 Hi everybody. Also, can I just say that Jay's presentation was fantastic, and I just have another round of applause for that. Awesome. And I'm just getting back into playing D&D as well, so all of you should too. All right, so now we're going to talk about this marketing thing that we're actually here for. Let's start. With, unfortunately, the reporting struggle is real, right? Everyone I talk to about reporting, they're like, God, reporting sucks. I hate it. It's the worst part of my job. We spend so much time doing it. It doesn't feel billable. It feels like it sucks, and then we give it to the client, and they don't read it anyway. So why do we even bother? It's very depressing. And we've been talking about this for years, right? Like, from the very beginnings of our industry, reporting has just been bad all the time. But yet, we keep doing the same things all the time. Why? I don't know. So it's like, we wonder why our clients fire us. Well, our reports were bad. You know, we wonder why people don't take our recommendations. Our reports were bad. So our communication, especially via reporting, just really stinks. And it doesn't help us as an industry, because if we're giving people bad stuff all the time, then how are people supposed to tell the good marketers and the bad marketers? Well, they can't because we're all terrible. So now that I've got that depressing stuff out of the way, let's share our struggles. We're going to name our problems, and then we're going to solve them. And then I promise by the end you will feel way more optimistic about reporting than you do at the current moment. This is the trick of presenting. It's like, I'm going to make you feel really sad, and then I'm going to pump you up, and it'll be awesome. There's three major problems in reporting. The first one is that we often confuse clients with the things that we give them because we're confusing the idea of monitoring with reporting. The second thing is we just vomit up stats, hoping someone will trust us because look at all this data. Something in here must be meaningful, right? That's does not work. And then the third thing is that we're reporting on things in the end that don't actually mean anything to your customers or your client's customers. The people you're actually marketing to, those people, doesn't mean anything at all. So how can we fix this? We're going to start first off with confusing, monitoring with reporting. And you may be thinking to yourself, well, what do you mean monitoring and reporting? Well, what is reporting? This is a very deep question of the day. I know it's quite late to be asking a deep question, but if a tree fell in the forest and a GA event wasn't recorded to account, right? Like, what is reporting at the end of things? So monitoring is data. Reporting is insight. Clients do not pay us for data. Anybody can get data. Clients pay us for insight. For example, your organic is decreasing. Monitoring the organic, that's the symptom that is decreasing. Reporting gives you the result on why it's decreasing and how you're going to fix it. Often, we report just on monitoring stuff. We don't report on reporting stuff. So here's a great example. One of the tools that we really enjoy using at Kickpoint is called Deep Crawl. I hope there's lots of happy Deep Crawl customers in the audience. It's a fantastic tool. So one of my favorite reports in Deep Crawl, and how much of a nerd am I? I'm like, one of my favorite reports in our crawling tool. Yeah, I've just, I've been on it. I've been doing this a long time. I'm a huge nerd. The report that tells you how many pages existed on your site, but yet did not receive a single organic visit. This is a sad report, because it means that all the content that you did was just, right? Like, Google's doing nothing with that. So one of the things that's useful is if you actually look at that report on a regular basis and then you see if the numbers are going up and going down, which you think, okay, that sounds great. But the problem is that often when we're doing reporting, we don't actually look at that kind of thing until the end of the 30-day reporting cycle, and then we give the clients a report that looks like this. And then we're like, yeah, that's really bad at the end there. Something happened. That's where the box is. Something happened. We'll get back to you. That is a terrible thing to have. Like, nobody wants that kind of meeting. You ruin trust between you and your client or your boss, right? Like, everything is sad. Instead, if you were monitoring this and actually keeping an eye on it, then you would know ahead of time. So, for example, in Deep Crawl, again, we have this report. When a crawl happens, have it push a thing to Slack that says, hello, I have finished a crawl now. Please come look at me. And then you can see if things are good or bad. And then you can proactively say to your client, hey, look, we did this crawl. We found that this is increasing. There hasn't been a major holiday. We're not sure why. You know, World Cup is not on or whatever it might be. You know, all the other things that screw with data and the amount of people coming to your website. We're not sure what the problem is and we're going to look into this. That's proactive and that's because of monitoring. The client doesn't actually care about this kind of report. They don't want this kind of report. They want to know that you're on it. That is the difference between monitoring and reporting. And monitoring is still incredibly important. You have to monitor the health of your work. These things just don't need to make it into that final report because they aren't something that tells us where we're going, where we need to go. It's a difference between strategy