How to Build A Cross-Channel Marketing Report?

But with consumers constantly being bombarded by brands competing for their attention, it’s become challenging to understand how they interact with your content and messaging.

A cross-channel marketing report can help you identify your audience, learn how they interact with your brand, and which channels or messaging they prefer.

We aim to help you minimize reporting hurdles while maximizing your marketing ROI. We'll also guide you on building comprehensive multi-channel marketing reports.

In today's article, we'll show you how to create cross-channel marketing reports step-by-step.

We even have a pre-built cross-channel report template for you if you wish to skip the entire report-building process. The link will be at the bottom of the article.

Let's first have a look at what makes a great marketing report.

What is a cross-channel marketing report?

A cross-channel marketing report is a type of marketing report that allows you to track the performance of all your marketing channels in one place.

Connecting a variety of channels and pulling data to one place allows you to track metrics from websites, social media, paid ads, e-commerce, and email marketing tools in one place.

For clients, on the other hand, a cross-channel report gives a complete cross-section of their marketing campaigns.

Comparing cross-channel marketing metrics allows you to spot performance trends and opportunities to adjust your marketing strategy for optimal growth and revenue.

Cross-channel marketing report vs. cross-channel marketing dashboard

Although for many people, marketing reports and dashboards are the same thing, let’s briefly explain the purpose of each.

• A cross-channel marketing report is best used when you want to include both recent and historical data to spot trends and patterns in relevant metrics as they develop over time.
• A cross-channel marketing dashboard, on the other hand, is more suitable for reporting live data and the essential marketing KPIs in real time.

However, with advanced marketing reporting software, the difference between reports and dashboards is getting blurred as the capabilities of both reporting formats significantly increase.

4 benefits of cross-channel marketing reporting

There are quite a few advantages to reporting cross-channel marketing data, but the most important are:

1. Discover top-performing channels

A capable cross-channel reporting platform should help you compare the performance of different channels, such as social media or paid ads.

When you have their key metrics displayed neatly together and visualized in a structured way, it’s easy to discover specific insights.

This cross-channel analytics capability was one of the reasons why 33social chose Whatagraph as their marketing data platform.

In the past, this marketing digital agency from Charlotte, North Carolina, used Looker Studio to report on paid search advertising on Google.

But as they grew, they added more lead generation channels to their stack that now include not only paid search advertising on Google but also paid social advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

The agency needed a solution to build comprehensive cross-channel reports with side-by-side metric comparisons of multiple organic and paid social media.

Using Whatagraph, 33social creates beautiful and insightful reports comparing their critical lead generation platforms.

“We are now able to successfully report on platforms outside of Google platforms alongside the Google reporting” - Robin Steele, Founder and President.

2. Unify the most important KPIs

Another advantage of cross-channel reporting is bringing accurate data from different sources and presenting it in multi-source widgets.

Let’s look at this section of a cross-channel paid advertising report created in Whatagraph:

The single-value widgets for Cost, Clicks, Average CPC, Conversions, and Average CPA all display multi-source data thanks to a custom formula that consolidates metrics from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

The graph below shows Conversions and Average CPA over time, again pulling Conversion and CPA data from four paid ad channels.

Finally, the goal completion widget with the main KPIs uses the same custom formula for cross-channel insights.

3. All marketing efforts in one place

A marketing data platform capable of cross-channel reporting can also help you track multiple marketing assets, even when spread across different countries, brands, and venues.

We can hardly think of a better example than Rekom Group.

This company is a global player in the nightlife industry, with over 20,000,000 guests every year in four countries and over 200 venues. Each brand in each country has its own website, organic and paid social media presence, running campaigns, etc.

With so many marketing touchpoints, it was challenging to track all assets and bring them together for high-level reports and more granular analytics.

Eventually, Rekom chose Whatagraph for its easy and scalable cross-channel data collection and reporting features.

With Whatagraph, getting multiple channels on one report takes a few clicks. The report builder allows you to use pre-made or custom visualization blocks, apply custom filters and formulas, save templates, etc.

This setup allows companies to break data silos and see the results of their cross-channel marketing campaigns across all countries or zoom in on a single venue if more granularity is needed.

4. Insights for future strategies

The fourth benefit of cross-channel marketing reporting is the opportunity to collect valuable insights from customer data aggregated across channels.

By analyzing data from social media, email marketing campaigns, website traffic, and other channels, you can better understand which actions hit the target. And use this information for planning future cross-channel marketing strategies.

How to build a cross-channel marketing report

Whatever marketing reporting tool you use, you should stick to these points when creating cross-channel reports.

