Marketing analytics & reporting

What is a Marketing Campaign Report and How to Create One

Doing amazing marketing work is only half of a battle won. Your clients want to see the results of your hard work, whether you're an agency owner or an in-house marketer. To do this, you need to create a marketing campaign report, outlining your successes. Today, we'll show you what campaign reports are and how to create them to upscale your marketing efforts.

Whatagraph marketing reporting tool
Nikola Gemes

Feb 25 2021 8 min read

Whatagraph marketing reporting tool

Table of Contents

    What is marketing campaign reporting?

    Campaign reporting is the process of reporting on the results of your marketing campaign. A campaign report is a document showing your progress, whether it's in SEO, social media marketing, PPC, or a cross-channel report. In short, campaign reporting entails showing progress to your client or manager.

    Every marketing campaign has certain goals and it can take a lot of different steps from the moment you start until a campaign is finished. It's easy to lose focus and show your progress, which is where reports come in handy.

    Usually, the person creating campaign reports in an agency setting is an account manager in charge of a specific client. When reporting in-house, this can be anyone from a marketing intern all the way to the marketing manager.

    No matter who does it and where it is used, campaign reporting helps you document your marketing processes and carry out a practical post-campaign analysis.

    Marketing teams use marketing campaign reports to track the success of their strategy and optimize their campaigns using professional KPIs.

    The KPIs can come from all the top marketing channels, such as Google Analytics or social media reports, email marketing, paid search, and more!

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    Why you should create marketing campaign reports

    A well-written campaign report provides insight into the performance of your campaigns by tracking your marketing data. That way, everyone can be on the same page: the CMO, the management team, the sales team, and the agency sending the report, all the way to the CEO. 

    Functional campaign reports help you:

    Determine the basis for assessing if the campaign was worth the expenditure spent in running it.

    Understand the strategies and tactics behind successful and unsuccessful campaigns and how they impact your bottom line.

    Review the overall effectiveness of your marketing activities against your main targets and KPIs.

    Evaluate how the target audience responded to the campaign and how market variables affect the business or brand.

    Understand the basis for planning and implementing future campaigns.

    Help in the discussion of the campaign with key stakeholders. 

    If your team members are already tracking marketing metrics such as traffic, leads, and customers, you can use a monthly marketing report to gather and analyze marketing metrics to inform future marketing decisions, and strategies, as well as improve your marketing performance.

    What are the essential elements of a marketing campaign report?

    A great report must have a few essential elements to do its magic. If you're thinking of a Powerpoint presentation or a Word document, think again. From the style to the content, these are the elements you need to pay attention to.

    1. The style

    The report should be written in a narrative style. While each report revolves around data, it's always a good idea to tell some sort of a story in your business report.

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    Storytelling lets you take a look at the individual pieces of your report and connect them. That way, you can show how.

    Most importantly, it saves the reader of your report a lot of valuable time and keeps them motivated to go through your work and report carefully. After all, everybody loves a good story.

    2. Simplicity

    Campaign reports should be easy enough to understand for anyone with basic marketing knowledge. You probably have a good idea of who will be reading your report. However, it needs to be understood well enough by an intern as well as the CEO of a company.

    Most people going through the report might not be interested in all the information, so you want to present the campaign's key success and achievements in a way that anyone would understand.

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    The most nuanced approach will be to discuss your key performance indicators (KPIs) and whether you were able to achieve them or not.

    It is best to avoid technical jargon and a bulky campaign data report. After all, what is the essence of your whole time preparing the report when no one wants to read it? What if they read it and find it difficult to make any appreciable decision based on the report? Well, your aim is still defeated.

    3. Data visualization

    This also contributes to the notion of keeping the report simple and in an easy to comprehend format. Visualization entails the use of tables, charts, graphs, maps, and other graphical tools.

    Visualization of data, value, and illustration of your results helps to communicate the necessary information vividly. This is important because noticing your trends and patterns will become a lot easier, which in return brings you closer to achieving your business goals.

    campaign template examplesFurthermore, you could easily indicate correlations, relationships, trends over time, frequency, and market values through charts and graphs. In the same way, you must match the appropriate graphical tool to the right data set so better interpretation can be easily made.

    Proper data visualization can save the report's consumers a lot of time analyzing and interpreting different types of marketing reports.

    4. Automation

    Another time-efficient tool both in the preparation and consumption of the report is the use of automation. Just as it is counterproductive to spend weeks preparing a campaign performance report, it is also not ideal if stakeholders can't fully grasp the report's essentials quickly.

    There's an array of reporting tools out there to help you with this, from a simple Excel sheet to marketing reporting tools such as Whatagraph.

    Just as with data illustration tools, it is also essential you choose a means of automation that fit your particular need. For example, where the report contains many illustrations, Whatagraph is an excellent tool to help you create stunning visual reports.

    How Do You Write a Marketing Campaign Report?

    Writing a campaign performance report requires you to tell a story incorporating all the essential elements mentioned above. Your campaign report should follow a proper outline.

