Tracking, Logging and Reporting

What the top brass want to hear

[Skylo]

When you guys come up with monthly reports or hypothetically speaking if you had to come up with reports, what would they be?

I use a host of tool, from Nettracker to Search Engine Commando. But now instead of me meeting with Management once a month to discuss what i think is going on, they now want me to show them the reports i base my decisions on. We all know that with tools such as nettracker there is a wealth of data that we can use to Analyze how our sites are performing, what we may assume from this data, and consequently forming a strategy for the many sites that concern the business.

My question however is: What does Non tech minded management want to see? Numbers are always a good thing and so are visual representations of data analyzed.

Thus far I have come up with the following that I feel is important for my Bosses to know:

1) Keyword Site Report - This will document the performance of keywords on a per site basis. This report should be able to document performance for a given month and then compare to the previous months report

2)Top Keywords Per site report - The top 20 most popular keywords per site (Assuming each site has roughly 150 keywords)

3)Top 100 Report - The companies 100 best performing keywords

4)The Visits vs Enquiries - per site and then for all sites together. This will reflect the performance of the business as a whole

5)Number of Visits + Most active time of the day + Visitor retention

6)Top 20 least active pages compared to the top 20 most active pages per site

7)Total enquiries for the month including average per day vs the total number of converted enquiries. Finally a Enquiries to bookings ratio

8)Top page errors for the month. So that the developers may be addressed

9)New Pages and their resulting performance on the engines and concerning enqiries

What do you all think? Have I missed out any vital information that they might need? I feel that this is a fairly comprehensive list.
Comments will be greatly appreciated:)

Happy Surfing
Skylo

[karmov]

When I give quick verbal briefs it's all about unique IP's (audience size) and most often visited pages/sections. Also throw in any positive comments made by visitors.

[netguy]

Skylo, it sounds like your site is designed to generate leads, then convert them to buyers over the phone. If that's the case, the reps always need to determine the origination of the calls so you can properly credit and track all promotional aspects of your business.

For non-ecommerce, in addition to keyword positioning, I would also be looking at monthly uniques, total impressions, total pages visited, what pages they are visiting, time spent on the site, referrers, etc. - then do an analysis on whether visitors are going to the 'money' pages you want them to, or enhance the homepage to make sure they do.

Most of my clients could care less about the details of keywords, most active time of day, etc. In the e-commerce area in particular, it is all about sales.

For E-Commerce sites, I provide a spreadsheet that shows monthly:
1) New shopping cart sales
2) Repeat shopping cart sales
3) New call-in sales (generated from site)
4) Repeat call-in sales (from site)
5) Total Internet sales for month

Plus (above) in a 1-year (month-to-month) chart.

The other reports that I personally monitor focus on primary keyword positions, month to month uniques, total impressions, average pages per visitor, length of time on the site, referrers, GoogleBot activity, etc.

Steve

[kosar]

netguy, what do you use to track your new cart and phone sales compared to the old ones? thanks

[netguy]

kosar, reporting of new cart sales numbers is generated from the e-commerce database itself, and new phone sales are generated from a variety of contact management databases I connect to (mostly 'Act'). Repeat orders come from the customer history that is maintained on my client's MAS 90/200 (and a few QuickBooks) accounting software. While this can also be done manually, it is obviously more efficient to do with automated procedures.

With a little up-front work, its easy to plug in a few numbers every month and get a relatively simple sales trend report produced in Excel or whatever format the client prefers.

Most importantly is the analysis. We pay particular attention to any drop in repeat customers. While we always want new business, the continued flow of repeat customers is where it's at for long-term growth. We also like to see whether there is a trend up in telephone sales over shopping cart sales. If so, we make adjustments to improve the online buying process and checkout flow, so we can keep the client's overhead down to a minimum.

Steve

[Skylo]

>>Most importantly is the analysis. We pay particular attention to any drop in repeat customers. While we always want new business, the continued flow of repeat customers is where it's at for long-term growth.

Yeah, thats the key. We have roughly a 40% repeat customer base at the moment but we obviously want to be able to bring in many more new customers and retain them. That is the ultimate goal for us! And this can only happen through a lot of analysis and strategy execution:-)

[cfx211]

I like to approach my reporting in two ways. First I like to start with the money and work my way backwards so that management can understand what entry points/sections of the site are the most valuable. Second work from the masses of people down towards the money. By looking at it both ways, you identify your current revenue sources and identify your strong and weak areas on the site.

For long term customer value, I would group things by when people first visited the site. Say in January 30k people visited your site for the first time. How many converted to a lead, how many placed an order, how many became repeat purchasers. Figure out what you earned per visitor that month, after 3 months, after 6 months, and over the lifetime of those visitors. Compare it to your acquisition cost. Keep doing that every month for new visitors to your site, and track growth, revenue, and cost.

Compare that data back to your search engine rankings for the month, your Overture and Google spend, and anything else that drove people to the site. That way you can show management cause and effect.