Decide on the report structure and metrics

The first thing you need to decide is what to include in your cross-channel marketing report and how to present the information in a way that’s easy to understand.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to structuring this, but here’s an idea:

• Cover page
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Performance overview
• Acquisition overview
• Website overview
• Audience overview
• Paid traffic overview
• Organic traffic overview
• Social media overview
• Recommendations

Let’s now explore what each of these sections should contain.

Cover page

Don’t skip this part, as it adds a healthy dose of professionalism to your report. Include a report title and an engaging graphic. Use your company’s or your client's branding and color scheme, depending on the recipient.

Table of contents

Give the readers a clear view of the information your report covers. It also makes it easier to find the part they need immediately.

Introduction

Start the report with short introductions where you summarize your marketing strategy and your marketing goals for the current year. It helps keep everyone on the same page with the goals.

Performance overview

Show where the company is standing at the time of reporting. You can include the:

• Time Passed,
• All Conversions,
• Cost per Conversion,
• Media Spend, and
• Revenue Generated

Then proceed with more granularity as you segment the company performance by country, region, brand, etc.

Acquisition overview

Here, you can present the acquisition of new users by the channels you use, such as Direct, Organic, Paid, and Referral. Use pie or donut charts to visualize:

• Conversions (by top channels),
• Users (by top channels).

Website overview

Start the section with a summary of the key points. Use your Google Analytics 4 data to visualize the relation between:

• Users,
• Sessions,
• Transactions,
• New vs. Returning Users.

Other metrics that readers will expect to find in this section are the:

• Engagement Rate (Bounce Rate in Universal Analytics),
• Page Loading Time for the top pages.

Audience overview

In this section, you’ll present your results regarding the audience you’ve reached. Add your insights for the previous week, month, quarter, etc., and highlight your:

• Reach,
• Revenue by Users (both returning and new).

As with the company overview, you can add more granularity by segmenting the demographics by the most active countries, brands, venues, etc.

Paid traffic overview

This is where you’ll report on the performance of your paid ads channels. The metrics that are most interesting for this section are:

• Total Spend on Ads,
• Cost per Click,
• Cost per Lead,
• Cost per Conversion,
• ROAS.

Organic traffic overview

List your actions to improve your search engine rankings and increase organic traffic to your website. Also, include your content marketing and SEO activities.

As for the metrics, you want to go with:

• Average Ranking,
• Goal Completions,
• Goal Conversion Rate.

Social media overview

Display the performance of your social media campaigns, mainly through:

• Sessions from Traffic,
• Sessions from Referrals.

Also, visualize the share of traffic among the social media you use, as well as the

• Revenue by social media.

Recommendations: Add comments at the end of your report where you’ll share the next steps in your marketing strategy.

Build a story

Dumping your data on a report won’t impress anybody. Give them endless numbers and charts without context, and your clients or managers will think you’ve done only half of the job.

Instead, you need to walk people through the story that your cross-channel report is telling and provide context at every stage.

Here are some of the ways to make your report easier to read:

• Use comments: Comment boxes can provide additional context, highlight the results, summarize a section, or point out relevant information, such as trends or patterns. The language and tone you use impact how the reader receives your story. Speak to them in their language and at their level. Stay away from buzzwords.
• Keep it concise: Try not to overload the reader with the amount of information you include in your report. With the data available today, it’s easy to go overboard. Don’t insist on too many numbers or words; have the length manageable.
• Add personality: No one likes corporate speech or technical jargon. Yes, we have reporting tools that automate much of the process, but it doesn't mean your report should look like a machine created it. Focusing on the core results is fine, but a joke or a GIF inside will keep things optimistic and exciting.

Present information in a way readers can understand

Reports that are heavy with data can be tiresome to consume, especially if you just list row after row of numbers. Instead, show people what those numbers mean. It takes our brain to process visual cues much faster, so turn those numbers into graphs and charts.

For example, the share of users across devices and demographic distribution is much more engaging in a beautifully designed chart and a table than in rows of numbers.

Visualizing cross-channel data makes your report easier to digest and, more importantly, retain the information you provide.

How does Whatagraph make your cross-channel reporting easier?

Fast all-in-one platform

Whatagraph is an all-in-one platform to connect, visualize, and share your marketing data. This means all three data processes you need for digital marketing reporting take place under one roof. There is no need to use a separate tool to connect or visualize data.

Whatagraph has such a seamless experience that you can complete all three steps on one page.

