Document your findings, visualise your data, summarise KPIs and performance. Then build it into a report to communicate to the right people.
Contents
Visualise your data
Metrics, numbers and data are important for measuring and reporting your performance. On their own they can be difficult to take meaning from. Turning your data into visuals is the best way to report on content performance, and the easiest for both users and senior executives to understand. There are a range of free and paid tools to help you visualise your analytics.
A common mistake is focusing on reporting metrics and data rather than the analytics. It is the analytics and findings which actually show content performance.
Dashboards
Dashboards are a simple and clear way to demonstrate metrics and KPIs. They are easier to understand than numbers themselves which makes them a great way to show your content success.
Reporting template
Establish a reporting template based on your metrics and populate this with your data regularly.
There are a range of free and paid tools you can use to develop a reporting template. It is a good idea to run user testing to understand what type and what goes into your reporting template. Users may include both the public, other agencies and senior executives. Some of the tools available can automate both the data extraction and populating your template. Your template may include a dashboard.
Establish what the best time frames are for your reporting but they can range from weekly, to monthly and yearly. It depends on the volume and how frequently you are publishing content. Another important part of your reporting template are KPIs. These are the targets you have set and they track how well your content is performing.
To build a template:
- decide what you want to measure
- list metrics and give each a weighting
- give each metric a target score
- measure the actual score
- list the percentage of the actual / goal
- all the percentages for each section are calculated into a total percentage and this is the result for that measurement
Communicate your results
Set up a monthly reporting template with a dashboard that shows performance against the KPIs. Keep it short and the important part here is not so much the metrics themselves, but the analytics and tracking performance against KPIs. It's the findings that are most important for senior executives and the wider content team.
When appropriate, consider reporting content performance to:
- your direct team
- the IT team
- content owners across the agency and also the leaders of their branch
- the senior executive team
- the public
- other agencies
Make sure you actively communicate your findings to the appropriate governance groups and senior executives. Don’t assume colleagues will read pages of analysis. Make it easy for them to learn about important findings.