How long do you spend on monthly reporting for your clients?
My 3-person team spends about 15+ hours a month each writing monthly reports for our clients (99 small retainer clients). We’ve received feedback that they’re too complicated and the clients just want to know - are we on the right track, what action items are there, and what any next steps are in their strategy.
How do you simplify without losing value?

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Everyone gets this "so what? Cut to the chase" feedback at some point. You've arrived! The surprise is that you will spend a little longer getting to a simpler output each month, because your team needs to be fully understanding of the data to confidently say, "we're on the right track."

You can offset this time spent proactively at a milestone (beginning, quarterly, halfway) point of a campaign by stopping to ask the client what they want to see and what they don't. I don't mean verbally - give them a red pen and your reports and let them tell you what's cluttering up their view.

More often than not, you'll find that your team is trying to showcase metrics that only the agency nerds care about, but clients don't. Keep a stockpile of that data for internal use & escalation use only and show only the tip of the iceberg to the clients in regular meetings, sharing more only if they decide to dig deeper, then you reveal the larger magic.

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When I was new to the advertising side of the business (my first 6 years were at PR agencies before I moved to a full-service shop and then from PR into account management), I was in my first campaign reporting meeting with my client. I had never been in an integrated ad campaign reporting meeting or seen a report before, so I really relied on the analyst knowing what to share and implications at that point since it was still new to me. The client sat quietly and respectfully for the full 60 minutes while the analyst went through about 40 slides of a ton of data points that (looking back) didn’t really tell you anything. When the analyst was done, the client looked at me and said, “I don’t care about the thousand things we could measure in a campaign. I care about the 5 things we should measure that will change what we do next month.” She said it directly, but nicely enough because she knew I was new to the ad side. I’ve never forgotten that. And I made sure after that day that clients always get a reporting output that focuses primarily on the handful of measures that force the most import discussion and decision making. Signals are more important than the noise.

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