How to Build A Cross-Channel Marketing Report? (+ Template)

Whatagraph is a tool used to aggregate digital marketing data and present it in a visually appealing way. It works with various popular digital marketing tools, including Google Analytics, email marketing platforms, SMS, mobile apps, push notifications, and social media like Instagram, and Facebook. It can help you create a strategy and roadmap for achieving omnichannel marketing objectives for your eCommerce clients.

Actually, focusing on a single channel can make for a poor customer experience and prevent you from successfully nurturing your leads through the marketing funnel until they become loyal customers. It typically takes six different tools for brands to achieve an integrated experience.

For marketing teams who spend a considerable amount of time managing multiple digital marketing platforms and perhaps even targeting multiple buyer personas, presenting performance data to clients or executives isn't easy.

Building a personalized report to communicate current achievements and future priorities effectively should be simple and time-efficient. Simplicity and efficiency factors play a huge role for you and for the ones you're reporting to.

Our goal is to help you, a marketing professional, minimize reporting hurdles while maximizing your marketing ROI. We'll also guide you on building comprehensive multi-channel marketing reports.  

When different channels are integrated, the user experience significantly improves.

Automation and using a variety of channels will help you break down the silos that keep customer metrics out of context and rarely contribute to the success of your social media campaigns.

In today's article, we'll walk you through the cross-channel marketing report creation process step-by-step. We even have a pre-built cross-channel report template for you to use, in case 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 cross-channel marketing reporting?

Cross-channel marketing reporting is reporting on more than one marketing channel. For example, combining social media with PPC, email marketing with SEO and similar. In short, it's all about creating reports that encompass multiple marketing channels.

3 Benefits of cross-channel marketing

An outstanding cross-channel report is all about providing insight and connecting multiple marketing platform metrics effectively.

A report has zero value if it gives no insights to the people you're reporting to. In other words, you need something that transforms plain customer data into information. It also has to provide a seamless experience across the different marketing platforms you're reporting on. 

1. A great client report helps facilitate effective decision-making – it improves collaboration and relays information well;

2. Reports need to guide your client's attention to vital metrics and activity;

3. Add context and clarity in case our target audience isn't present during your day-to-day activity. 

Take note that this is just an example of how to formulate a comprehensive cross-channel report. We use Google Analytics, Instagram, and Facebook platforms for this example. However, it doesn't mean that you're limited to just these platforms! 

How to build a cross-channel marketing report

Building a report that's composed of data from different sources can be difficult. 

What platform should you start with?

The beautiful thing about cross-channel reports is that you can usually start the report from any platform. However, we advise you to avoid reporting on vanity metrics. 

Also, keep in mind that not all channels work well together. For example, if you decide to concentrate your marketing efforts on SEO marketing, you should invest more in content marketing than Facebook Ads and influencer marketing, as these two promise better customer engagement when used together.

You already have a ton of data to showcase. So, you should focus on metrics that translate to cash flow, for example, conversions and retention. 

In the example, we begin with website content metrics from Google Analytics. Of course, we didn't forget the conversion metrics for the reporting period.

Having data presented in a line graph helps you quickly deduce any correlation between session numbers and possible conversions for a specific date.

Here, you can also include an average bounce rate of your website content. It's a great way to see how well your audience perceives your marketing messages. Take note that a high bounce rate is not always an indication of poor page performance. We included this as a possible metric to track for our example.

Facebook Insights

Let's include Facebook as another social media platform of choice for our report. It's an incredibly versatile tool both as a standalone brand recognition builder and a formidable PPC platform.

In this portion of the report, we're also using graphs to present the buyer’s journey. It's an easy yet effective way to show how a particular metric developed over time. 

The graph here is interactive, and you can select the time of impressions you want to compare:

The ability to select which type of metrics to look at just makes the client's or executives' lives easier. It eliminates the data clutter and helps focus on the right KPIs, such as customer loyalty one at a time.

Back to the main Facebook insights overview now! 

In the example above, we've included the general page insights and 2-week performance data. It gives a clear overview of Facebook engagement metrics and how those metrics are compared to previous months or years. 

Instagram performance

Let's take a look at a general performance overview of Instagram. 

Again, the main focus here is to showcase the aggregated engagement metrics of a particular platform. In this section, you should see the overall health of a marketing platform. And, how the user base is responding to the content there. 

We're going to dive deeper into individual post performance in only a moment.

Audience demographics

Looking at your audience's demographic data must be done by every marketer. Are you actually reaching the right people with the digital content you produce? Well, that's going to be answered in this portion of your cross-channel report.

You're more than welcome to allocate demographic information next to each corresponding platform. We've lumped in demographic info from different marketing platforms in this one section. 

Of course, you have the option of different types of visuals to show demographic data:

• Bar graphs

• Line graphs

• Pie charts

• Maps

Select the data optimization method yourself and see just how effective your content is in reaching your desired audience.

So as the report progresses, the data you include within will be more detailed. 

It brings us to an even deeper dive into data: evaluating individual content pieces.

Which metrics to use in your cross-channel marketing report

Whether you're reporting to your clients or firm executives, your report needs to tell a story. All of this rests on two things – data and visuals. Analytics data is essential in capturing your leads’ touchpoints.

Data is used to showcase results and explain the reasoning for specific actions that you've taken. Most people – especially in marketing – aren't too keen on making changes if the change is not supported by data; or hard numbers. 

Visuals are there to help translate data into something that's easier to digest. The simple reporting process you've come to dread is turned into extensive storytelling, engaging your clients and executives. 

Wrapping up

A cross-channel marketing strategy is an effective way of reaching out to your audience. It can help you create brand awareness as well as generate leads and drive higher sales.

Insightful reports tell the story of your progress via visuals and data

Great internal reports help your team monitor the current situation and quickly find any shortcomings within your processes throughout the customer journey. 

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