Despite several decades of encouraging land management actions to improve water quality, we are not able to accurately quantify what management actions have been implemented, where these actions have been used and the intensity of implementation. This is largely because standardised approaches to recording and reporting of land management actions have not been established. This leads to a lack of robust information that can be used to determine the effectiveness and longevity of these actions at a catchment or larger scale. Better information on the effectiveness of different land management actions will provide land managers with more certainty that their investments in land management actions will make a difference. I will summarise the complexities associated with recording land management actions (i.e., temporal and spatial lag-effects, confidentiality issues, lack of data robustness) and review processes used for grouping action types. I will also explain how actions can be measured, how to address the challenges with doing this and recommend a suite of indicators of land management actions that could be standardised and widely used.