A couple weeks ago, at the end of our Higher Ed Experts webinar about web analytics, an attendee asked us for advice about reports to leadership – how often they should be made, what should be in them.

How often you should report and to whom really depends. There shouldn’t be a cookie cutter answer to this. What’s good for one organization or unit may be useless for another.

Remember your website objective and your key performance indicators. These will be essential when creating a dashboard or report for your team and for leadership.

As far as how often, of course this depends as well. I think once a month is fine unless something really good or really bad happens.

Yes. Report if something really bad happens. For example, a lot of website owners in higher ed might not run the server the site resides on. If the site goes down quite often or goes down once for a long period of time, how do you convince leadership that something must be done? How can you help raise the priority of a solution to a department you have no control over?

Show them what happens when the site goes down. If possible, tie it to money.

Do users call in and complain?  Hopefully you have a Customer Relationship Management tool or similar system to capture that feedback. If you don’t, tell those who answer the phones it’s essential to capture that feedback.

Now you have quantitative *and* qualitative data to show leadership that it’s time to make a commitment to solve the down server issue (or whatever issue it is for you).

Report the bad.

Report when things go really well, too. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. It’s important that your team knows what is working well (be it a marketing campaign or a section of your website). It’s important for leadership to know this as well.

Too often we only use analytics to pin point trouble areas. Of course this is essential. But if your site is doing something especially well, report on it!

So let’s talk monthly reporting. I say monthly, but, again, it depends on what is right for your organization. For you, it might be weekly, although unless you have a really active website, monthly will probably be fine.

Who do you give the report to and what the heck do you include in the report?

Example

Let’s say one of your website objectives is new student recruitment.

You’ve created a few KPIs for your objective:

1. Landing page bounce rate (for new visitors!)
2. Conversion rates (application, on-campus visit sign up, etc.)
3. Visits-t0-conversion (how many visits does it take for a user to convert?)
4. Conversion visitor loyalty (how many times is that converting visit coming back?)

Team reports. It’s important for team members to keep each other up-to-date on the website and any marketing campaigns you (and your team) might be working on.

Your KPIs should be on your team reports (the bigger ones should be on your leadership reports).

The high-level metrics are a good start, but team reports might also include:

• Your KPIs!
• Then dig deeper:
  • what type of campaigns do better? (click-through and conversion by type)
  • top knowledgebase questions asked (if you have a knowledgebase)
  • top internal keyword terms used
  • top referring keyword terms used

Again, remember this report is for your team. Give them something to chew on and something that would make them go back to their desks and take some action!

Make recommendations in your team reports or, even better, create topics for discussion in your team meetings.

If your team runs a lot of marketing campaigns, you may even want to break down the report into two sections, one geared toward your marketing campaigns and one geared toward the health of your website.

Leadership reports. Let’s face it, sometimes leadership demands including things that won’t tell you too much – visits, page views, etc. That’s ok.

Make sure to use trends for these metrics, though. For example:

• In March, visits were up 20% over February and 30% over March of last year.

You’re not done there, though.

Make a recommendation or, in this case, a comment and explain the trend. For example:

• The increase in visitors for March could be attributed to a few things including:
  • There are 3 more days in March than February.
  • This year, course registration opened 2 weeks earlier than last year, which happened to be in March.
  • A marketing campaign that received x click-throughs ran in March.

You get the picture.

For leadership, I love the dashboard template Stéphane Hamel developed. You can customize it for your needs. It is geared toward e-commerce, but it’s very easy to substitute enrollments or applications or any other type of conversion.

If you can automate anything, all the better. Another reason why I love Stéphane’s template. You fill in the most recent numbers, update your recommendations and bam!, you’re done. Remember, the more cumbersome and complicated you make your monthly reports, two things will tend to happen:

1. You will get farther and farther behind (or will stop them altogether).
2. Your team and/or leadership will stop reading the reports.

Yes, your team reports will be more detailed, but for leadership, keep it simple. Keep your recommendations and comments relevant and short.