What to ask your agency about reporting latency
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on reporting latency, these questions are worth asking early.
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Decide how fresh reports genuinely need to be. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Most decisions do not need same-minute data. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
In practice
Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Three things worth confirming about reporting latency before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Real-time costs several times more than hourly — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.