How do I generate reports for my clients?

Reports are a great way to provide regular updates to your clients on the maintenance work performed on their websites. Reports can be generated for single sites or as multi-site reports for clients with multiple domains.

Reports include data from the website activity logs, traffic information from Google Analytics, and uptime data. They can also be personalized, white-labelled with your company name and logo, and automatically emailed to your clients at regular intervals. 

Create a report profile

Report profiles are convenient ways to configure and save a series of customized reports. One created, profiles can be used to automatically email reports to specific emails or to manually download a report.

To create a report profile:

1. Click the Reports link in the left menu on the Watchful Dashboard followed by the New Report button to launch the report builder tool:
   
   
   
   
2. In the Report Builder choose a filter for your reports:
   1. Sites — Choose a single site.
   2. Tags — Choose a group of sites based on a tag.
      
      
      
      
3. Choose a delivery mode:
   1. Manual Download
   2. Scheduled Email
      
      
      
      
4. Choose the date range or delivery schedule for the report.:
   
   
   
   
5. Choose the report content. Options include:
   1. Google Analytics data
   2. Uptime data
   3. Log data.
      1. See below for details on how to customize which data from the logs is included in your reports. 
         
         
         
         
6. Personalize the report:
   1. Complete the Report title and Prepared by fields. If these fields are left blank, the report title will be Website Care Report and no report author will be displayed.
      
      
      
      
      
   2. Upload an image for the cover page of the report. Landscape or square orientation works best.
   3. Upload a logo to appear on each page. This is commonly your comany logo. Landscape orientation works best. 
      
      
      
      
      
7. Personalize the E-mail details (available for if Scheduled mail was selected under Delivery Mode):
   1. Enter the desired email address for delivery. 
   2. Enter the subject line for the email.
   3. Customize the body of the email. 
      
      
       
8. Customize the Email sender details. Choose either Watchful, or your own email account. To select your own email account, you must first configure your custom SMTP settings. 
   
   
   
   
9. Click Save Report Profile and enter a name for the report profile. If left blank, the site name or tag name will be used instead.

Download Reports

Once a Report Profile is saved, use the Download button to save a copy to your computer. 

Email reports automatically 

Report profiles may be saved and used regularly send reports. For example, you might use a saved profile to generate a monthly report for each client. To automatically receive reports by email: 

1. Ensure that your account email has been validated. 
2. Ensure Scheduled Email is selected as the Delivery Mode.
3. Enter a custom email address. If left blank, your account email will be used.
4. Use the Send test email button and make sure you receive the report at your account email address.

Managing saved reports

Saved reports will be listed in a table on the Reports page as shown above and includes a summary of each report. The list of reports is also used to manage the saver report profiles.

1. To delete a saved profile, click the Delete button at the right of the profile name.
2. To download or modify the report, click the profile name to open the profile editing drawer.
3. Modify the report in the builder as needed.
4. Click the Save report profile or Download PDF buttons as appropriate.

Customizing log types

By default, Watchful reports will include all data from the logs for the chosen date range/interval. It's common for Watchful users to customize the log data included to be more relevant for site owners. Often this includes actrivity on the site such as added or removed software, admin user changes, downtime events, and software updates.

To customize the log data in your reports, select the option Customize the logs included in report in Step 4 of the report builder and choose the desired items.

Video Preview

Please review this video to see the reporting tool in action: