Are Marketing Reports A Waste Of Time? – Episode 76

But before you ask for a report, it should be a report about something, right? So you should be doing some kind of deliberate campaign. And then the question is, do you have a goal in mind for that campaign, assuming that you've then gone away and figured out what the actual goal of the campaign is, then just ask for a report that illustrates, you know, how many people are getting to that point of of what doing whatever your goal is and how did they get there and kind of forget all the rest of it because it just doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because it'll save you a lot of time plowing through loads and loads of tables and graphs that that really aren't very interesting and it'll save your agency time as well. You know, you're going to pay for that somehow.

Well, yeah.

If your agency is churning out massive reports, then you know, that is going to take away from the the budget available to do the actual work to achieve that goal. Hello and welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, you've got me, Julie, and you've got Alex today, and we're going to talk about the possibly thrilling topic of, um, data and reporting, but we will try and keep it interesting. And if we.

Don't oversell.

It, we don't keep it interesting. We'll keep it brief, one or the other, or maybe both. I don't think it will be a particularly long one. So, um, yeah, enjoy.

It is, it is an interesting topic. I think it's like a massively kind of convoluted and overlooked topic, isn't it? Really?

Yeah, I think it is because it's not kind of shiny and sexy and glossy then, you know, people don't talk about it very much. But yeah, everybody needs data and everybody wants reports. So it is useful to kind of figure out what people should be asking for in terms of reports and what, what they should be providing to their boards.

Yeah. Because this is kind of pivotal, isn't it? it? The whole kind of the the reason we're doing this podcast, I guess, is because we were having a discussion in the office around the fact that a lot of the time, the things that people are asking for in reports, they're not really what they actually need to know. Right? It's like, yeah, people are kind of like stuck on, on autopilot. You know, they're like, I want these KPIs because they've read about them on the internet or they're what their old agency gave them or something like that.

It's like people used to always want to know how many hits their website.

Right.

Which actually is a, a number that kind of doesn't mean anything at all.

And now it's like.

We have moved away from that, but we're still talking about visits and we're talking about impressions and.

And Facebook likes and shares. And yeah.

You know, they all have their place and they all have value. But it's a case of thinking about which ones you want. Don't just report, you know, ask for a report of absolutely everything because it, it's just gonna mean that nobody really looks at it because it's going to be so kind of complicated and daunting. And you know, it's much, much in our our opinion or my opinion, it makes much more sense to ask for a report on the things that matter at the time. Don't just churn out the same report every month just because that's what you always do. Look at what you actually want to measure that month on the basis of what you wanted to achieve that month.

Yeah, I think yeah, definitely. I think there's kind of two things to unpack, isn't there? There's the first, and probably the most pressing thing is that, like you say, don't ask for so much in your reports that you end up inundated with data because that's like, we see those reports all the time. And it's like, if you have a report that reports on every bit of data that a platform provides, like your, your visits, your unique visits, your visits from Africa, your visits from Europe, your visits from Asia.

Length of time on each page and.

Bounce.

Rate. Yeah.

Like all that is, is just data for the sake of data. It's just noise. There's no way for you kind of as a marketing manager or a head of marketing or whatever, to sit there and kind of from that data, develop a picture of what's actually happened. There's nothing useful about it unless you want to sit and analyze all that data yourself, in which case, what's the point in asking for a report? Just log on to the platform and look. And the other thing is, like you say, people are not kind of changing their reporting needs based on what the actual marketing activity they're undertaking, right? So it's just like blanket reports about something like web visits is a perfect example because that's fine. If all you're doing is just generally trying to increase your web traffic. But that's not actually the case very often, is it? It's not very often.

Be all and end all. I mean, nobody wants web visits just for the sake, because they happen to want people to see how beautiful the website is. Exactly. That's not the point of sending traffic to your website. The point of sending traffic to your website is ultimately so that they buy something.

So. Well, yeah. So I guess that's a really interesting point. What? Last time I did a podcast, Leslie pointed out that one of my verbal tics is that I always say, that's a really interesting point.

