Client expectation from analytics report

As a web analyst, sometime during the project, you would deliver a web analytics/metrics report with necessary key metrics to your counter parties (clients). Apart from the technical part of the report, it is most important to deliver what clients want and expect to deliver metrics that are actionable to their business.

I have heard of a case where client thought the report was auto generated by computer (no analysis), and did not want any further web metrics report service.
So what do web analysts need to do to make them special in terms of reporting?

The key is to not just handover a summary report filled with facts or plain numbers. Here are the list of things that can help you approach in building and deliver great web analytics report to your client.

1. Don’t work and focus too much in building pretty charts. Focus more on the structure of the report that tells the story of the numbers.

2. Spend time to find the meaning and relationship of the KPI’s to the web site’s goals and objectives. Some clients would be excited at first report just by seeing the tracked numbers from the analytics software. However, sooner or later they will want to know more than those KPI’s. Dive into the numbers and do the “analysis”, and report it.

3. Reports can be very long or short. That doesn’t matter as long as you:
- Give true and honest insights to what the KPI’s mean to their business objective.
- Find learnings about their website, and clearly define that as an asset to their business.
- Build a report that leads to a next step. One report should not conclude everything about their web site strategies. Apply previous report as a benchmark if need to.

4. Don’t make a flat (lame) report. Allow the analytics report to give extra dimensions to how the clients see their web site, but at the same time provides them a vision to where the web strategies will guide their business.