Vanity Numbers in a Monthly Report

Why reports get long

Because length is read as effort, particularly where somebody is being paid.

A one-page report with five numbers looks like it took twenty minutes. A fourteen-page report with charts looks like a month of work, whether or not it was.

There is a second reason, less cynical and more common. Reporting tools produce dozens of figures by default, and removing them requires a decision, while leaving them in requires none.

So the report grows, the recipient skims it, and eventually stops opening it at all.

The test for keeping a number

One question, applied to every line: if this moved by a third in either direction, what would you do differently.

If there is a clear answer, keep it.

If the answer is that you would note it, or feel pleased, or investigate at some unspecified point, it is not a reporting number. It might be an interesting number, and interesting is not the same thing.

Most reports lose two thirds of their content to this question, and lose nothing anybody was using.

The usual candidates for removal

• Impressions, which count being shown, not being seen.
• Followers, which change slowly and mean little.
• Bounce rate, which is widely misread and easily distorted.
• Average time on page, which conflates interest and confusion.
• Pageviews per session, which rises when navigation gets worse.
• Total keywords ranking, which counts positions nobody reaches.

None is meaningless. Each is a diagnostic figure useful when investigating something specific, and none belongs in a routine summary.

Why bounce rate in particular

It deserves singling out because it appears in almost every report and is understood by almost nobody.

It counts visits where only one page was recorded, which sounds like failure and frequently is not.

Somebody who lands on your contact page, reads the number, and calls you is recorded as a bounce. That is a complete success.

It is also easily distorted by how tracking is configured, so a change in the figure often reflects a change in measurement rather than behaviour.

A number that goes down when things get better and also goes down when somebody adds an event is not reportable.

What earns its place

Fewer things than expected, and they are mostly at the outcome end.

Enquiries, counted properly, from all channels.

Quotes issued and jobs won, with values.

Where enquiries came from, in broad categories.

Visits to the pages that produce enquiries, rather than to the site overall.

And one or two leading indicators you have chosen deliberately: clicks from search results, say, or calls to the website number.

Five to seven lines, with last year's equivalent beside each, is a complete report for most small businesses.

A worked example

An agency sent a client a monthly report running to eleven pages.

The client admitted to reading the first page and the chart on page four.

Going through it line by line and applying the decision test, they cut it to seven numbers on one page: enquiries, quotes, jobs won, value won, enquiries by source, search clicks, and visits to the four service pages.

Each showed the current month, the same month last year, and a rolling twelve-month total.

The client began reading it in full and, for the first time, asking questions about it.

One of those questions led to a change in the following quarter's plan, which nothing in the eleven-page version had ever prompted.

Show the comparison, not the number

A figure alone is close to useless, because nobody remembers what it was.

Four hundred and twelve visits means nothing without knowing whether that is high, low or ordinary.

Every line should carry a comparison, and the right one is usually the same period last year, with a rolling twelve-month total beside it to show the direction.

Where there is no history, say so rather than presenting a bare figure as though it were informative.

Write the sentence, not just the table

The part most reports omit, and the part that makes them useful.

Three or four sentences saying what happened, what you think caused it, and what you propose doing about it.

A table records. A sentence commits somebody to an interpretation, which can then be discussed and, importantly, be wrong.

Reports without interpretation are safe for whoever wrote them and useless to whoever receives them, since the recipient is usually the person least equipped to interpret the figures.

Report at the right interval

Monthly is conventional and often wrong.

At small volumes, monthly figures move mostly on noise, and a report that swings every month trains the reader to ignore it.

Quarterly reporting with an annual review suits most small businesses better, with monthly limited to anything genuinely operational such as spend against budget.

The exception is anything with money running against it daily, where a monthly review is too slow to catch a problem.

Who the report is actually for

The same figures suit different readers badly, and a single document trying to serve everybody is usually the reason a report is long.

An owner deciding where next quarter's money goes needs outcomes and a recommendation, and nothing else.

Somebody doing the work needs the diagnostics: which pages, which searches, which step lost people, none of which belongs in the owner's version.

And a supplier reporting to a client has a third pressure, which is demonstrating that work happened. That is a legitimate need and it should be met with a short list of what was done, separately, rather than by padding the numbers section until it looks substantial.

Splitting them is less work than it sounds, because the long report already exists. The owner's page is an extract from it, and the rest becomes a working document nobody has to read.

The counter-case

Removing numbers has a cost and it is worth acknowledging.

Diagnostic figures are genuinely useful when something goes wrong, and a report stripped to five outcome numbers will tell you that enquiries fell without offering any clue why.

The answer is not to put them back but to keep them accessible: available when investigating, absent from the routine summary.

There is also a legitimate reporting requirement in some relationships, where a funder, a board or a franchisor requires particular figures whether or not anybody acts on them. Those are obligations rather than reports, and they should be kept separate from the document intended to inform a decision.

Cutting a report down

1. Apply the decision test to every line.
2. Remove impressions, followers, and bounce rate.
3. Keep outcomes: enquiries, quotes, jobs, value.
4. Add last year's figure beside every number.
5. Write three sentences of interpretation.
6. Move to quarterly unless money is running daily.
7. Keep the diagnostics available but out of the report.

Most reports come down to one page, and start being read.

The unread dashboard is covered in the dashboard nobody opens.

Frequently asked questions

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