And now on this occasion. It was a very interesting.

Point, very interesting point. It was just really hard to like continue then. Um, no, it is a really interesting point because what we're essentially saying then is like, you have to actually kind of drill down and work out what your real objective is, right? So your objective probably isn't, you probably don't care about going to the board and saying, we got more website visitors this month. They probably don't care about that either.

They probably are asking you as a marketing manager to tell them how many website visitors they got because they think that.

That's that's what.

You.

Do.

It's a thing you can measure, and it's a thing that goes up and down over, over, like from month to month. And it's a number that you can look at. But actually that's not, it's not the point. So it's a step on the way to the point.

Yeah. So I guess that's the thing, isn't it? And I guess the reductive point of view to take is like, what all that really matters is like website sales or inquiries, right? And we can just, just all we should really be reporting on is leads. But I don't think that's quite true either, is it?

I think you need to you need to see the process.

Yeah.

You know, the thing, you know, I think it's get my words out. What's important is actually getting some insight as to what happened rather than these are the number of visitors. It's, you know, these are the number of visitors that did this. And these are the number of visitors did that. And this is what we did to get these visitors or this is what we didn't do. And this is why. And it's that that's a valuable thing. I mean, anyone can look at Google Analytics or whatever and see how many visitors, but it's understanding why that happened. That's actually valuable.

Yeah, definitely. So I guess we're saying that when you're kind of sitting down and thinking, okay, what do I actually want my agency or marketing team to report on? You should be asking yourself in order to kind of build up a clear picture of what's happened. I need you to report, you know, what, what information do I need? And then like you say, the often that's going to be, you know, for a specific campaign that you're running, where did those people come from? You know, what did they do once they landed on the site? And then what percentage of them actually did the useful action you want them to take, whether that's signing up or sending an inquiry or whatever. But it's that, like you say, you need all the steps in the process and you need to see where people are dropping off and where they're being engaged.

And yeah, the numbers on by themselves don't necessarily tell a story.

Yeah.

And, and to be fair, you know, if you're a marketing manager listening to this, you can get reports, you can, you can either by some like dashboard software that pulls stuff in from lots of different places. You can get all these numbers. You can look at Google Search Console, you can look at your Google ads or your Facebook platform or, um, whatever. The other thing is called Google Analytics. That's what it's called. You know, there's tons of, if you want data, the data's there and you can, you know, you can set up reports that just, you can dig out every month.

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of Google Data Studio for exactly that, right? Because it's like, if you just want like a top level, what's the general health of like my marketing activity, something like that, that pulls in a bit of analytics data for visits and a bit of AdWords data for clicks and cost per click. And, you know, just all the like really top level stats that you need to say at a glance. Is it the same as last month?

But you can see movement. And then where your experts come in is explain that movement. Why did that movement happen? Why did it go in the direction it did? And what you know, what happened?

Well, because I feel like this is the really frustrating thing about reporting in general, right? Because it's like, so far as I'm aware, the way it generally goes is that marketing agencies churn out a report every month. The report is very top level. It lands on someone's desk. If it's all green, nobody says anything. If there's some red, they then ring up and say to the marketing agency, oh, explain why things are going down. But like, to me, that whole thing is just a giant waste of time, right? Why not? Instead of that, just wait until something you know is going well or interesting.

Happened.

And then say to the people you're working for, oh, this is what's happening. And this is why.

I suppose that involves a degree of trust in your agency, that they are going to flag it up rather than just go, oh, we'll just pretend that never happened. I don't know, but I think, yeah. Um, Yeah, it's it's to do with, you know, what, what's what's there. But also, you know, we've, we've come across people who've said to us, well, you know, I've got this SEO agency and they sent me a report every month, but I don't really know what they're doing. And then you ask them maybe how much they're paying and you think, well, for that amount of money, probably they are just sending you a report every month and they're probably not doing anything. Um, and I think people can hide behind reports because you send someone a lot of numbers, it looks like you've done something.

