Here is a digital marketing report guide that contains all of the information needed to create effective reports that will aid in the development of marketing campaigns and strategies. You'll find templates to try, benefits of digital reporting, and data into how often you should report below.
Aug 02, 2022 ● 6 min read
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 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.
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:
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.
Every day, marketing agencies develop reports to look at ad campaigns, lead generating keywords, pages, or traffic for any noticeable anomalies or shifts in performance metrics.
The agencies and marketers look at month-over-month and year-over-year traffic and interpret 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 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:
Marketing agencies usually use one or all of these digital marketing strategies:
Not only that, but they usually run these campaigns alongside the way:
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 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.
Digital marketing reports benefit marketing agencies because they include historical performance data.
By having historical data and examining KPIs over time, it is possible to identify benchmarks to:
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 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.
“Reporting can be done daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly or annually, depending on your requirements,” says Aaron Crewe, Managing Director at Novi.Digital.
However, ruleranalytics found that 32% of marketers track campaign success monthly, while 43% measure performance weekly.
Here is how different intervals would benefit your agency:
Choose the frequency that would provide the most value to your agency and team, depending on your goals and needs.
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.
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:
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 analyse data:
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.
Because creating reports manually takes a lot of time, some marketing agencies might need additional staff.
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.
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. Include key metrics and KPIs and effortlessly manage multiple clients.
Grab your free marketing analytics report template.
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 tools you use to market their business and pull data.
After that, drag and drop widgets that best represent your strategy’s performance and progress.
A 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 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.
Report |
Dashboard |
|
Real-time data |
No |
Yes |
Multiple data sets |
Yes |
Yes |
Set alarms |
No |
Yes |
Data-rich |
Yes |
No |
Data visualization |
If needed |
Yes |
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:
Marketing templates are tools always ready to go and present data in no time.
Need a Facebook ads report? Go to template gallery, select 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.
Marketing report templates are great because they pull data automatically.
This means you don’t need to worry about inaccurate or unreliable data.
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 colours, report domain, and logos, and your clients will consistently receive reports that match your agency’s branding.
Utilize the SEO report template and examine your client’s website performance KPIs, keywords, SERP positions, and other key SEO 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, impressions, CTR, link-building analytics, and more. Learn how your efforts are faring and progressing, and then optimize based on this data.
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, for example.
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.
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!
Published on Aug 02, 2022
WRITTEN BY
Dominyka VaičiūnaitėDominyka is a copywriter who uses simple words to explain tough ideas. Her content is inspired by the good old brand “For Dummies.” Anyone can read and learn all things marketing with her.
Enter your email and get curated content straight to your inbox!
Only the best content & no spam.
Pinky promise.
By submitting this form, you agree to our Privacy policy