Mind Readings: What’s the Difference Between Analytics and Reporting?

In this episode, let's talk through the differences between analytics and reporting. These two terms uh are used interchangeably a lot, an awful lot, and they're not the same thing. This came about because uh we're talking about Google Analytics 4 and how it is a very different tool than Universal Analytics or Google Analytics 3. Google Analytics 3 was sort of this all in one Swiss Army knife, right? Uh configuration, analytics, and reporting all in one tool.

And now in Google Analytics 4, these are now three separate software packages effectively. Google Tag Manager for configuration, Google Analytics for analytics, and Google Data Studio for reporting. Most of the time, when people are talking about analytics, they're actually talking about reporting. Most of the time. Most of the time, people are using tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics or HubSpot Analytics or whatever to report on what has happened.

Now, let's start with analytics. Analytics from the Greek word analyne means to unlock, to loosen, right? And the the way we use this term means to take data that we have of some kind and sort of shake it, right? Loosen it up and get stuff out of it. Get something useful out of this pile of data, right?

To unlock it. What happened is the question that we try to answer the most when we're doing analytics. When we're doing insights, the question we try to answer is why? Why did those things happen? And so when we're talking about reporting, reporting is different.

Reporting is communicating our results, our results of our an analysis, results of our analytics to somebody else, right? You give them a PowerPoint, a dashboard, um, a 40-page typed paper. Something that says, here's what happened, and we're communicating this in a way that will be hopefully useful to you as the consumer of this data. And so when we think about analytics and reporting this way, we see they're very different functions. One is trying to understand what happened, the other is trying to communicate what happened to someone else.

The best analogy I can make is that analytics is like cooking, right? You got your raw ingredients, you cook them, you you process them in some way to make a dish. And then reporting is like plating and serving, where you like you just don't hand somebody a frying pan filled with what you cooked, right? You you plate it, maybe make it look nice, you walk it out from the kitchen to uh to where people are dining and and you consume it. Now, yeah, of course, there are exceptions, right?

Um, go to a hibachi restaurant and they're cooking literally in front of you and setting things on fire and stuff. Order a uh a breakfast skillet at Denny's or whatever, and you get the pan that was literally cooked in. Um, so it's not like inflexible, but for the most part, when you're cooking, you're using one set of dishes and processes and things like that. And then when you're plating and serving, it's something different. It's presented, you know, the the your results are presented in a way that hopefully is appealing, right?

From a taste perspective, if you just served certain foods like in one big pile, right? It would taste fine, even if that's horrendous to look at, right? Whereas something is artful with you know little you know chopped herbs and things like that. That presents the your the output in a in a more pleasant way, and it can enhance the dining experience. When we talk about analytics and we talk about reporting, if we treat them the same, then we are effectively saying we're just gonna slop the food on the plate and fling it in front of you, and and you you get what you get, right?

As opposed to saying, no, here's our analysis. We're going to plate our analysis, right? We're going to prepare it, we're going to make it look nice, we'll put it in a company PowerPoint template or whatever, so that um it's ready for consumption. Maybe even do things like write some narrative around it to make it more appealing, make it more understandable, make it more digestible. If we might think about when you look at a uh piece of data, our analysis says our website traffic was down 42% last month.

Our stakeholders probably going to ask, you know, first question they're gonna ask is why? Why did that happen? That's not supposed to happen, it's supposed to always go up and to the right. If we are doing analysis without considering the plating of our outputs, we're not prepared to answer that question, right? We say, uh, I'm gonna go look, I'll get back to you.

Whereas if we think about the plating, we can anticipate, um, yeah, the I'm gonna ask why. Why is our traffic down, you know, 42%, and it's because you know, Google changed its search algorithm, we lost a bunch of traffic, or uh our CEO was just arrested, and you know, it damages the company's uh reputation or whatever. There's that aspect of preparing it in such a way that the most obvious questions someone would have about an analysis are answered. Uh there's something called out. When I do reporting for our clients, and we always have these little call-out boxes pointing out, hey, this is this is worth paying attention to.

Here's a big bar chart, but this bar right here, pay attention to this one. This is important. Um it's plating. It's plating our our results in a way that is appealing to the eye, that enhances the dining experience, the consumption experience of our data. Um makes it easier for people to recommend.

Makes it easier for people to make a decision from, right? If you have a bunch of data, but you just call out this is the one thing that is important, make a decision on this. It helps to focus people. And you're not hiding anything, right? You're not concealing the truth.

The data is there if they want it and they want to run their own analysis to unlock the data from a different perspective. But the reporting that you've done guides how you want people to consume it. Again, like plating. If you if you have a big pile of food and you just fling it all in a bucket and hand it to the person, uh, it's A, it's unappealing, and B, it's you're you're risking them consuming it in ways you didn't intend. If you take all of your data and you plate it, you know, appetizer, first course, second course, third course, dessert, and you space it out, people will consume the data in the order you want them to, in a way that tells the story that you want to be told.

So you, as the reporting person have a lot of control, a lot of control over how data is consumed, right? Over how data is interpreted by the way you played it. One of the things that is unfortunate is something of a uh very common misperception is that data science or analytics is more sophisticated and more important than reporting, right? Because anybody can put together a PowerPoint, right? Well, yes, anybody can put together a PowerPoint.

Not everybody can put it together well, right? Anybody can cook. Not everybody can cook well. And so if we think about the art of plating and presenting our data, there are artful ways and there are less artful ways, just like there are is with food, right? You could take all the ingredients of sushi and just put it in a pile, right?

No one's gonna be happy with you. But if you arrange it really nicely and have that little fake plastic grass, you know, and stuff, you make it look nice, it helps people process it better. So analytics and reporting are not the same thing. They're two separate disciplines. They require two separate sets of skills, and the two outcomes are very different.

Analysis is to unlock not what only what happened, but things like anomalies, trends, uh, maybe even predictions. Reporting is all about communicating our results. And you have to do the analysis to do the reporting. That is true. But analysis without good reporting is lost on people.

And they won't make the decisions that will make everybody happier or get better results or make more money. And both roles, both functions are equally important. So avoid treating reporting as though it was an afterthought are less important. In the same way that a Michelin-starred restaurant is not going to invest heavily in a chef that cooks really well, but then plates terribly, right? That plating experience is part of the dining experience.

It's part of what makes a Michelin-starred chef so valuable. So use that analogy, cooking versus plating, and how they both work together to create the best possible outcome. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.