Well, look, and yeah, and I might get shouted at I might get my knuckles rapped later for kind of giving away industry secrets. I don't know. But look, I mean, you were kind of alluded to this earlier. Things generally move anyway, right? Month to month. Yeah. If you if we did absolutely nothing to our website for a month, we would still see a fluctuation in traffic either up or down randomly. And you'd see a fluctuation to visitor rates and you'd see a fluctuation to our rankings, because rankings are always going up and down in Google.

Because they're affected by other.

People. Yeah. Well, yeah, this is it. Right. And, and with AdWords too, you'll see a fluctuation in the number of clicks. And that doesn't necessarily have to be driven by marketing activity, because the honest truth is that, you know, all marketing, all this data is recording is how people have acted and how people act is, you know, largely determined by external circumstances.

We.

Can't measure.

Yeah. I mean, you could see a huge increase in visitors or whatever it is, or sales or something, which actually has nothing to.

Do, something.

To do.

With your industry's been on the news.

Or you sell ice cream and it's been particularly hot. You know, that that example, you know, and it's got absolutely nothing to do what you did or your main competitor went bust. So then you're, you know, you, you have this huge increase in volume, but it actually isn't anything to do with something you did. So you've got to be aware of what's going on around you as well. And you're churning out a report that goes, oh, you know, the numbers went up isn't necessarily anything you did at all.

Well, yeah, there's this kind of twofold thing, isn't there? It's like on the on the one hand, yeah, there are agencies out there who hide behind their reportings and they don't really do anything. And then they say, well, your stats have changed and they hope that that distracts you enough lulls you into the kind of false sense of security that, you know, something's been going on, something must have driven those changes. And then there's the other side of it, which I guess is kind of people taking credit for those natural fluctuations and saying, oh, look, we did loads and this is what's happened. And I think, yeah, I mean, without getting into the weeds of kind of just slagging off other agencies, I guess the important thing is that whenever somebody is reporting something to you, you should always be asking, so what? Like who cares? Like what? Why does this.

Matter? Why is that important? Yeah.

And if they can't explain that, if their report doesn't explain that in the first place, like I'd always be a little bit skeptical of that. Like, I see it all the time. People just get reports and it's like traffic to your website was up this month. Look, nice green graph and your rankings are up. Nice green graph. And it's like, well, so what?

Like, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's not very meaningful because it's like, okay, so what, what did we do?

What did.

We do? Can we make that happen again?

Yeah, exactly.

Great. You know, it goes down the next month and, you know, for the same reason or lack of reason And you know, you can't just keep saying, well, this is something we did. If it isn't.

So yeah, what have we learned? What is repeatable? What are we going to do next to replicate it? What have we learned didn't work. Those are all the things that I think you'd really want to see in a report. Right? Yeah. And also, like you were saying earlier, like something that goes a bit beyond the obvious. It's like if, if loads of traffics come to your site, but your conversion rate hasn't moved or you're not getting more inquiries, I guess your conversion rate doesn't have to move, but the number of conversions you received hasn't moved like that should, that should automatically that should tell you, well, okay, so the traffic that's been sent to your site just didn't matter, didn't help. Yes.

And see it all the time on, on our site and other people's sites. They have some blog posts that, that they've, they've put up on a whim and it's got a quirky title or something and it just takes off and they end up having all these rankings for something that is completely.

Are you alluding to a certain blog post on our site about crushed nuts?

I am alluding to that one, but I have I've seen it on quite a few other people's sites as well. So not just ours, but we do have one with a, with a kind of quirky title that that ranks really well for. I'll tell you what, for what kind of what kind of knots do ice cream vans use? And it's just things like that. So you suddenly get loads of traffic for something that is utterly meaningless to you. Um, so again, that that needs to be interpreted and analysed and it's the insight and the interpretation, like, okay, you got all this extra traffic, but actually it was just a bit of a one off or it was actually, these people are never going to buy anything. It's just just one of those things and just, you know, discount it basically.