and tactics. Social strategy is not post four times a day on Facebook. That's not a strategy. That's a tactic. Monitoring is not, oh, hey, the number of pages that Google visited is going up or down. That's not a report. That is a monitoring point that you can turn into some insight and do something with. And the other part about reports is that they should tell you if you're actually meeting your goals, which brings us to the next part. We deliver reports with every possible metric under the sun. And so I have some reports that we have received from clients who've worked with us and given us the reports that we got from the previous agencies. And if your report is here, I am very sorry. Okay, so this is one. Look at all the green. Green means good, right? They got these wavy lines, you know? What does this mean? That's great. Year over year increase of 14% of organic traffic to the site and 17% of new visits. Well, first off, new visits is crap and we know it's crap, right? Like, you could have used two different phones and gotten that. Secondly, like, what... They don't care about the difference between day one and day two. And actually, my favorite part of this report, and you may not be able to see it here when you download the slides, you can. Over on the right-hand side, it says other options. And then it says mobile versus desktop. And this is show SEO start, 1101, 2017. I assume it's an internal metric. So you just, like, turn that on and your stuff looks better. This is a real report a client got. Pretty meaningless. This one is even better. This is for car dealership. So this is all they got and it was accompanied by the same data in tabular form. There's no context for this. People filled out forms. Congratulations. Here are the different forms presented in the worst possible way visually that they could possibly be presented. It's kind of amazing. And this one... This is not a small spend for this campaign. This is a month $6,200 on AdWords. And they didn't hook up conversions. So it looks like you had a minus 100% return on AdSpend. This is, I swear, this is a real report a client got. And then you wonder why you get fired, right? It is this right here. So if these are any of yours, like, we can talk later. I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at the report. And maybe I hear all sorts of horror stories about the stuff that people have to put up with and other agencies, and so, like, we can talk about it. Don't be sad. We can get there. And we've all made bad reports, right? I spoke about reporting here at 2014, and I showed a really spectacularly horrible report that I gave to a client who thankfully has not fired us. But, like, this thing was shit. They should have fired us. So if you want to go watch My Shame on YouTube, feel free, because that report's there. We're just going to let it go now. So why do we do this? Why do we include every possible metric in reports? Why do we just throw things at the wall and hope that something sticks? And our theory is that it's insecurity. Maybe the campaign isn't working. Maybe we don't know if the campaign is working. Maybe we don't have access to the stats that we need to prove that this is actually working. So we're just like, here is a bunch of crap, and we hope that something in there makes me feel good. And then you keep paying your bill a good day. Right? Like, this is what happens with these kinds of reports. But what actually happens is that the client looks at this and says, your report is built into thrown of lies. You know, if you can't trust the data, then we can't trust you. You know, and you, the agency, you, the employee. And what happens is every metric you pile on, every time you spout some confusing bullshit so that a client doesn't ask too many questions about why you have zero leads or the phone isn't ringing, every time you pretend the data's okay, when you totally know it is not okay at all and was never okay, and in fact, why are we even doing this? It just makes that rock bigger and harder to push up that hill. And often being in digital marketing, we can feel like we're pushing a rock up a hill and endless giant hill, and there's, you know, bears. So, right? Sometimes it feels like this. But that trust, if we have that trust, it makes that rock smaller, it makes that rock easier. Maybe even if you have enough trust, the client will come and help you push up that rock. That's nice, right? So, let's start with the end. Let's start with where we're going to go. Before, at Kickpoint, before we start with any project, we want to think about the end of the project. What's going to happen when we've gotten to our destination? There's going to be balloons and streamers and donuts and puppies, right? It's going to be great. So, the way we get there with the puppies is we introduce a goal charter. And again, going back to 2014, I talked about how you can take goals and turn them into metrics and KPIs and reports. Well, this, since then, in the past four years since that presentation, we've used that technique, but this has actually turned into what we now call the goal charter. And we didn't just name it that, so it sounded fancier. It's actually a different document now. So, the goal charter is where you take every single goal that your client gives you, and then we break it down into clear objectives and measurable results. It is a document. It's not a spreadsheet. It's actually like a narrative. We're telling a story in the goal charter. It answers three key questions for the client. What is the goal? It's harder to get than you may think. Why did these goals exist? This is the objectives. This is what we call them. And how will we know we've met the goal? What are your results? My goodness. That sounds so