They’re everywhere. Every single software program you use has the capability of producing data-backed reports. You can even run reports from your social media business account dashboards.
If you use software to run your company’s daily operations, you’ll find reporting features in those programs, too. For instance, fleet managers run reports to get the data they need to manage productivity, costs, warranties, and inventory.
How many reports do you run for your business? Do you use all the reporting features you have access to across your applications? Even though reports are widely accessible, they’re actually underused by a lot of businesses.
The thing is, reports are a necessary component for success and if you’re not using them, you’re missing out.
Reports help you plan milestones to reach your goals
At any given moment, the reports you run will tell you where your business stands in that moment. This is important because you need to know where you stand if you’re going to reach your goals.
Knowing where you stand now will help you develop a roadmap and a plan for getting where you need to be.
Example: reports can help you achieve lead-generation goals
Say you have an overall goal to generate 50,000 email subscribers. Now say you’ve been running your lead-generating campaign for one year and you’ve collected several thousand subscribers in that time. Run a report from your email marketing application to find out how many subscribers you generate per month or week on average and then set weekly milestones that work with your lead-generating campaign.
Say you generate 400 new subscribers per week on average. At that pace, it will take you 125 weeks to reach your goal of 50,000 subscribers. That’s just under 2.5 years to achieve your goal. That’s not unreasonable, but by running reports, you’ll know what to expect; you won’t have to guess when you might reach your subscriber goal. Then, you can choose to increase your efforts if you decide you’d like to reach your goal sooner.
Running an email marketing report will also tell you if you’re getting an increase in subscribers or if it’s trending downward. This information will tell you how and where you need to step up your game in case there’s anything getting in the way.
Reports can help you troubleshoot problems
An often-underestimated use for reporting is to troubleshoot problems. If something is not working quite right in your business, and you can run reports related to what’s not working, you might find your solution.
For example, say you notice that your PPC traffic has slowed down significantly and you’re not getting many conversions anymore. What could be the cause? Well, it could be anything and you won’t know where to start looking unless you run some reports.
When you run a report from the back end of your PPC ad account, you might find that some of your ads have stopped running. Or, you might discover that your payment method is invalid or your account has been suspended.
In any case, running a report will tell you where to start looking to identify the problem. You’ll save time because you won’t have to start by guessing and checking on random potential issues.
Reports provide performance insights
The most important reason to run reports is to generate performance insights. Performance insights can tell you where you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement.
For example, say you run a website traffic report to find out where your company website stands in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You might notice that a few of your web pages have risen in ranking and are now closer to the first page. Or, you might notice that some of your web pages have started to rank worse.
For the pages that are ranking higher, you’ll know your optimization methods have been working. For the pages that are ranking lower, you’ll know you need to step up your game and do something different. It’s possible that you’ve been overtaken by a competitor, too. However, only reports can give you the specifics you need to diagnose and fix the problem.
Reporting will help you keep your business efficient
No matter what industry you’re in, and no matter your niche, run reports whenever possible. There is plenty of different information that will give you the data necessary to improve your business’ efficiency.
If you’re still crunching numbers with a calculator, switch it up. Reports will give you more accurate data than manual methods.
