The Ever Evolving Search Reports

Everytime I work on generating a monthly PPC / SEO report for our clients I find myself asking the same questions.

• How much is too much information?
• Do you REALLY need to tweak PPC campaigns more then once or twice a month, once the campaign has been established?
• What is the most concise way to show data?

The more monthly search reports I see from competing search engine marketing agencies the more I’ve begun to notice the trend of “shock-n-awe” reporting. By this I mean reports which are 30 plus pages of Excel data dumped in by some automated program at micro sized type. These reports often include 2-3 paragraphs of human analysis and that’s all.

It seems to me that search engine marketing agencies should be working harder to interpret and condense marketing reports that are catered to clients rather then overwhelming the client with shear stats. Many reports I’ve looked at have ‘interesting’ data but they lack action items or substantive analysis. As this trend continues these reports are beginning to look more and more like the server log files which the report was meant to interpret. Perhaps soon we will see the creation of a new specialist, Search Engine Marketing Report Analyst. A position created just to interpret the search engine marketing reports.