Reporting & attribution
Your weakest area
Reporting & attribution
You scored lowest here. That usually means marketing decisions are being made on instinct, and nobody can say for sure which efforts are paying off.
What it looks like when it’s broken
You hear some version of these.
Plenty is happening. Very little of it is being measured, so every new idea competes on opinion.
Why it happens
When you are busy fighting fires, it is very easy to stop looking at your data regularly. Reporting is the first thing to slip because nothing breaks right away when you skip it.
I would argue that reviewing your data is imperative. You cannot make good decisions about where your marketing should go next without knowing what worked, what did not, and why.
What good looks like
Without reporting
Ideas get picked by whoever feels strongest. Campaigns end without anyone knowing whether they worked.
With reporting
A regular meeting where someone presents last month’s sales and marketing data and findings to the team.
You talk through what happened, then make educated decisions about what to do next to hit the goals for the year. And for every sale that comes in, you can say how many came from marketing, and which marketing.
The first move
Set aside time once a month to review that month’s data, focused on your top KPIs, and share it with your team.
Then see what comes of it. Putting the right data in front of a group works wonders. People share better ideas about how to move forward, and it becomes much easier to get everyone on board with yours.
Once a month. Your top KPIs. The whole team in the room.
How you’ll know it’s working
You see progress month over month, and marketing stops feeling like an all-or-nothing bet.
Measure the same KPIs every month. When you do, they should get a little better each time, and you will know exactly why.
What this looked like for one client
This one is about what happens when the data gets skipped.
A campaign idea came down from leadership as a decision that had already been made. I shared advice on how to execute it so it would get more traction, because the format was dated and would struggle in today’s competitive landscape.
There was a bigger problem. The topic had underperformed in all seven previous pieces of content we had created on it. Every piece went through the same sharing process, so we had a fair track record to compare against.
The decision was to move forward, so we did. We spent $3,000 on the campaign. It drove a lot of traffic to the website and produced zero leads. Once I reported the results, we shut it down.
The cost went beyond the budget. Other initiatives, ones we had tested with data, were put on hold to make room for it. In the end, we learned this type of campaign would not work for us, and we had even more data to prove it.
The data already had the answer. Checking it first would have saved the budget and the time.
Where this sits
Reporting is how the rest of the system learns. Without it, four other areas lose their way.
Dashed areas are not directly affected by this one.
Every piece of content should have a job. Without good reporting, you cannot tell which pieces are doing theirs.
Reporting is a big part of why you pay for a CRM. If nobody reviews it, you are wasting that money, and the decisions you make without it can cost even more.
On the sales side, reporting can be as simple as how many sales each person closes a month and where they rank on the team. If sales or marketing goals are assigned by team member, those numbers need a close eye.
Good reporting tells you which tools to keep and which to stop paying for. Without it, you can end up spending on things you do not need.
Start reviewing the numbers and those four start improving. Skip it and you keep paying for things nobody can prove are working.
Your weakest area is where to start. It is not the whole picture.
The Scorecard rates eight areas because they fail together. You scored lowest here, but there are often others already under strain. Worth reading the neighbors before you decide where to spend the next quarter.
Click any highlighted area to read it.
- Goals & prioritiesRead →
- Audience & positioningRead →
- Content & conversionRead →
- CRM & handoffsRead →
- Reporting & attribution · You are here
- People & ownershipRead →
- Tools & dataRead →
- AI useRead →
Want someone to look at the whole system?
The Scorecard tells you where it hurts. A Diagnostic tells you why, and what order to fix it in. I look at your setup properly and give you a sequenced plan rather than eight separate problems.