How to get the most out of your weekly Executive Report

If you can track it, you can improve it!

The Executive Report was created to give business owners a quick and efficient way to analyze their business and make sure they were trending in the right direction. As we all know, goals are only as good as the records we keep on the journey to reach the goal.

The Executive Report has proven to make a huge difference in our customer’s businesses. In an independent study of our clients and retentions rates based on our database. Those who connect accounts to the Business Hub and then take the time to open and review their Executive Report actually saw a 51% increase in their customer retention rates.

What could a 51% increase in your customer retention rate do for your business?

In the Business Hub, you can decide whether you want to received weekly or monthly notifications when your Executive Report is ready to view. Most choose to go with the monthly view, but those who spend their entire marketing budget on digital advertising, tend to view the report on a weekly basis.

Through the data provided on the Executive Report, you will quickly be able to identify what aspects of your business are working, and where you might need to focus a bit more time and effort to improve. It can help you see holes you maybe had not seen in your operation, and help you to determine where you might need to hire some help to plug those lost revenue holes.

When you received notification an Executive Report is ready, you can click on the link and see the entire overview of the report right there, if you want to drill down a little deeper, just click anywhere on the report and you will be either automatically logged in, or prompted to log into your Business Hub account. It is really that simple.

Connection to your accounts is key

When you first log into your Business Hub, our dashboard does a great job of needling you to connect your Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Analytics accounts. Simply because the more data sources we can pull from, the more accurate had helpful your Executive Report will become. We have amazing scripts and processes in place to help organize, total and create simple graphs so you can quickly see and understand the raw data being pulled in. But without the data, our amazing programming is useless, and our developers get their feelings hurt.

Let's dig into the Executive Report

Choose a view

First you will need to choose the view of the report that best works for you. At the top of the screen you will see an option to choose weekly or monthly reports. If you happen to have multiple locations in your Business Hub, you will be able to select rolling periods of 7, 30 or 90 days, etc. Or a totally customer date range can be chosen.

The Marketing Funnel

The Marketing Funnel located at the top of the report is where we present data from multiple sources and return them as data on Impressions, Engagement, and Leads – this information is critical to understand how your marketing efforts are contributing to increases in brand awareness and in attracting more customers.

The Marketing Funnel provides graphs and data in the 3 sections mentioned above, namely Impressions, Engagement, and Leads. Let’s define these so we are all on the same page.

Impressions: The number of views the content you are sharing online has received.
Engagement: The number of times your online assets have successfully motivated some kind of action (click, scroll, download, message sent, phone called, form filled out. etc.) by a visitor or potential customer.
Leads: The number of contacts that have reached out showing interest in any aspect of the business.

You will notice in each section that we include information from Social Media Marketing, Ad Intelligence, Reputation Management, as well as data from Google My Business. If there are more opportunities to add in other connections, we will also make these known. We constantly strive to improve our platform, so you might see a new connection request from time to time.

Recommendations

With the Executive Report, you will notice that we make a few recommendations here and there. These are just a sentence or two that might explain a feature in more detail, especially if we have received questions about it, we also will include some advice based on our experience, and some links to services in our store that might be appropriate if you find your numbers a bit lower than you would like in any given section.

In each section of the report we have reserved a spot for one comment, and each comment or statement will be related to only that particular section.

What are Google My Business Insights?

The Google My Business insight section is lots of detail on your Google My Business listing, and how it is performing in search, or the pursuit of free Google leads. The data from this report is only available to those who have connected their Google My Business account to the Business Hub. If you haven’t done so already, just log into your Google My Business account, then come back to the Business Hub and click on the “Connect” link. Because you are already logged into your GMB account, Google will just have you verify that you give the Business Hub permission to pull in your data, that’s it! Once you have your account connected, we are able to provide you very critical data like:

Search types, or exactly how a customer found your business on Google.
Views, or where your customers are seeing your Google My Business listing.
Actions, lists the common actions being taken by visitors to your Google My Business listing.
Photo views. The number of times people have viewed the photos you have uploaded (for what it is worth, we are seeing Google reward customers who are consistently adding photos to their GMB listing. And our Social Media Marketing tool connects to GMB, so you can schedule out 6 months of photos to be posted automatically and really expect to receive higher rankings and more leads from Google)
Photo quantity: how many photos that you have uploaded directly, or using our app, as well as how many photos have been uploaded by your customers.

These numbers communicate how engaged your customers are on your Google My Business listing, and when there is higher engagement, Google rewards you with more leads to your site.

Listings Section

If you haven’t been able to tell, we at Blue Market love listings. Listings were such a big deal in the old days, but they sort of lost favor when Google and Facebook started offering cheap advertising opportunities. But now that advertising has become expensive and more difficult for small businesses to afford, listings have come roaring back as a hugely important aspect to your online business.

