What is a Marketing Report? All Questions Answered

Today, even the average Internet user has access to a massive amount of information that can help them make the right decision when it comes to choosing products, brands, or offers. Implementing a marketing report in a business intelligence strategy is crucial for its success.

It’s the basis of market research and customer acquisition, providing a clear data-driven insight into relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and building a solid foundation for higher conversion rates.

What Is a Marketing Report?

A marketing report is a document that includes marketing data from different platforms that shows the performance results of your marketing strategy. The purpose of your marketing report is to understand whether the marketing strategies you currently use are going in the right direction and to further improve them.

The scope of the report can vary depending on the subject matter and the number of platforms you are collecting your data from.

Why Do You Need a Marketing Report?

The goal of marketing reports is to optimize your marketing campaigns, but you won’t be able to do that if you don’t measure your results. Tracking specific marketing metrics and business goals on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis can prevent you from wasting your valuable time and money.

Many people wait for the end of a campaign to check its performance, but that’s not how you keep track of your goals. You should check the performance of your campaign on a regular basis to make sure you’re on the right track.

If you notice something is not working as planned at the beginning of the campaign instead of the end, you’ll save a lot of time and money. 

Therefore, you should build marketing reports as regularly as you schedule marketing activities – on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Here are a few reasons to build marketing reports:

To present all your data in one place to your boss and company executives in the fastest way.

To help you connect the dots by seeing data from different sources in one location.

To help others in your company know about the performance of marketing.

When Do You Need to Make a Marketing Report?

People in marketing should look at their performance data all the time, sometimes on a daily basis. Even though daily or weekly reports can be useful, monthly reports are the most commonly used.

They allow you to present separate marketing reports for your content marketing, paid advertising, and social media efforts.

Here are a few words about each type of digital marketing report based on the time required to gather the relevant data:

Types of Marketing Reports

Depending on your needs, there are different types of marketing reports you can use.

Daily Marketing Reports

They give you reporting tools to make better decisions at a faster pace. A daily marketing report can help you to make an action plan each morning, focusing on the things you’ve accomplished the previous day and the things you can do to improve them.

Even though the overall performance result of the current marketing strategy won’t be affected on a daily basis, a daily marketing report can help you find out more details about the daily activities of the campaign.

Also, these kinds of reports are great for quick experimentation to answer smaller questions, notice a problem early enough to do the necessary action, and avoid wasting money. Remember, a single day may not determine the success of your campaign, but a few days in a row can indicate a trend.

Weekly Marketing Reports

Keeping track of your weekly traffic can help prevent a breakdown in the performance that could impact the return on investment of an entire month. The data collected on a weekly basis can be of great help for CMOs building the overall marketing strategy.

The insights you can get from a weekly report can affect decision-making in the future. Things you can track every week include blog organic traffic and blog leads, website traffic and leads per channel, and online advertising performance.

Monthly Marketing Reports

A monthly report can provide more insights than any other custom report, although it’s important to consider all of them. Your marketing team can use the weekly reports to make monthly decisions.

This report shows a bigger picture of your campaign’s performance in the long run. For example, you can make a monthly report on marketing KPIs, web analytics, or marketing performance.

What Should a Monthly Marketing Report Include?

A monthly marketing report should include the following sections:

A summary – the first page that includes a project overview, highlighting the most important metrics in a clear and concise manner. Your client should get an idea about the position of marketing that month. The following sections should explain everything in more detail.

Current marketing strategy – addressing the core marketing strategy by revealing the target market, the primary marketing channels, the current scope of the project, and the growth opportunities currently pursued. It should include a brief overview of everything that has been accomplished this month.

Conversion metrics – showing and comparing key metrics that affect the client’s bottom line from month to month, such as revenue, a number of leads by channel (social media, offline sources, email marketing, referrals, etc.), CPC for paid channels (Facebook Ads, AdWords, etc.), and organic vs. paid leads.

Traffic metrics by device and channel – showing the channels your web traffic is mostly coming from and its performance to help you prevent wasting money and time on developing unsuccessful channels. Also, presenting the bounce rate on mobile and desktop.

SEO report – an overview of the rankings on search engines and the things you did to increase the organic search.

Blog leads – sharing blog traffic and leads data each month for optimal blog performance.

PPC campaigns – focused on the metrics characteristic for paid channels such as click-through rate (CTR), CPC, impressions, ROI, and ad spends, comparing them to each channel. This section can help your clients decide where to focus their marketing budget.

Social overview – showing the social media marketing performance of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or any other active social media channel in real-time. To understand your client’s success on each channel, focus on target audience engagement metrics.

Goals and ideas for the next campaigns – setting goals on a monthly basis and trying to accomplish them will ensure your brand is growing. Don’t forget to revisit them every month to see your accomplishments.

Financial projections – including the graphs of estimated costs of future marketing goals and the ROI you expect from them. Invaluable for sales teams.

Reasons to Use a Marketing Report Template

Marketing report templates can simplify and speed up the process of creating daily, weekly, or monthly reports for your stakeholders. Here are some practical reasons to use them in your agency or marketing team.

• Increased transparency
• An easier way to track goals
• Staying in the loop about ongoing campaign progress
• An easier way to upsell clients on new services
• Keeping track of client and campaign budget