Analytics/KPI Reporting - What's Your Process?

[John Huggins]

My questions are about reporting analytics/KPIs to clients each month - Mike has shared a great lookerstudio template for general reporting but also mentioned in his 2024 Tech Stack Note "I try to avoid sending clients keyword ranking reports or getting too hung up on specific rankings,..." This got me thinking about everyone else's reporting experiences and approaches. What's worked/hasn't worked for you? Any suggested tools? Are keyword rankings a sticking point for your clients? Currently, I use reports generated by SEMrush and review them with the client every month.  I've tried a few ways, slide decks, pdfs, live dashboards, but always go back to the semrush reports because the clients haven't been interested in dashboards or live data, AND they always seem to get hung up on seeing KW rankings.

[David Dennison]

Agency Analytics is actually super convenient and easy to use, so I'd give that a go! As far as keyword reporting, you don't want to dive in too deep simply because of natural fluctuations, it'll start to become a headache. I also usually have clients that are coming from a rough spot, so I focus on the the work we're doing to improve their situation, and focus on those results.

[John Huggins]

Thanks for the input David, you and your damn amazing hair! I try to gloss over the keywords but don't seem to have much success because they always want to come back to it. So I may not be framing the conversation well to focus on the other areas. I like agency analytics but don't like the minimums and maybe that's just me being cheap. I average between 3-5 clients/month.

[Mike Friedman]

20 hours ago, John Huggins said:

Thanks for the input David, you and your damn amazing hair! I try to gloss over the keywords but don't seem to have much success because they always want to come back to it. So I may not be framing the conversation well to focus on the other areas. I like agency analytics but don't like the minimums and maybe that's just me being cheap. I average between 3-5 clients/month.

The keyword thing is a discussion I have with clients when we first start working together. It's kind of hard to change their mindset once you start working together.

I set up keyword tracking that they can look at whenever they want, but I don't present ranking reports to them on a regular basis. I will highlight something if we have a big win. I would do the same if we had a big loss.

I explain to them that we want to focus on covering topics. Most of the high traffic pages I work on get clicks from 1000 different search queries each month. We would drive ourself crazy trying to track all of those and it would be a waste of resources.

I try to pick out keywords that will let us track overall trends. Are we moving up or are we moving down?

Their primary focus should be on conversions.

[tmcom]

Me been working on my forum doing deals with other platforms to get new signups and recently found after a few years that SEO is starting to kick in on its own, (the latest Google update certainly gave me the biggest surge in traffic l have seen which has died down) and l am seeing new signups on SEO only instead of paid as of late.