easy, right? These are actually extremely difficult documents to write. But it's a really great way to start off your engagement with the client because you're really diving into where do you want to go? I just want you to buy me AdWords ads. Okay, but before we spend a single dollar here, let's talk about how we're going to know when we get there. And that's the important thing about these goal charters. Plus, it brings you and the client. You get to know each other a little bit better. It's a really great way to start on the right foot for a project. So, recently, I tweeted, I'll be talking about reporting. Please tell me your reporting challenges. Give me some real goals that you have been asked to meet. And what was really interesting about the responses to this tweet is I didn't actually get a lot of goals. I got a lot of measurement challenges, which I think is actually something that's for another talk, which is a symptom of how we approach goals in this industry. We approach them as measurement challenges. Clients just want to know if their phone is ringing, right? So, really think about how you phrase these, because the client doesn't actually give a crap about how you got the data. They just want to know if it's right. And then they can make their own judgment call and if it's good. So, that's the important thing is make sure you watch your language when you decide how you're going to approach these goals. And the client, they just, what do they want to know, right? That's the goal. So, I chose one of the goals. It was a pretty clear client request. So, Matt, thank you for asking this. So, he said, I recently had a client ask to report the percentage of people who clicked driving directions from Google My Business Listing that actually made it to the store for 2,000 locations. Easy. Okay, I said, please tell me more, Matt. So, their goal is driving foot traffic through local pages and Google My Business Listings. Rather than just going along with Google's X% of local searches within 24 hours, which anyone at local SEO knows is just, like, don't trust that as a load of crap. They wanted a better idea of driving directions. The assumption is people clicking driving directions are way more likely to visit than just a local searcher. The idea is to determine an ROI for local listings management. Great. This is what I need. So, the goal is how much budget should we put towards local listings management, which is a little bit different than, say, 100 sales, right? But it's still a really worthwhile goal because this can help us figure out other goals. Once we know this, then we know a sense of budget for this thing, and then we can free up budget for other stuff, like paying us more to do some cooler SEO stuff. So, the objectives, we want to know that we're spending the right budget on local listings management, and part of that is we need to understand the ROI of local listings management. So, how do we measure that? Well, there's a few different ways you can measure that. You could... The Google Beacon Project, which some people may be familiar with, has real potential with this. It's where Google sends you a beacon that then reports back to the mothership on people and their phones, and it doesn't sound creepy at all when you explain it to regular people, right? Just do not tell regular people how we do this because they will turn off location tracking, and that would be bad. So, that might work. You could also, and this is how we would recommend measuring it, you could compare driving direction request numbers with people counters at your individual locations. So, you can't say this person had driving directions requests and this person didn't, but let's say, for example, I know that 2,000 people walked in the door and there were 200 driving direction requests. Next month, 3,000 people walked through the door. There were 300 driving direction requests. Okay, well, it's 10% each month. That's pretty consistent. Then, over months and months and months of measuring this, if that percentage stays consistent, then you know that this is a metric you can trust. There's no correlation that you can trust between these two numbers. And we've done this for several clients. One of them that worked really well for was a home builder because people just wander into show homes and we're running radio ads, so how do we tell the percentage method? And really, if there's no correlation, then you know that's a metric you can't trust and that's okay. You can say, you know what? We tried this, it didn't work. We're going to try something else. And maybe it's more ad words and you can absolutely tell driving direction requests from there and Google ads or whatever they're going to call it next week. So you'll get some metrics in there and you can mash it all up in Google Data Studio. So that's the way you can think through this kind of goal and be able to tell the client, okay, we're working on this. And then they can see the results at the end of this. So for every single goal, go through this process. We started working with a client that has 14 goals. That's a lot of goals. So we decided that four of them were actually like right now goals and 10 of them were later goals. And from those four goals, we turned out seven specific metrics that will tell us if we're actually meeting those goals. So just seven. This report has seven things in it. I'm going to show you a sample report. This is not for this particular client, but this client, they're a moving company and they want to know, you know, did people look us up? How many people looked us up? Are pages getting more organic visits? Well, it's like, okay, well, more organic visits in itself is not a goal, but are you getting more business from organic visits, for