    1. The Campaign at a Glance

    It is crucial to begin your campaign performance report with an overview of the most relevant marketing KPIs. This part serves as both an introduction and a summary of the entire report. You must be crystal clear about what the brand sought to achieve and how you went about achieving it.

    It is also important to reveal within this section whether the campaign ultimately met set out objectives. Remember, the report is not only for you and your marketing department.

    This might be the only part top executives get to read and use in making decisions. So, please don't keep them waiting and use weekly marketing reports to send out the good news on time.

    2. The Objectives

    Proper articulation of the objectives of the campaign is essential in assessing the overall performance. You might want to discuss the specific goals the campaign was designed to achieve and its relation to other marketing plans of the business.

    The goals should be stated in concrete and measurable terms. This allows you to determine when these goals have been achieved.

    For example, the campaign may increase the brand's market share by 10% or raise the overall sale by 20%. It might be as simple as just increasing the market awareness of a product.

    Other essential items to include in this section are the metrics and key performance indicators. These are crucial in evaluating whether objectives are met or not.

    Organic traffic, click-through rate (CTR), number of leads, conversion rate, number of visitors, page rankings, the average position of ads, and even the bounce rate may be used as metrics to assess the campaign.

    3. The Approach

    This part should detail the strategies deployed in achieving the objectives of the campaign. The strategy may range from simple e-mail marketing or Facebook ads to a multi-fold approach incorporating various marketing tools and models that can range from content marketing to search engine optimization and website traffic to e-commerce analytics.

    The strategy is useful in providing the necessary information about how results were achieved. It provides consumers with a valuable perspective, which is useful in evaluating the campaign results.

    For a campaign where multiple strategies are used, you need to discuss each strategy's effectiveness. You might also want to compare and contrast the marketing tools used and how they helped achieve set marketing goals.

    For example, you can compare the performance of your campaign on Facebook ads and Google ads vs. paid advertising on LinkedIn.

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    4. The Result

    The emphasis in this part of the report is on performance. This will be the part most marketing specialists and brand managers will show a keen interest in reviewing. The result should feature each marketing strategy and how it performed.

    Here, you must roll out the figures. You can also use graphs, tables, and other graphics to present the campaign's outcomes objectively.

    Illustration and data visualization is of particular importance in this part of the report. This allows for the presentation of the data set in an easy to comprehend format. It also helps in the comparison of various data sets and in the tracking of performance in real-time.

    The choice of graph, chart, or illustration to be used must correlate with the metric and KPI being reported. For example, while bar charts are a useful tool for comparing various data sets, such as the number of emails sent in your email campaigns, they do not show market trends.

    5. Factors That Affected the Result

    For every objective of the campaign that was met or otherwise, some dynamics are involved. This is where you want to discuss how internal and external forces helped in shaping the marketing campaign.

    Internal forces may include the staff, marketing agency, business structure, motivation, incentives, and strategies implemented, amongst others. It would be best if you discussed how each of these reasons positively or negatively affected performance.

    Your campaign did not occur in a vacuum. Market trends, competitors, and consumer choices are some of the external factors that may affect your campaign's performance. As you are busy planning and implementing a campaign strategy, your competitors are also doing the same.

    Therefore, it is vital to consider how your campaign fared in comparison with those of your competitors. Market trends and consumer choices also inform marketing strategy and approach. So, you should highlight your performance in terms of these vital variables.

    6. Recommendations

    At the end of your campaign performance report, you should discuss key take-outs and recommendations for future campaigns. You should briefly discuss the elements of the campaign that produced desired results.

    For example, how the use of social media ads helped in reaching out to more young people. Campaign strategies that performed below expectations or led to outright failure should also be highlighted.

    Future trends, product market position, and how they may change over time can go a long way in formulating better marketing campaigns on a monthly basis. Hence you should also analyze them and other elements that may require additional testing and modification.

    Present your clients with a concise marketing dashboard that will inform them of the steps you’ve undertaken and, more importantly, steps you’re going to undertake in the future to give them the highest possible return on investment.

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    Wrapping up

    Creating your next data-driven campaign report should now be a breeze - no matter what type of work you do and who your intended audience is. And the best way to start with an analytics report is by using a reporting tool that does all the heavy lifting for you.

    By using modern digital marketing reports, you can monitor the performance of your strategies, and understand which activities were successful and which were a waste of time and money.

    Whether you prefer creating reports from scratch or using marketing report templates, you're in the right place. Sign up for your free trial of Whatagraph and see how you can create amazing campaign reports in minutes - not hours.

    Published on Feb 25 2021

    Whatagraph marketing reporting tool

    WRITTEN BY

    Nikola Gemes

    Nikola is a content marketer at Whatagraph with extensive writing experience in SaaS and tech niches. With a background in content management apps and composable architectures, it's his job to educate readers about the latest developments in the world of marketing data, data warehousing, headless architectures, and federated content platforms.