Yeah. And I think that kind of one of the awful truths about digital marketing in general is that a lot of these top level statistics that people rely on or that people see as kind of the purpose of digital marketing, they are very easy to massage. I mean, they, you've got kind of, you can create a blog post very quickly that ranks for something that is high traffic, but irrelevant to your business. And there's also all kinds of things like on AdWords. I know one of the the kind of favorite tricks that I've seen used is to smack up some display advertising really quickly, because Google's display network display advertising is literally just images. Um, and they can be very effective, but Google's display network kind of has a really broad reach. Um, and lots of people click the display ads that are just not interested in what you're saying or what you're doing. They'll just click a pretty picture because it's interrupted them, or it's in the middle of a blog post or whatever. And so if you're, uh, an unscrupulous, um, AdWords agency and you desperately need to show an increase in traffic month on month, you can just do stuff like that. That from a top level is like, wow, great, fantastic. Everything's on the up.

Actually, you can also do that just by not getting your negative keywords right and just getting, being, having really broad keywords and then people click on them. But again, you're spending money on clicks. So actually measuring clicks from.

Meaningless.

AdWords is, is the wrong measure again. And, you know, we've had clients sort of asking, you know, how many clicks and, you know, can you get more clicks? Well, yeah, we can get you more clicks, but.

Well, I've always said you.

Would if you would like to waste your money.

Well, yeah, this is it. Like I always said, like, I would much prefer a campaign with like no clicks, but a really high conversion rate, you know, if you only got ten people, but all ten of those people converted, that would be much better than a thousand.

People and still only ten converts because it's much.

Cheaper. You're paying per click. So yeah. But yeah, I think this kind of like the root of the problem, isn't it? Like it's really hard for people who don't do this stuff day in, day out to know whether these stats are meaningful or not. But yeah, like if it's top level, if it's just a measure of something happening on your website, it's probably not useful.

Like, I mean, it's a measure of something, but it's not a measure of what your agency have done. And it's probably not a measure of what you've done. Um, so it's, it's a number and it satisfies the need for people to think they should be.

Getting.

Reports or providing.

Something's happening.

Yeah. There's, you know, there are definitely things that you should be asking for and things you shouldn't be asking for. And I'm not going to start giving a list of things you should and shouldn't, because it depends on what your objectives.

Were neatly anticipating. My next question.

If. If your objective genuinely was, I want lots of people on my website because for whatever reason, I want to remarket to them. You know, in the good old days when that was.

That was a thing that was possible.

Um, you know, so then, yeah, you might just want lots of people.

Yeah.

For whatever reason, that might be a measure.

Yeah. Like if you know that your conversion process is, is slow and works best in bulk, then sure, like we've got ten thousand new people onto the site might be fantastic news.

You might, you might sell crisps or something. And so all you want is people to know about your new crisps.

Can you buy crisps online? No no no.

Listen, listen. You you sell crisps. So you want somebody to go on your website to find out about your crisps so that next time they're in Tesco they see your crisps and they go, oh those are the crisps that I saw. And it was a really cool website and the crisps jumped about and it looked really groovy. And I'm gonna buy crisps, you know what I mean? So you know, an awareness adverts. Brand awareness. So you know you you might want to do that. If that's your objective then you know.

Then it is.

Visitors. Is is completely justified. Great. But you know in in the area we work in, which is mainly B2B and it's sort of high value, you know, slow burners, then, you know, you probably want someone to come on your site, visit a few different pages, read something, possibly download something and, you know, do something, move, move themselves through that process slightly nearer to the, the final decision to work with you. And if that's your purpose, then that's.

What you need to measure.

You need to measure that they, they went from that page to another page or they looked at your about us page, or they read some case studies or something. And that's a valuable measure of your work on the website actually having achieved what you wanted to do.

Yeah, definitely.

But that doesn't give you a nice number. You can put in a graph, does it?

