Web reports covers what you have published and how it is holding together.
What it shows
The state of your content, rather than the behaviour of your visitors.
How many pages exist, and how much content each actually has.
Published against draft, across articles and knowledge base entries.
Whether the knowledge base is in good order. More drafts than published entries is flagged, because it usually means writing started and stopped.
The sitemap, and whether it is current.
Reviews, as a count and an average.
What it does not show, and this is the important half
Traffic. How many people visited, from where, on what.
Behaviour. What they read, how far down, what they clicked, where they left.
Conversion. Whether any of it produced anything.
None of that is here, and none of it can be, because NearSync does not sit between your visitors and your website. Those questions are answered by whatever analytics your site runs.
Say this out loud before presenting anything from this surface. A report on content volume presented as website performance is the kind of mistake that gets repeated in a board pack for a year.
It counts what you made, not what happened
Worth holding in mind for every number on the page. This is a stock take of your content, and a stock take never tells you whether anybody bought anything.
It will not chase anybody
No alerts, no reminders, no nudges. If nobody opens it, the draft pile grows quietly. Put it on a recurring list or accept that.
What it is genuinely good for
Three questions, and it answers all three well.
Is anything stuck in draft? Content written and never published is the most common waste on any website, and it is invisible unless something counts it. A knowledge base with more drafts than published articles is a project that stalled.
Are pages actually finished? Content density catches the page created as a placeholder eighteen months ago that still has a heading and one paragraph.
Is the sitemap honest? It decides what search engines are told, and it drifts every time pages are added or removed.
Nothing here is a vanity number
Every figure on this page is either work finished or work outstanding. That is unusual for a reporting surface and it is why the monthly read is short.
Reading it monthly
Ten minutes, four questions.
Did anything get published this month? If not, the website is not being worked on, whatever anybody says.
Has the draft pile grown? A growing pile means somebody keeps starting and not finishing, which is usually a review bottleneck rather than a writing problem.
Are there thin pages? Either finish them or remove them. A half-written page live on your site is worse than a missing one.
Has the average review moved? And if it has, read the recent ones rather than the number. See Reviews and reputation.
Published against draft
The single most useful pair of numbers here.
Drafts are work already paid for and not yet delivered. Somebody wrote them. The cost is sunk. Publishing them is the cheapest content you will ever get.
A draft count that only grows is a process problem rather than a writing problem, and the fix is almost always approval rather than encouragement.
A draft count of zero on a site that is actively worked is unusual, and normally means people are publishing without review.
Sitemap drift
It changes every time a page is added or removed, and nothing tells you when it stops matching. Check it whenever you publish a page rather than on a schedule.
What good looks like
Not volume.
A small, complete, current site beats a large, half-finished one, on every measure including the commercial ones. Forty thin pages perform worse than twelve good ones and cost more to maintain.
A knowledge base with no draft backlog means the process works, whatever its size.
A sitemap that matches reality.
What to check monthly
Ten minutes, and the four questions are the whole of it.
Published anything? Draft pile grown? Any thin pages? Reviews moved?
Write the answers down somewhere. A number checked monthly and never recorded gives you the current state and no trend, and the trend is the part that tells you anything.
Pairing it with real analytics
If you run analytics on your site, this becomes considerably more useful, because the two answer different halves.
Analytics tells you which pages get traffic. This tells you which pages exist and which are thin.
Put them together and you find the genuinely valuable thing: pages getting traffic that are not finished. Those are the highest-return work available on any website, and neither source finds them alone.
What to do with what it tells you
Three findings and what each one means.
A draft pile that never shrinks is a review bottleneck. Somebody writes, nobody approves, and the writer eventually stops writing. Fix the approval, not the writing.
Thin pages that get traffic are the best work available on any website. Somebody is arriving and finding half an answer.
A knowledge base smaller than your support queue's top questions means the queue will keep asking them. Five articles is a fortnight's work and it is the highest-return thing on this list.
Presenting it without misleading anybody
If this goes in front of anyone senior, one sentence up front prevents a year of confusion.
Say what it counts. "This is what we have published and its state. It is not traffic."
Without that, a chart showing forty pages and nine articles gets read as website performance, and the next question is why the number is not going up. The number going up is not the goal; a small, complete, current site is.
Where the wider reporting lives
Cross-department numbers, governed measures and anything you want on a board are Analytics, not here. This surface reports on Web's own content and stops there.
For how to read any widget properly, including why one might be empty, see Reading a widget.
Did this answer your question?
No, ask a person