Monthly reporting

What monthly reporting is

Monthly reporting is a single page, delivered on the first working day of each month, that tells the owner what the content did last month and what will change because of it. It uses three or four numbers chosen in advance, states them in sentences, and ends with one decision. It replaces the forty-page analytics export that nobody reads.

It is not a dashboard, which is live and unexplained, and it is not content reporting in the strategy sense, which sets up the measures and the reporting frame in the first place. This is the monthly page that comes after those measures exist, written every month by someone who has looked at the figures and thought about them.

Who this is for

An owner or manager who is paying for content, in money or in staff time, and cannot say in one sentence whether it is working. You get a monthly email from the web person with a screenshot of a graph going up, or you get nothing at all, and either way you could not tell a partner which pages produced an inquiry last month.

It is not for a business that publishes nothing and changes nothing; there is nothing to report. Nor is it the right buy if the measures have never been chosen. In that case the first step is choosing the KPIs, which takes a short piece of work and then makes every later report meaningful.

What it contains

The page has the same five parts every month, in the same order, so you can read it in four minutes and compare it with last month's without hunting.

1. What was published. A short list: each piece, its date, and where it went. If the schedule said six and four went out, the report says four and why.
2. The numbers. The three or four measures agreed at the start, each stated as a sentence with the previous month alongside. Qualified inquiries that came through the site is always one of them. Visits to the pages that matter, and which pages sent people to the contact form, are usually the others.
3. What it means. Two or three sentences of interpretation. A rise in visits to a page that produced no inquiries is noted as such, not celebrated.
4. What is slipping. Any page whose visits or inquiries have fallen for two months running, flagged for a refresh before it is a problem.
5. One change. The single decision the month's figures support: a page to refresh, a topic to drop, a piece to move up the schedule. One, so it gets done.

The figures come from your own analytics and the inquiry form or inbox, which you give me read access to. Where a number cannot be measured cleanly, the report says so rather than guessing.

What you get

The monthly page. One page, as a document you can forward, on the first working day of the month. Written in sentences, with one small table for the numbers.

The running record. One spreadsheet, one row per month, with the same measures in the same columns, so at any point you can see twelve months on one screen.

A quarterly note. Every third month, an extra half page that looks at the quarter rather than the month and says whether the plan is on track or needs changing.

A ten-minute call, if you want it. Some owners read the page and file it; others prefer to hear it. Either is fine, and the price is the same.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A small commercial cleaning company publishes two blog posts a month and sends one email newsletter. The owner receives an automated analytics summary showing visits rising and assumes the content is working, but the inquiry form has produced the same three or four leads a month for a year.

The first monthly report lists the two posts and the newsletter, then gives four numbers: total inquiries through the site, four; the pages those inquiries came from, three of the four from the office-cleaning service page and one from a post about strata cleaning contracts; visits to the two new posts, a few dozen each; and the newsletter's clicks, mostly to the strata post. The interpretation is that the blog is being read by people who are not buyers, except for the strata piece. The one change is to write the next two posts about strata and property-management questions and to put the strata post in front of the newsletter. Three months later the report shows whether that produced inquiries, and the schedule is adjusted again.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish, what you currently see, and what you actually want to know each month. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. A monthly fee, agreed before the first report.
3. Set-up. You give read-only access to analytics and the inquiry form or inbox. We agree the three or four measures and I write a baseline page for the previous month so the first real report has something to compare with.
4. The monthly page. First working day of each month, every month, with the spreadsheet updated.
5. The quarterly note. Every third month, with the call if you want it.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed monthly price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on how many channels are being reported on, whether the measures already exist or need setting up, and whether you want the call each month. Reporting is included in the Content Engine on the pricing page; on its own it is a small monthly fee for a business that publishes without me.

What happens next

The report tends to generate its own work: the page flagged as slipping goes for a content refresh, and a pattern of pages falling together is worth a proper content decay analysis. Twelve rows of the running record are also the honest starting point for the next content strategy plan, because by then you know which subjects produce inquiries and which produce readers.