Well, it's interesting because I think that the thing is that like, because people do use Facebook, for example, for brand awareness campaigns, that is why Facebook will give you that CPM, that that cost per thousand impressions, right? That's why it exists as a metric because absolutely.

Because you just want to be seen.

But when you like get and this has happened to us like fairly recently, isn't it, that like somebody has come to us running like a fairly kind of, you know, there is a very obvious objective to their campaign. And they were like, oh, we really want to see a report of like CPM for our adverts. And it's like, you don't need that information. That's not like it's just noise. Like it's not actually telling you anything useful. It wasn't a brand awareness campaign at all. Right.

Well, I mean, the thing with Facebook is that actually sometimes it won't let you it won't provide you with that information because it's like, well, that wasn't what you were trying to do. So it didn't, it didn't, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily even give you all that the data.

That.

It doesn't exist because you were trying to do something completely different, like, you know, get leads or whatever.

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it. I think ultimately what we're saying then is like when you go into before you ask for a report, it should be a report about something, right? So you should be doing some kind of deliberate campaign. And then the, the question is, do you have a goal in mind for that campaign? If not, why not? And, you know, assuming that you've then gone away and figured out what the actual goal of the campaign is, then just ask for a report that illustrates, you know, how many people are getting to that point of, of what doing whatever your goal is and how did they get there and kind of forget all the rest of it because it just doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. Just, you know, get the stuff because it'll save you a lot of time plowing through loads and loads of tables and graphs that that really aren't very interesting. And it'll save your agency time as well. You know, you're going to pay for that somehow.

Well, yeah.

If your agency is churning out massive reports, then you know, that is going to take away from the the budget available to do the actual work to achieve that goal. So do think carefully. If you want lots of reports, make sure it's stuff that can just be sort of run off automatically. Don't ask for something that that involves loads and loads of manual input because you're wasting your budget as far as I can see.

Yeah. I mean, it's a really interesting point, isn't it? And it probably again, speaks to the whole kind of like misunderstanding around reporting like a report. If it's a good report, it will have involved a lot of analysis. And that analysis takes time, but that's valuable.

Yeah, that is valuable.

Yeah. But only if it's like only if it's used in the right way. Right. Because you can, you can go to an agency and you can demand a report that shows, you know, that takes a lot of careful analysis that forces somebody to pick through a load of data, but it doesn't actually tell you what you need to know at the end of it. Yeah. And that is a waste of your budget. Or the other option is that it cannot require any analysis and effort. And it will literally just be an automated report generated by some software that tells you nothing meaningful.

And the worst is one that can't be automated and still tells you nothing meaningful. Meaningful, because then it's, you know, it's chewed up somebody's time and it's also still not giving you anything meaningful. So if you want, you know, big chunks of data, I think, you know, finding some way of getting them automated is a good idea. And then, you know, then spend your budget on meaningful insight into things that actually matter to you that month. You know, don't just ask the same thing month after month either, because your campaign might change, your goals might change. You know, what you want your agency to work on might change.

That's a really good point because I remember like when I first started doing SEO, that was a thing you used to provide clients with ranking reports that showed how the rankings had changed to all one hundred keywords you were tracking for them or whatever, but like you'd only be working on three or four of those keywords in the month. So realistically, the only thing we should have been reporting on is the three or four keywords would actually put work into, because if anything else has moved, it's irrelevant to what we're doing anyway.

It depends. I mean, the thing with SEO, it could take months. Yeah. That's true. I mean, we've seen it before. Like we've had, we've had clients who have, you know, for whatever reason, left us and moved on. And then like six months later, suddenly the stuff we did starts starts having an effect and it's actually quite frustrating.

So but then I guess the goal is like be reporting on the things you did. But but the point is you should never just be kind of blindly reporting on.

It still comes back to, to the meaningful reporting. And, you know, if, if something you did suddenly starts taking effect, then that's, you know, it's, it's putting some thought into what's coming out. It's like, oh, and we also noticed that this thing that we did six months ago is suddenly taking effect or is still having an effect. And, but if it's not, then there's not really.