example? So really thinking through these goals quite deeply. And then you end up with a report like this, which I think if you work in local at all, please feel free to steal this. This is a report in Google Data Studio for a real client. This is real data. I took their logo off, because obviously. One of the things is they want to know, this client loves knowing if their phone's ringing. That's what they like. This is the phone ringing. Are they getting emails or visitor appointments being booked? They're psychologists. They want to know if people are coming in and getting psychology. So this is for last quarter is what this report is for. So you'll notice that in the report, it doesn't say phone calls. It says, is your phone ringing? Micro copy in reports is so important. I know micro copies is like huge buzzword, but these are micro copies by their very definition. And it's very important that you write it out so the client understands exactly what you're talking about. Is your phone ringing? Our visitor's calling you once they're on your site. This is the number of people who've called via call rail because they have it implemented on their site. Are you getting emails? This is our visitor's clicking, tapping, your email or filling out your contact form. And in Data Studio, we add up the number of people who are clicking or tapping their email as well as the people who are filling out their form as one metric and presented here. And then our visitor's booking appointments, people who fill out the appointment form. Not all necessarily come in and then they report and eventually we're going to be able to take this because Data Studio just like last night mentioned that you can blend data sources now. Woo, right? Nothing has made me more excited because I was going to get mad about this in this presentation. Now I can't. I'll have to get mad about something else. Anyway, but now we'll be able to mash together No Shows and be able to deduct it from there and anyway, it's going to be great. But the other part of this is which pages your visitor's view because once they start blogging, this is going to be important for them. And we write, once you start blogging, this will help you find out what content is most useful for clients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you may notice at the bottom we've got a what's next and how to use this. What's next is like stuff we need you to do, client, start blogging, for example. And for us, we train clients. They do a lot of the implementation themselves so this is really important to remind them. So when they go and look at their report, they remember, oh right, I was supposed to do that thing. Maybe that's why I don't have as many visits as I was supposed to because I didn't do the thing that I was supposed to do. So it really helps with that open communication. It helps with your clients. And really, if they just look at the top line and that's all they look at, great. They can make the time period. They can look at this whenever they want. They can look at it every single day if the mood strikes them. It's great. Go for it. Don't have to call us to do it. It doesn't cost us any more money. Once we set it up, it's set up the end. And then you're going to go through all your goals like this. And then once you hit a goal, you're going to start another. Back to that client with 14 goals. Once we hit one of those four that we've decided to really help if you do regular monthly work or you're in-house, sometimes you have project inertia. You're like, I don't know what to do anymore to build links. This is boring. I'm sick of it. Start on a new goal, right? Once you hit a goal, you start on another. And this will also help for agencies who do monthly because it will make you feel like your client. You're doing stuff every month for your client, which is awesome. New things happening and new goals are being spent. It's not the same crap every single month. But we still have a problem when it comes to goals. You're like, Dana, you just taught me how to do goals and they're telling me it's bad. The problem is that, and this is an organizational problem, is that we measure what's important to the company, not to the actual customer, which brings us to reporting on things that in the end don't actually matter to your customers, which the people you're actually marketing to or selling to. I know we just went through metrics, but let's pick better metrics to work on. And this is not something that you're going to necessarily be able to do tomorrow. This is something that's a longer-term shift that I would like you to start working on in your organizations. Because the problem is that you can end up in a situation where you have a report and entirely reports on metrics that matter from an organizational point of view and not the customer's point of view. So I read a great example of someone who had a Quick Links menu on their website and they reported that they were like, wow, this Quick Links area is really popular. What's the people clicking on the Quick Links? Well, they clicked on it because their site search sucked. So if you just reported on the wrong things, you said you should report on whether or not people found the thing they wanted, which the answer was no, and they ended up getting rid of Quick Links and then fixing the search instead. That's a better metric to report on. So you end up with a metrics like, how many people contacted us? Did we solve their problem? What was the bounce rate? Did people find what they needed and left because our site was helpful and that's okay? Or how long did they spend on the page? Did they actually read the content and find it useful that was there on that page? And one of our major problems is that we