Finding Your Reporting Rhythm
Every team at Bayer has their unique data, goals and opportunities, which is why it’s important to establish a reporting cadence that is right for you.
A regular schedule not only keeps everyone accountable but also helps everyone on your team generate the most value through measurement and reporting.
This section explores some of the most common measurement and reporting intervals.
First, consider these key questions to help you determine what frequency is best for your reporting:
- What does success look like for your content or initiative?
- How long will the campaign or initiative run in-market?
- How much data—and from how many sources—do you need to collect, process and analyze? Consider all the channels which are being used in the execution.
- What are some potential optimizations or adjustments you could make prior to the project’s culmination that could ensure its success?
- Who will be in charge of delivering the report (i.e., internal team, agency partner, media vendor, etc.)?
Regardless of how often you choose to report, one fact will always remain true: The report frequency and data sample size impact what you can learn. The longer the time frame, the more data you’ll have to work with—and this determines what insights you can glean from your reporting.
Opportunities in Every Interval
Picture your reporting pyramid. At the bottom, the date range is wider and therefore contains more data to be analyzed.
As you climb upward, your date range gets smaller, and your sample size of data decreases.
Odds are that your reporting needs will fall somewhere within this spectrum rather than at the polar extremes.
Daily, Weekly, and Biweekly
- Best for ongoing surveillance and monitoring of media performance
- Useful for making smaller adjustments and optimizations to a specific source/channel
- Less useful for trend analysis and generating broader insights regarding the overall campaign
- Reporting at this frequency lends itself well to a dashboard approach
Monthly
- Best for summarizing ongoing performance across channels
- Useful for identifying changes in performance and key indicators for success
- Helps flag potential trends, but is less useful for deriving overall campaign/brand insights
- Lends itself to a dashboard, presentation deck or a combination thereof
Quarterly
- Best for examining high-level patterns and trends across the reporting period
- Helps inform overall campaign and brand-level insights
- Useful for considering external factors that may have impacted performance
- Less useful for granular analysis of individual sources, placements, posts, creative, etc.
- Lends itself to a presentation deck that seeks new opportunities for future campaigns and initiatives
Bi-Annual, Mid-Year, Annual
- Best for large-scale exercises like communications planning and evaluations that assess how campaigns impact the brand
- Useful when determining which activities resulted in desired outcomes (e.g. increased traffic or engagement)
- Less useful for granular analysis of individual sources, placements, posts, creative, etc.
- Lends itself to a larger reporting deliverable such as an extended presentation deck or long-form PDF. It could also be broken out into a series of conversations looking at more specific items.