Digital Marketing Reporting in 2023: The Ultimate Guide With Templates, Dashboards, Tools and Metrics

What is digital marketing reporting?

Digital marketing reporting is like a storyline that assists marketing agencies in understanding campaign results, evaluating current campaign status, and predicting future campaign outcomes. As a marketer's job is to tie everything to return on investment (ROI), digital marketing reporting helps to ensure that the company profits from every action that an agency takes. 

For that, marketing agencies and marketers need instruments such as reporting tools and dashboards. They serve as torches, illuminating the darkness and allowing you to see where your strategy and campaigns are going. These tools provide assurance and insights into your actions and their outcomes.

So, in a nutshell, the goal of digital marketing reporting is to analyze and understand the performance of marketing activities and find ways to improve them.

The benefits of digital marketing seporting

Whether you are an agency, a marketer, or a freelancer, you must report on your digital marketing activities to understand how you perform. Here are four other reasons why you should consider digital marketing reporting and the benefits you’d get from this process:

Keeping clients/managers up to date

All the time marketing agencies get a question from a client or manager on how a specific campaign is doing. 

You can also have bi-weekly meetings with a client or manager to discuss the updates on your marketing campaigns. 

Developing and maintaining good rapport, especially with clients, by providing regular updates on campaign or strategy performance statistically is better for the marketing agency.

Did you know that 68% of customers leave a company when they believe that the company doesn't care about them? Or that the same percentage of people are willing to pay extra for the service if the customer service is spot on?

So, to have better client retention rates and keep your clients and managers happy, you should consider automated reporting. 

Automated reporting keeps you accountable, educates your clients regularly, and provides updates on your successes and failures.

With Whatagraph, you don’t even need to send reports manually. You can customize, white-label a visual data report, and automate it to be sent out on your desired frequencies. 

You can save up to around 20 hours per month simply by using automated reporting software.

Advice: Consider turning your client reports into an additional revenue channel.

Making better marketing decisions

Every day, marketing agencies develop reports to look at ad campaigns, lead-generating keywords, pages, or website traffic for any noticeable anomalies or shifts in marketing performance metrics. 

The agencies and marketers look at month-over-month and year-over-year traffic and interpret marketing data to craft actionable next-step recommendations.

A digital marketing report is not only needed when a new experiment, project, or initiative is launched to ensure everything goes smoothly. It’s also beneficial to get historical data for future launches.

Take, for instance, Whatagraph. You can create a cross-channel dashboard with interactive graphs for a real-time view of your initiatives. But if you want to develop a new strategy for the upcoming quarter, you need data to back your decisions.

This is when you’d create a cross-channel report. 

A cross-channel report is beneficial for any marketing agency because:

• It covers and pulls data from multiple sources in a single report;
• It showcases customer behavior, ad performance, channel and campaign patterns;
• It provides historical data which you can use to make more informed decisions.

Keeping budget under control

Marketing agencies usually use one or all of these digital marketing strategies:

• Sponsored content; 
• Social media ads;
• Ad retargeting; 
• Banner ads;
• Influencer marketing;
• Events. 

Not only that, but they usually run these campaigns alongside the way:

• PPC campaign; 
• Lead generation campaign; 
• Product marketing campaign; 
• Sales promotion campaign; 
• PR campaign; 
• Email marketing campaign. 

As you can see, that’s a lot of paid initiatives. 

A digital marketing report can be filtered to display your total marketing budget spent on any given initiative.

Here, for example, what a report should look like:

Key takeaways from Google Ads Campaign performance report example:

1. It shows the total ad cost spent during a specific period. 

This data can help anticipate scope change, forecast resource usage, and prevent over- or underspending. 

If the costs exceed expectations, ads may be adjusted, or the ad campaigns may be stopped altogether. 

Consistent forecasting assists marketing agencies in ensuring that the Google Ads campaign is utilizing the appropriate amount of money - not too little or too much. 
 

2. It highlights the transaction revenue.

Marketing agencies need to know how much money they spent on ads and how much revenue they generate from these transactions. 

