How do I get my client to draw better conclusions from reports and dashboards?

This is a regular series where Oodle experts answer your marketing questions. To submit your own question, email [email protected].

Oodle Partner Mark Hughes: My answer is always the same with this: It’s storytelling. You can’t dump data – it has to be a story. 

Oodle Partner Ryan Hughes: That’s it. People ask all the time, “How do we get better dashboards? How do we get better reporting?” But a dashboard and a report only go so far. The real question is, what does it mean? And how do you use it? 

Here’s an example: Say your bounce rate skyrockets from 20% to 80%. It would be easy to look at that and say, “Something’s wrong.” But then you think about it. And you say, well, we just fired up this big campaign focused on brand awareness, and it’s generating a number of click-throughs and impressions. These folks are not far down the buyer journey yet, so we kind of expect them to come check us out and then take off. We’re not trying to engage them yet. We’re not trying to sell them yet. We just want them to know who we are.

So that bounce rate makes sense. Actually, if it didn’t happen, I’d be really curious as to why. 

Mark: In digital specifically, if it moves, you can measure it. But that doesn’t mean you should analyze it. If the goal of your campaign is brand awareness, your bounce rate is not indicative of success. Traffic might be indicative of success. Impressions might be indicative of success. But your bounce rate is not. 

So, short answer: storytelling. You have to tell the right story. And that’s not just for agencies trying to tell their clients’ story, it’s also for marketers trying to tell a story to their executive teams. 

‘Oodle Answers’ is a regular series where Oodle experts answer your marketing questions. To submit your own question, email [email protected].