aren't focused on helping our customers solve their problems as fast as possible. We focus on things like, oh, we don't want any pogo sticking happening where they click on a result and then go back again. Maybe your result was good. We get mad at Google for scraping our data and I mean like, okay, fine. It's not great, but it's Google and they can basically do what they want, unfortunately. So maybe we just have to play by their rules, which kind of sucks, but here we are. But I mean, the reason why Google is doing this stuff, the reason why Google is doing snippets is because our websites are terrible and therefore Google decided they can do it better. So we did this to ourselves. And that is why Google said, well, how can we make it easier for people? How can we make it so that we're solving problems as fast as possible? Snippets. So have you asked your customers what their problems are? In general, organizations put themselves first. But that's the old way of thinking. I would like all of us to start becoming customer centric. So for example, Twitter, hey, can we have an edit button? You know, at Twitter, how about a heartwarming video? The world asks Twitter, hey, can you get rid of the Nazis? And Twitter says, do you want to turn any characters now? This is not solving a customer problem. Twitter clearly is not listening when we tell them things, right? So this shift is not just desirable. It's important if you're going to stay relevant in business. We have to keep up with the changing ways our customers want to shop and engage with us and interact with us. We can't do this if we don't make them the center of all of our decisions and all of our goals that we report on. Because success is not measured in campaign cycles. The six-month campaign, the quarterly campaign, the however long you're going to talk about a campaign, is an entirely artificial construct that we've placed on marketing. Customers do not actually give a crap how long this campaign is going to last. And if we've spent enough budget for Q1, right? They do not. It is not of interest to them. But in our case, we really need to keep asking why. Why did the customer want this? Why are they using the site this way? Can we solve their problems faster? For example, it's about the experience the customer wants to have, not the experience that you want them to have. Google Maps does not decide, oh, I want directions to the airport. No way I'm going to take you past the space needle because the space needle paid us for it, right? That would be a bad experience. But imagine if they did take that money and Google, please don't do that. That's not the kind of thing where people would say, oh, but we want you to see this and this and this before I let you go. Just let them, this is what the customer wants. Take yourself out of this. You don't know better. The customer actually knows what they want. So if we're thinking about how we're going to measure this in terms of conversions, the old way is measuring conversion rate on a form filler or purchase. The new way is measuring how fast an order arrives. And you can do this right now. This is an easy thing to measure. You can see perfectly post-lasic. How do you measure this? Well, you monitor social because they'll probably talk about it unless people have their stuff public when they shouldn't. The new way, whoops, is when their father likes and respects the new home care nurse that you sent out. How do you measure this? Reviews, right? All of these things can be measured. And this is how you make a company think about their customers first instead of metrics first. So let's call these customer conversions. And I'm not a fan of the word conversions. It's such an inside baseball kind of word. But we need a bridge from the old to the new. So I'll call them customer conversions for now. The old way are organizational conversions. The new way are customer conversions. So how are you going to measure this stuff, right? I talked about it a little bit, but, for example, you can measure things like the number of featured snippets. And that could answer the, can someone find their answer quickly? How many snippets does the organization have? And can we provide a resource for someone's question? Could someone answer all the questions they have about our product that are actually going to our website? And you can use stats or analytics to measure this. They're just out there. You can go talk to them. They did not pay me to say that. Did we, was a post, did a post spark a conversation on social media? Are people telling their stories? Are they building a community? You can hook this up to rival IQ, which is my social reporting tool of choice. And then you can look at engagement rate. And rival IQ also has a nice data studio connector now. And then you can take all the likes and hearts and ha ha's and all that other stuff from Facebook and figure out math wise if there's a sentiment behind it. Like this post made people sad. This post made people happy, for example. That can all be done with existing tools that we have. And this one is a problem that we've been working with for quite some time, which is what your content consumed. And this is a new metric I really want to introduce you to today. The old way of measuring content would be all the pages, three minutes, we're going to fire an event at the end. Well, some content is really short of a good metric. And people hoard their tabs. You might leave a tab open for weeks, right? Yeah, I hear you. I know who you are. I'm not a tab hoarder and I find you people horrifying. You probably just leave your inbox all in red too, don't you? Thousands. Disgusting, right? What does your house look like? All right. All right, what do you need? So how do you