Anything to know about it. Yeah, definitely. Do you think there's also something to be said for the idea that, I don't know, maybe it's just because we I mean, I think we are very kind of transparent generally, but there's something to be said, I think for instead of reporting sitting down with your agency once a month or every couple of weeks and getting them to just go through the data with you, right? Just having like an actual conversation where because you can pick through all that stuff live, right? All these platforms that the data is drawn from, like AdWords or analytics or search Console. Anybody can log into them at any time and just see, you know, what does it say right now?

That's it. And you know, if your if your agency is following best practice, then you will have access. It'll be your ad account. So you will have access. You it's your account and they have access to it. So you can log in anytime and see what's going on. So they shouldn't be able to pull the wool over your eyes at all.

Yeah. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, for a lot of people who are either just dabbling in marketing or are running an entire department have a lot on their plate, there probably isn't the time or the inclination to sit there and go through that data yourself. You probably can't. Right. But, but you can sit down with whoever's doing this work and they can explain to you, you know, either at a top level or in detail exactly what it's saying right now. And that gives you the chance to ask questions. It gives you the chance to kind of like focus on what you actually need to know. And it prevents this awful thing where they just kind of like present a load of information up front, and then you have to go back to them and say, oh, what does this actually mean? It's like, that should all be happening.

Totally. I mean, I think meetings and actual conversations with people are are underrated. And yeah, you know, even even if you provide a, a very basic report and then have a meeting and just go. But, you know, the interesting thing was when we saw that number, we went and looked at it and this is what happened and this is what happened. And you can, you can get a lot more information across in a conversation than you ever can in one of these reports.

Yeah.

Um, so I think, you know, conversations around the numbers are, are really important and, um, yeah, can transmit a lot more information and a lot more meaning than, than just sending some sort of word document every couple of weeks.

Yeah. Like context is key. Right. Totally. Without any context, it is just data. And you don't know. And, you know, at the end of the day, are you going to sit there and kind of assume why traffic is up or traffic is down? Like, no, you're gonna have to have a conversation with them eventually anyway.

Statistics say whatever you want, really, as long as you can find one positive statistic, you can probably kind of conjure up a report that makes everything look wonderful, even if it isn't, you know, you can you.

Can that Benjamin Disraeli quote about lies, damn lies and statistics. Yeah. That one. Yeah.

You can though. You can, you can spin it any way you like.

So absolutely.

You have to be careful and you have to.

And you see people doing all kinds of insidious, sneaky things like changing the date range to like cut out a day where there was a drop in traffic and, you know, just like all the stuff that people do. And I just think, yeah, at the end of the day, like a report is not, well, I might be speaking.

It's a snapshot, but.

It's, I don't think it's worth the paper.

It's never gonna give you the full picture. And I think a conversation, and if you've, if you've got the kind of relationship where, you know, you have a transparent relationship, then a conversation is always going to give you a lot more and you can back that up with just a summary, or you can send a summary and discuss it and, you know, the two hand in hand, but you know, the, the important points and the, the relevant stuff, I think is what it comes down to.

Yeah. It's interesting actually. We do have a client who, um, we meet with every couple of weeks, but occasionally they can't make the meeting and for whatever reason, they just send me a quick summary of what you were going to tell me. But it's very open ended. They just let you tell me what you think is important. And I think that that's okay because you just basically say.

What's been happening? What have you seen? What what is there to report on that's new? And, you know, that's great because you're, you're using the, the budget wisely. You're using your, your own time wisely in terms of what do I actually need to know?

Yeah. And it's interesting, actually, we're having this conversation. I'm just thinking like, the more I think about it, the more I think that actually just having a conversation is like, by far the most sensible way to approach this. It's like the whole reporting thing. Like it seems almost like a, um, you know, the scene in American Psycho where it's like comparing their business cards. I've seen Americans like, oh, well.