And we love that we have taken a brutally manual process and have turned it into an automated piece of heaven for our clients. Just fully fill in your Business Hub profile, and you will start benefiting from the Listings software. And the Listings section of the Executive Report you will see some amazing results, and it is exciting to see how many benefits can be achieved through our system.

What I love about Listings is that it is the gift that keeps on giving. You protect your brand, you take control of your business information, and you just naturally gain links month to month to your site, improving the trustworthiness of your site in Google’s eyes.

One of the really cool things you’ll notice is you can easily track your improvement over time. It is probably my favorite part of the graph. The proof of the benefits of Listings is right there, in your face, plain as day. The right side of the section shows your business listing accuracy and what directories or publishers you are currently listed on. Each publisher will show any errors they have noticed, and those errors are indicated in yellow. If everything is correct, the color will be predictably green. The graphic I have included below displays your listing score breakdown, which is how publishers are factoring in to make up your current listing score.

Reputation Management Section

This Reputation Management section provides a pretty detailed, but also simple-to-digest overview of your business’s online reputation and how our software has been able to support you in protecting your online reputation. In this section, we include data concerning the following items:

Average Star Rating: This is calculated across all reviews collected, on all platforms we are monitoring for you. Any change in your rating would be compared to the same time period used previously.
New Reviews: Collected in the reporting period selected on all platforms being monitored.
Insights: Sentiment analysis of review context using Google’s Natural Language Processing technology. Essentially, we are showing the underlying emotion of the review. Namely, it is a positive, neutral or negative review.
Top Review Sources: From which sources your business is receiving reviews in the highest quantities. (This is a great indicator of where those who want/need your product are hanging out online)
Recent Requests: Number of new requests sent for reviews via Customer Voice.
Average Response Time: The average time it takes you or someone you have hired to monitor your reviews (yes, if you are paying us, this would be our response time) and then responds to these reviews via the Business Hub.
New Review Responses: Responses successfully made during this period.
Recent Mentions: These are calculated based on mention searches that have been configured in Reputation Management.

It’s important to note that the star rating you may find on the source, may differ from the star rating you see in the Business Hub. For example, if reviews are deleted, or ratings are updated before we have had the opportunity to gather the review the very first time, there is no way for us to determine that. Eventually, our spider will revisit the review site and update the number we save in the system.

Website Section

So here I go again… In order to receive all the website data we can organize, analyze, and present, we need to have you connect your Google Analytics account, installed on your website, also connected in the Business Hub.

This connection is most easily accomplished through the Business Hub walkthrough or wizard. The Executive Report pulls in important data from your Google Analytics account for your analysis, including

Users: the number of unique or “first-time” visitors your website has received
Sessions: the number of times your website has been visited
Pageviews: the number of times a user has viewed a specific page on your website
Average time on website: the average length of time that a user spends on your website
Bounce rate: the percentage of users who left your site after viewing only one page. This bounce rate is a big one. When Google sends referrals to a particular site, and then they bounce back or quickly return back to Google, Google interperats a bounce-back to mean that the page served up did not meet the needs of the person searching, so that keyword becomes more disassociated with your website.
Pages/session: the average number of pages viewed in a single visit to your website.
Traffic sources: where your website traffic is coming from. This includes direct searches on Google for your business name, organic searches using keywords related to your business like “eye doctor near me,” and traffic from social sites that were re-directed to website from a social media platform
Top referral sources: where your website is being found the most

Social Media Marketing Section

The Social Marketing section gathers all the data from all social media sites you have connected to your account. The information we share in the report includes:

New Posts: The number of posts that have been published on all connected social media accounts (can include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business) during the chosen period.
Engagement: Likes, comments & shares your posts have received during this same period.
Reach: The number of people who have seen your posts across all platforms during this period was queried.
Top Performing Posts: Posts with the highest reach and engagement this period. Also a good indication of where you can find people congregating who have shown to gravitate towards your message, brand, products, or services.
Facebook Likes & Twitter Follows: Audience growth over the time period analyzed, as compared to the competitors you have selected and included in your Business Profile.

Advertising Section

If your Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager accounts are authenticated/connected with Advertising Intelligence, then the advertising sections can become one of the most important you will review. You can quickly see how your marketing campaigns are performing, you can identify what is working and what is not based on ROI, and then quickly make adjustments to improve your ROI.

Digital advertising is the most transparent and easily tracked form of marketing, especially with regards to knowing, and I mean really KNOWING your ROI on your investment. Other traditional forms of marketing do not offer this level of confidence.

If I can be frank, I personally can not understand why any business owner would pay for a billboard, radio spot, or magazine article these days. Unless it is for purely superficial reasons, it makes no justifiable, economic sense.

Wrapping Up

The Executive Report was created to give you the information you need to make sure you can make informed decisions about your business. No more “gut feels” or “semi-educated guesses” you can now react and make long-term strategic plans based on data not previously available to small business owners at this price. We hope you love the Executive Report, and find great insights from it so your business can predictably thrive, even in uncertain times.