
In my opinion it is great approach to have weekly meating where different teams show it’s results. For example marketing talks about current on-site promotion. Business talks about revenue and products which were the most popular. Ads performance team shows data about page traffic etc.
To have the base – something which you can start conversation about is a couple of slides – let’s say 2-5 per team. So each team will be able to show DATA about what they are duing currently. More important would be:
- which actions lead to which results
- what are they planning for future and why
It’s really important to have such meeting. It’s often the only option for people to openly communicate about what each team is going to do and to adjust each team actions to one another.
Ads reporting
This is my specialization so let’s start with what is your KPI? In performance campaign it seems easy – REVENUE. But it is not so easy if you get into details. Let’s say you are provided with report:
| Traffic source | Sessions | Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| 5000 | 1000$ | |
| 3000 | 800$ | |
| 8000 | 2000$ | |
| 500 | 0$ | |
| YouTube | 1000 | 0$ |
The question is: which traffic is the best and you should invest in it more, and which is the worst, and you should cut it’s budget?
Seems like Reedit na YouTube are really week – there is no revenue from them! Google seems very good – it had the biggest revenue. But is it the right question?
NO!
You do not have enough data to answer such question. What you need is … amount of money spent for each medium. To calculate ROAS:
| Traffic source | Spent | Sessions | Revenue | ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1000$ | 5000 | 1000$ | 100% | |
| 500$ | 3000 | 800$ | 160% | |
| 3000$ | 8000 | 2000$ | 67% | |
| 500$ | 500 | 0$ | 0% | |
| YouTube | 800$ | 1000 | 0$ | 0% |
So now you can tell that Twitter has the biggest ROAS. If there is potential you should invest in this medium more.
How about answering the question about which medium is the worst and you should cut it’s budget. Seems obvious it is Reddit or YouTube, but which one from those?
In such cases it is good to have additional KPI. In my opinion the best one is: “Cost per NON-bounced Session”. Why such KPI? Because it takes into account:
- Cost – the less spend the better
- Sessions – the more traffic the better
- Traffic QUALITY – lower bounce rate is better
To calculate it you need: cost, # of Sessions, Bounce Rate. Let’s say it is:
| Traffic source | Spent | Sessions | Bounce Rate | Revenue | ROAS | Cost per NonBounced Session |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1000$ | 5000 | 60% | 1000$ | 100% | 0.5$ | |
| 500$ | 3000 | 65% | 800$ | 160% | 0.48$ | |
| 3000$ | 8000 | 55% | 2000$ | 67% | 0.83$ | |
| 500$ | 500 | 75% | 0$ | 0% | 4$ | |
| YouTube | 800$ | 1000 | 70% | 0$ | 0% | 2.67$ |
So from this you can see that YouTube is better than Reddit. In my opinion for measuring performance ads (all ads which have purchase / users action on page) as a goal, you should use such 2 KPI’s. Always take into account:
- Results (revenue, non-bounced session)
- Costs
Data source for reporting
There is many ways to collect data and create all the reports based on that. In my opinion the easiest start is Google Sheets. And if your company is 10+ employees then move (as much as usefull) to BigQuery. You can provide BigQuery with all data which you collect in your company. So it will be easy to create dashboards, and other forms of reporting.
Summary
Data-driven approach in any organization sounds really good. The reality is that still a lot of decisions needs to be based on gut feeling. And it is good. However you need reporting to help you make this decision or to combine team of people to be much more efficient. In my opinion it is really important to have clear KPI’s. As my (business) motto states: (Properly) measured statistics improve over time. Logo image from.
Leave a Reply