combine these metrics to get an actual read on whether or not somebody read your content? So how long would it take to read this content? It's the first question we need to ask. So it's, you know, X number of words. That would take five minutes to read. This other post is a lot more words. It would take ten minutes to read, right? Reading time. We can calculate this. This is the thing you see in all sorts of websites now that warn you that you're about to get into something serious when it's a 20-minute read. That's there. And the second question is, when does the content end? When is the end point of this particular piece? So did both these things happen? If they did, the content was consumed. If they didn't, you either had people who abandoned ship, they skimmed, or they hoarded the tab for later, because they're bad people. So I don't have time, obviously, to go into all the nuances of this, but we have released a Google Tag Manager recipe that you can put on your website, and it will measure through custom metrics if people spent long enough on the page to read it. And the way we do this is we actually look at how long it's going to take to read the piece of content you define, and then send this as a metric. And then if they scroll to the bottom of the area you define, we send this to analytics as a custom metric. And then if both those things happen, we send it to analytics as a custom metric. We've been testing it out on our own site. It works. We've been testing it for, I think, about six months now. So please go download it. Let me know what you think. I hope you really enjoy it. So thank you. I'm not done yet, but thanks. So now what? Okay, so the first thing you're going to do is you're going to share your gold charter. Remember back when we were talking about the gold charter where you got all excited about measuring content? Okay, so you're going to take that, and you're going to share it throughout your entire organization. Because marketing is a profession that's very public, right? Everyone has an opinion on marketing. Oh, my roofer said you should do this, and my son, he did websites, and he should do, right? Like, we all have this thing happening. Can I get this in cornflower blue? Like, these are all things that people ask us all the time. So by sharing the gold charter, you're able to sort of head this stuff off at the pass because it's a really clear path on how you're going to get from the current state of suckage to awesomeness. And you avoid things like one time we had a client who was implementing a review strategy, and it wasn't communicated to everybody, and they got a bad review, and the person who the bad review was about went on and complained back at the other person. This is obviously bad. And then it just... Now we have the review strategy communicated to everybody. But this is an important part of the gold charter. Because the difference between a successful company and a mediocre company is that in a successful company, everyone is rowing in the same direction. Everyone has the same goals in mind every single day. And if you don't communicate that, then how is everybody going to know that you're all rowing in the same direction? This is a very Canadian slide, I understand. So let's remember why we're doing this in the first place before we all leave here all inspired. People do not switch agencies because they're happy. I mean, this sounds obvious, but I think a lot of people forget. And this is something when we work with a new client and see the team is looking at the website, we're like, God, this is terrible. It's like, if it was good, they would not have hired us. Let's remember that. Because no one says, oh, you know what? These results are great, or these results are the best results we've ever had. It's totally fire this agency. That never happens. So obviously people leave us because we're not doing as good a job as we can. And what happens is that people make changes because they don't understand. They don't understand that what you're doing is meant to get them to where they need to go because we haven't communicated that to them. And what's worse, the organization might not even have a unified understanding of where they want to go in the first place. You end up with departments that fight with each other all the time and poor marketing gets caught in the middle. This happens all the time and it sucks. So without that understanding, you lose that accountability and you lose that trust and that rock gets heavier and heavier as you have to push it up the hill. Then you end up in the blame game. This is a terrible game. Nobody likes playing this game. You know, you can point fingers all day, but when it comes down to it, no one agreed to report on when the relationship was first established. No one knew where you were going. So how are we supposed to know when we got there? No one... This is a terrible game. Do not play the blame game anymore. In the end, we're all trying to help people do better. So when you tie goals back to real results, you show the monitoring that you do as part of this full picture. You communicate exactly why you're reporting to your entire organization. Everyone's on board. Everyone knows which way the boat's going. They're excited to see the results come in. They can commiserate with you if something did not go the way it was planned as opposed to blaming you for sucking. Sometimes it's just not your fault. Sometimes it was just bad creative and you didn't see that coming. That happens. And we're all trying to help people do better and be better and do better marketing. So when you get back home, I really want you to figure out what better means for you, how you're going to get there and what that means for your reports. Thank you.