Maybe I.

Should, you're missing out. But there's a very famous scene in it where they're kind of sat there like kind of enthusing about how amazing everybody's business cards look. And it's that kind of thing, isn't it? Like it's almost become a bit of a cliche. It's like you get your your marketing agency aren't doing their job unless they're reporting. I want the shiny report. I'm paying two three thousand pounds a month. I want a report. And it's like, you don't you don't need that. And to be honest, you probably don't want it either.

Exactly. You know, they might maybe, you know, maybe the first month they looked at it and maybe the second month they'll look at it a bit. And the third month they'll kind of glance at it. And after that, really it's just.

Vanity stuff, isn't it really? And I think if you if we're being really honest, like when it comes down to it with digital marketing, what you actually need to know is like contextually, what's been happening over the past twenty eight days.

And is the money you've been spending on your marketing worth it or not?

Yeah, absolutely.

That's what it comes down to. So yeah.

And that's not to say, I guess that like your agency should be able to say, oh yeah, we've got you sixteen conversions this month or whatever. Because like often, I mean, to be fair, you know, especially in the B2B space, it's slow burn, right? We'll yeah. And it takes time. And, you know, sometimes you'll have like three months where not very much happens. And then suddenly it really takes off. And sometimes it takes even longer than that. So it's not to say that your agency should be able to prove that they're generating return on investment from day one. It's just to say that you should be able to have a sit down conversation with your agency where they explain why what they're doing is working or why it isn't working yet, or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. And, um, you know, yeah, it's all about the conversation. It's all about being able to say, you know, yeah, okay. Nothing's happened, but we're not worried or actually, you know, we are a bit worried and we think we should maybe try something slightly different. And again, that's, that's kind of relying on, on their judgment. But again, it's having a conversation to say or, you know, or the client goes, you know what? I'm really, really not comfortable with this. And, and can we, can we kind of move, move the budget and do something else? And that's a conversation. Again, it's, it's not something that comes off a piece of paper.

Yeah. I mean, we had this conversation with someone recently, didn't we? Actually a client who, you know, we were doing one thing and it wasn't really generating results for them. And they said, look, can we do this other thing instead? And, you know, without the actual kind of conversation around that you wouldn't have the opportunity to debate and discuss what was working, why it might not be working to reassure the client that, you know, there were other things that you could try and that there was a reason it wasn't working and all that stuff that that, you know, you need to explain to somebody. It just wouldn't have come across in a report at all.

So no, no. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah.

That's interesting actually thinking about it, I don't really I don't really see the value in reports at all now.

I mean they have their place, but I think it is. It's one of these, you know, tread carefully and handle with care.

And I guess it sort of makes sense if you just literally don't have the time to sit down with your agency. But again, I think it's important.

To know this is your marketing. You know, it bugs me that people just leave their marketing Friday afternoons. You know, marketing is the thing that brings in new business and it feeds your pipeline and it, you know, it keeps, it keeps everybody employed and, you know, feeds the bottom line. So it is too important to be left to, you know, just Friday afternoon, or just a sort of afterthought. You should be sitting down and having conversations about how you're spending your marketing budget and, and what results. It's bringing in.

one hundred percent. Yeah. So there we go.

I think, I think.

Problem solved.

You know, that's probably all we have to say on the matter. But, um, yeah.

But no.

If you have any, any thoughts or, you know, I'd love to get feedback from people who are clients or on the agency side to, to say, you know, what, what they think works and what they, what doesn't work. I'd be really, really interested in that. And I'd love to have a conversation with somebody.

I'd be really interested to hear from somebody who is getting reports from their marketing agency that are very informative and that do help them make decisions. I think that would be really interesting to see.

Yeah. What what actually works. So you can contact us at red evolution dot com or find us on any various social media platforms and give us a shout we'd love to hear. But for now, this has been Digital Marketing From The Coalface. This has been Julie and Alex and, um, hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you very much.