Why most online annual
reports fail
By: Dominic Jones
Related: Best
Practices for Online Annual Reports
ANNUAL REPORTS have an important
role on investor relations websites, but the vast
majority of companies are making the wrong decisions
about how to publish their reports online.
In fact, many companies are doing the exact opposite
of what research shows they should be doing. Instead
of focusing their energy on improving the annual
report sections investors do use, companies are
expending time and money on content that most
investors ignore.
This is the conclusion of a comparison between
the findings of two third-party studies of
how investors use online annual reports and IR
Web Report's findings of how companies publish
their reports online.
The findings of the third-party studies on how
investors use online annual reports are important
because they are based on the actual online behavior
of investors. By analyzing the Internet traffic
logs of websites hosting both HTML and PDF annual
reports, researchers were able to see exactly
what information investors looked at, when they
visited, and the sequence and length of their
visits.
IR Web Report's research covering 500 large-cap
sites finds that companies rarely pay attention
to the report sections that investors use and
instead emphasize content that investors ignore.
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