Monthly Reports – Performance

This content was originally featured in the June 28, 2023 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2023/06/inbox-insights-june-28-2023-monthly-reporting-part-4-common-crawl-in-ai/.

Wow, you’ve stuck with me this long, I’m so glad to see you back again! This is where we put all the pieces of the puzzle together and discuss our final segment of monthly reporting.

As a quick recap, we walking through how to create more robust monthly reports using the 5P framework. We’ve covered Purpose, People, Process, and Platform. The fifth P is Performance.

To refresh your memory, we created these user stories:

“As a marketing manager, I want to measure my content marketing, so that I know where to allocate budget.”

“As the content writer, I want to know what topics our customers care about, so that I can write valuable content.”

“As the content editor, I want to publish clear and succinct content, so that bounce rate is low.”

“As the analyst, I want to measure page views, so that I know what content resonates with our audience.”

“As a customer, I want to consume content that demonstrates authority, so that I know which company to hire”

“As a customer, I want to consume content that answers an immediate question, so that I know this company can help me”

Then we developed a process to automate data extraction into Looker Studio using metrics from the Google Analytics and Google Search Console platforms.

The last P to consider is Performance. Believe it or not, this doesn’t refer to the metrics in your report. Your performance, or measure of success in this case, is whether you answered the question stated in your Purpose.

In this case, the purpose is budget allocation. Take a look at the examples above and tell me if you think the stakeholder can make a financial decision. I’m going to go ahead and say that we have more work to do.

We got ahead of ourselves and skipped over the initial purpose when developing the processes. Here’s the good news, you can go back to any of the previous pieces and add what’s missing. In this case, we want to pull some of the attribution data provided in Google Analytics so we can see what channel are performing. We first need to know where our content is being published. This could be on our blog, in our email newsletter, or as a post on social media. To make sure you’re really clear, I’d recommend creating more user stories.

“As a content marketing manager, I want to publish content in our email newsletter, so that we can retain our subscribers”

Great! Now we know that email is a channel we need to pay attention to. As we’re refining our analysis process, we can include that as a metric. This should tell the marketing manager whether email is working and if we should continue to create content for that channel. That allows them to make budget decisions about current and future resources.

Repeat this process over and over until you have the right user stories, the right processes, and the right platforms to address your purpose. That is how determine your performance.