3. It provides historical ad cost data.

As you can see, the report has 3 widgets tracking 3 different campaigns from January to March. 

This goal widget shows how much a business spends on ads and whether or not they meet their business goals.

Tracking and comparing month-to-month shows patterns and trends of your ad spend. This data is needed and valuable when setting future ad budgets and altering ad campaigns.

Even though we analyzed a specific case - the Google Ads campaign - all the takeaways provided apply to any case. 

Advice: Develop a digital marketing report to track all your spending. Make sure you have a goal widget in a report to see how your initiative is performing financially. Include historical data and use it as a reference when building future strategies and experiments. 

Providing a benchmark for future marketing campaigns

Digital marketing reports benefit marketing agencies because they include historical performance data. 

By having historical data and examining key performance indicators (KPIs) over time, it is possible to identify benchmarks to:

• Set long-term marketing goals;
• Optimize your marketing strategy;
• Develop data-driven initiatives;
• Identify which initiatives need improvement;
• Measure progress;
• Identify gaps in the strategy.

To effectively benchmark your marketing initiatives, narrow down your experiments and initiatives.

You should analyze your blog, email, website analytics, and social media performance separately. 

Then, choose the right marketing metrics and KPIs.

Your benchmarks need to be detailed and specific. Otherwise, they lose their value. Think about your goals and actions you took in the past. Then identify the metrics that would best support your marketing activities.

Marketing reporting intervals

How often you should create reports?

“Reporting can be done daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your requirements,” says Aaron Crewe, Managing Director at Novi.Digital.

However, Ruler Analytics found that 32% of marketers track campaign success monthly, while 43% measure performance weekly.

Here is how different intervals would benefit your agency:

• Weekly reports - Provides essential insights into your latest marketing initiatives' success. This data is valuable for developing an action plan for the coming weeks. 
• Monthly reports - Provides a broader overview of your marketing initiatives and their performance. This data is valuable when understanding how these initiatives influence core KPIs.
• Quarterly reports - Provides crucial metrics when assessing quarters’ performance. Usually, marketing agencies examine:
• Revenue growth and deals won;
• New leads and conversion rates across different channels;
• Paid advertising spend and ROI;
• Social media marketing performance and growth, etc.

Choose the frequency that would provide the most value to your agency and marketing team, depending on your goals and needs.

How often should you send digital marketing reports to clients?

Usually, clients aren’t tech-savvy and don’t need huge volumes of data to be presented in a report. They need a report with key insights into how your marketing agency is delivering promises and meeting goals.

So how often should you send client reports?

We surveyed over 160 mid-size agencies and agency clients worldwide to understand the landscape of agency-client reporting better and lay the groundwork for report monetization.

And we discovered that the majority of agencies report on a monthly and weekly basis.

Clients, on the other hand, appear to have slightly different expectations. Monthly and real-time reporting received an equal number of votes, with weekly reporting coming in second and daily reporting coming in third.

How to create a marketing report

There are 3 most common ways marketing agencies create marketing reports: manually, from a template, and with a reporting tool from scratch. Let’s break down the pros and cons of using each way

Manually, by adding data from different reports

Manual reporting has been the only way marketing agencies would create reports for decades. 

Yet, it has so many cons that it is no longer the ideal way to analyze data:

• It’s time intensive.

It takes many hours to create advertising reports by hand. Because you need to cover all these marketing channels and campaigns, typing data and results from each will take valuable time. 

• It’s resource intensive.

Because creating reports manually takes a lot of time, some marketing agencies might need additional staff. 

• It’s prone to man-made errors.

As you can imagine, typing numbers for hours is hard work requiring full concentration. Because of that, there is a high chance of data inaccuracies and misplaced and mishandled data. 
 

From a template in Whatagraph

Here at Whatagraph, we are painfully aware that creating reports manually is not ideal. That’s why we offer a gallery with more than 95 ready-to-be-used templates.

