If you manage a client account, you need to explain reported findings and identify the delivery work that follows. An account manager owns the client relationship rather than the delivery work. You need two things from a research tool. One is an account of the month you can defend when a client questions it. The other is a list of named pages and publications for the delivery team to work.
What you can take from the reports without doing the delivery work
Four things are readable without running the research yourself.
- Whether the client is named in the questions their buyers ask, and whether named competitors are.
- Which pages the answers cite, which is the placement list the delivery team should be working.
- Coverage that named the client, and whether what it says is still accurate.
- Which prospects were qualified and how many are still unworked.
The last one is the account management question the others are not. A long list of qualified prospects that nobody has contacted is a capacity problem, and it is better raised in an internal review than discovered by the client.
The conversation to have before the first report
Three points settled in the first month prevent most of the difficult conversations later.
Answers vary between runs. The same question asked twice can return different companies. That is a property of the systems, not a fault in the reporting, and it means a month-on-month move is often noise.
Presence is not traffic. Nothing in these reports establishes a visit or a sale. If the client's question is revenue, the answer comes from their analytics and their sales records, not from here.
Nobody controls the assistants. There is no placement to buy and no position to hold. What can be promised is the work: corrections sent, placements pursued, pages revised.
A client who hears this in month one handles a flat month in month five. A client who has only ever seen a rising line does not.
Where the numbers come from, and who owns them
Two figures in these reports are collected rather than earned, and confusing the two is how an account manager ends up defending a claim that will not hold.
A discovered link is a link the collection found. It may have been published a year ago and earned by nobody at your agency. What your team earned is in your own records.
A count of available prospects describes what the index holds. It is not a measure of anyone's month.
Keep both out of the performance section and use them where they belong: as evidence about the market and about workload.
Handing a finding to the delivery team
A finding is useful to the person doing the work when it names the page and the action.
"Presence fell" is not a task. "The three roundups cited for the client's main buying question do not list them, and two accept submissions" is. So is "the pricing page reads as being about the product rather than about the buyer, and here is the category comparison that shows it".
The reports produce findings in that form already. The account manager's job is deciding which of them the client is paying for this month.
Preparing the review itself
The method for the monthly review, including what belongs in each section and what should be left out, is set out in reviewing client campaign progress.
What this does not give you
There is no client login, so a client cannot be given access to their own campaign, and staff cannot be restricted to particular accounts. The workspace role is the access boundary.
If your contracts commit you to client-facing dashboards, check that before assuming the campaign structure provides it.
Before the client review, attach each proposed task to its evidence. Identify who will complete it and when you will review the result with the client.
See the review method, roster capacity and access, or why visibility is not traffic.