You can connect your sources and create a report in minutes, with even the heaviest multi-source custom widgets loading in seconds.

Pick a report template from our library and use it right away. Save all changes you make as your custom template. You can save any widgets you customize as a widget template and use it in future reports without repeating the same steps.

Finally, Whatagraph has native integration with over 45 popular marketing platforms, which gives you better stability and speed, as your reports don’t depend on the performance of third-party connectors.

If you want to connect a source that isn’t supported yet, you can use a custom API, Google BigQuery, or Google Sheets.

Custom formulas

Marketing platforms that you collect data from provide fixed metrics, dimensions, and filters, but sometimes those metrics are not enough.

If you want more insights from available data, we got you covered.

Whatagraph lets you combine and change metrics, such as:

• Blend existing metrics from multiple sources
• Add agency markup
• Create custom metrics split
• Build new metrics that platforms don’t provide

Using simple mathematics, you can edit any widget using an intuitive custom formula builder and multiply, divide, and combine metrics.

Custom formulas add a lot of flexibility to your report and are a great asset when creating tailored cross-channel reports.

Another Whatagraph feature that helps you present cross-channel insights is the multi-source table.

A multi-source table is a pre-made widget you can add to any Whatagraph report to neatly compare metrics from sources such as paid advertising and social media platforms.

As with all other widgets, you can use a custom formula to tweak metadata for each metric inside the table.

Engaging and attractive reports

It’s hard to say this without taking on a little pride, but reports created in Whatagraph are good-looking. And by that, we primarily mean easy to read and understand.

Any report template from our library you choose has all the related metrics and visualizations grouped so that you can quickly see the complete picture of your channel’s or campaigns’ performance.

If you’re creating a report from scratch, you can arrange and resize the widgets to highlight the desired KPIs. Change the report color and logo to match your or your client’s branding.

An engaging report can help you prove your value to clients, increase retention, win budget increases, improve your agency’s brand image, and turn reports into a new revenue stream.

Easy report management

If you’re an agency, you’re probably writing many reports for your clients. The last thing you want is to send a wrong report to someone.

The same goes for in-house marketing teams in large companies who need to create folders on different brands or divisions.

In Whatagraph, you can create folders for your reports to organize them to avoid misplacement and confusion.

Any template you edit or report you create from scratch you can save as a new template for future use. But did you know that you can bulk edit templates?

Save a ton of time by making group changes to all the templates you select — add or remove sources, change names, etc.

Sharing automation

With Whatagraph, you don’t have to bother downloading your reports and attaching them to emails one at a time.

Instead, create an email template, pick the frequency, add recipients, and set the delivery time. Whatagraph does everything for you. No more worrying about deadlines and schedules. Still, if you want to control what gets sent, you have a review option before the send-outs.

Another option is to share a live link to a report and let them check data as it updates.

As you can see, cross-channel marketing reporting is a complex process with many i’s to dot and many t’s to cross.

It’s Whatagraph that makes it fast and easy!

But we often feel that words don’t do it justice, so why don’t you try Whatagraph yourself?

Request a free trial today and start cross-channel reporting on a whole new level.

FAQ

What is cross-channel marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a form of marketing in which brands interact with customers across several channels to deliver a better customer experience. Unlike multichannel marketing, where single channels act independently, cross-channel marketing allows brands to connect with target audiences with consistent and accurate marketing messaging across different channels, providing a seamless buyer’s journey.

What is the difference between cross-channel and omnichannel marketing?

In omnichannel marketing, channels are connected like in cross-channel marketing, but they are also interconnected and interactive, allowing for an integrated experience for a customer. The channels exchange information and work together to create a comprehensive user experience across all communication mediums. This ensures a smooth customer journey between both online and offline channels.

What is the role of a CRM in cross-channel marketing?

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform helps you create cross-channel campaigns for your customers by integrating your website, social media, direct mail, SMS, push notifications, mobile apps, and other channels. Using cross-channel triggers and workflows to send the right message at the right time and place, a CRM can help you optimize the marketing funnel and increase customer loyalty.

Wrapping up

A successful cross-channel marketing strategy is an effective way of optimizing customer engagement. It can help you boost brand awareness, generate leads, and drive higher sales.

When you properly attribute channels, they lead to potential customers, both online and offline — and don’t depend on the outdated ‘last touch’ method.

An insightful cross-channel marketing report helps your team monitor the current situation and quickly find any shortcomings within your marketing campaigns.

You are welcome to try out our pre-made cross-channel report template for free. The report is already built for you; just connect your accounts, and your data extracts automatically. Enjoy!