Benefit from pre-made templates and save hours of data reporting. We currently have more than 40 integrations available for you to connect to Whatagraph’s marketing reporting software. 

Find your marketing report template and filter the templates by integration or report type.

Easily access client data and create digital marketing dashboards or reports in no time. Whatagraph’s native data visualization function allows you to Include key metrics and KPIs and effortlessly manage multiple clients. 

Grab your free marketing analytics report template.

From scratch in Whatagraph 

Creating reports from scratch (from a blank page) in Whatagraph is easy, and a non-tech-savvy person could do it. 

All you have to do is connect your client’s social media accounts, the marketing tools you use to promote their business, and pull data. 

After that, drag and drop widgets that best represent your strategy’s performance and progress.



 

Digital marketing report vs. digital marketing dashboard

Definitions

A reporting dashboard is a document that includes live data of what is happening right this second. Usually, this format is short, single–screen and has only the most important marketing KPIs.

A report is a document that includes real-time and historical data. It is usually used to spot any trends and patterns of relevant metrics.  

Similarities

1. Both the digital marketing report and dashboard display data;
2. Both can be customized;
3. Both can be automated.

Differences

1. The digital marketing report has huge volumes of data, while a dashboard provides a high-level quick overview of the most important KPIs you can present to the board or C-level stakeholders;
2. The digital marketing report provides both historical and real-time data whilst a dashboard provides only real-time data;
3. The digital marketing report is a longer format, focusing on providing valuable data rather than the report's length. A dashboard, however, focuses on being brief and to the point. 

Digital marketing report templates

Digital marketing report templates are tools that help agencies work more efficiently and accurately and save time. 

You could say it’s the key to success because:

• Saves time.

Marketing templates are tools always ready to go and present data in no time. 

Need a Facebook ads report? Go to the template gallery, select the Facebook Ads template, and have a report presented in a few seconds.

Little secret: By saving precious time, you can dedicate it to more important things. 

For example, you could be building better client-agency relationships; running different experiments; looking for different channels to generate leads.

Our suggestion is simple - leave reporting to Whatagraph, and you take care of other agency-related things.

• Prevents mistakes from occurring.

Marketing report templates are great because they pull data automatically. 

This means you don’t need to worry about inaccurate or unreliable data. 

• Improves brand consistency

Create a report using Whatagraph’s template, and you’ll be able to customize it, white-label it, and save it for future use. 

Change colors, report domain, and logos, and your clients will consistently receive reports that match your agency’s branding.  

3 digital marketing report templates to get started

SEO report template

Utilize the SEO report template and examine your client’s website performance KPIs, keywords, SERP positions, organic search, and other key search engine optimization metrics. 

This SEO report template provides detailed data to your clients in just a few clicks. Track and display your client’s website organic traffic, clicks, rankings, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, link-building analytics, and more. Learn how your marketing efforts are faring and progressing, and then optimize based on this data.

Cross-channel marketing report template

Marketing agencies work with various clients and conduct marketing campaigns through various channels. A cross-channel marketing report template will gather data from various sources and compare how each performs on its own and in comparison to the others. With Whatagraph's cross-channel reporting, you can easily track the campaign performance of LinkedIn and Facebook ads and compare them with Google Analytics insights, for example.

Social media report template

Probably the most popular report template - is the social media report template. 

Whatagraph can be integrated with the most common social media channels, including Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

Whatagraph's social media report is especially useful because it is organized across multiple channels. You can easily see how much ROI you get from each social media platform. You can assess where you should invest more time and attention by creating divisions for each social media site - one for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for LinkedIn, and so on.

Bottom line

Digital marketing reporting shouldn’t be something marketing agencies spend a lot of time on. A reporting software would be ideal to have handy at all times, saving time and creating professional, easy-to-understand reports. 

Sign up for Whatagraph and get access to a positively overwhelming template gallery, report automation, and 40 integration to pull data from. Create beautiful reports your clients would actually engage with and save time with data automatically pulled from sources. Sign up for a free trial today to get started!