Essential Marketing Reporting Elements

Feb 05, 2020 ● 6 min read

Marketing report is an essential tool of gathering and analyzing marketing data to make informed and better future decisions, create winning marketing strategies and understand your audience's behavior.

For example, one marketing report may tell you about ROI on your recent campaigns and other marketing reports may tell you time customers took to finally make a purchase on your website. There may be different marketing reports for various marketing tools but the main purpose of every marketing report is the same that is to help you make better marketing decisions.

Basic Elements of Marketing Reports

As mentioned above, there are different marketing reports for every marketing purpose. So it is not possible to cover all the basic elements of the marketing report. So In this section, we will look at some basic tools that every marketing report has.

• Summary: Every marketing report covers a summary of total leads generated, number of impressions, website visits, and total conversions. The summary provides an overview of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and improvements that needs to be incorporated to make marketing campaigns more effective.
• Traffic Metrics: Basically shows us from which source most of the Traffic on your website is coming from. Some of the common sources that drive traffic to your website are Organic search, direct landing, Referral, paid search and social media, etc. 

From the marketing point of view, it’s very to know about these sources so you can spend more of your marketing budget on the source which is driving more traffic. 

• Engagements: This shows how many potential customers engaged with the brand through metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, frequency of visit and share contact number on the website.
• Conversion metrics: The main driving force of every marketing campaign is to get more conversion and drive sales. So including conversion metrics in marketing reports is very important. A conversion funnel is basically broken down into the number of channels, total revenue, cost per lead and other various dimensions of your business.
• Type of campaigns: Your marketing report varies from campaign to campaign. Every social media campaign has different objectives and metrics to determine the success of the marketing campaign so it's very important to mention the campaign type in your marketing report. Some of the marketing campaign types are SEO, Pay per click, Social media campaigns, Content-based marketing, Account-Based marketing, etc.  
• Business improvement metrics: Last comes the improvement you had on your business through any marketing campaign. This includes brand awareness, pipeline generated, brand image and revenue.

How to Determine Which Metric to Include in Your Marketing Report

Every marketing campaign is different and so are their metrics to determine their success rate. It might be easy to include all metrics in your marketing report but it can throw a very bad impression on your clients and boss to present such a lengthy marketing report.

Today, everyone likes concise and to the point reports so it can be very challenging to identify the least important metrics and include the most important elements. The best way to determine this is to understand the goals and objectives of the marketing campaign and what elements best help to understand the return on investment (ROI). Primarily these are some of the best metrics to include in your marketing report.

• Traffic sources: Which source is driving the most of traffic and leads for your website
• Conversion: Number of conversions you generated through your marketing campaign
• Revenue: Revenue generated through a particular marketing campaign
• Cost per lead: How much you are investing to get a potential customer
• Clicks: Total number of clicks on your website
• Other metrics: Bounce rate, keywords, Quality score, social interactions, etc. 

Marketing Dashboard

The marketing dashboard is a powerful tool to create automated marketing reports and analyze data to make winning marketing decisions. The dashboard is an automated marketing tool which only shows valuable metrics to your stakeholders and updates the data within real-time according to your campaign performance.

In order to build a marketing dashboard, it’s really important to pay close attention to your campaign's goals and objectives. You also need to make sure that you don’t have too many metrics and are focused on a single goal and objective. A dashboard would provide you a short and concise one window marketing report to your stakeholders.

Creating a dashboard is very easy and straight forward including your valuable metrics. You have to include your target audience, objectives and key performance indicators (KPI) you would like to monitor.

Let’s have a look at this marketing Dashboard by Google Analytics. It’s pretty simple, clear and concise you can also create the same type of marketing report through the dashboard for your various marketing campaigns. As you can see it very clearly defines the metrics such as visits by traffic type, Average visit duration, visitors on-site and pageviews on mobile, etc.

The marketing dashboard is really easy to create and edit with customized metrics depending on your campaign type. The best part about the dashboard is it updates within real-time according to your campaign performance and you can see real-time changes on the marketing dashboard.

How Often You Should Create Marketing Reports?

This is a really important question that many marketers give different answers. Creating a marketing report totally depends on the type of marketing campaign you are running and how often you run for it. For example, a marketing agency can create a weekly Google Adwords marketing report within the team to see how the marketing campaign is performing but it can send a monthly report to its client to give a holistic picture.

Also, creating a marketing report also depends on the type of business you are in. For a small business owner, a marketing report might be just the revenue he is getting against the spending on social media ads. He might not be concerned with other metrics or regularly creating a marketing report. In the same way, it also depends on the marketing team you are running a small team then you can get and share the metrics on a daily basis. If you running a large marketing team, then you should share the marketing report on a weekly or monthly basis.

Important Marketing Reporting Tools and Software

There are various marketing tools that marketers use to create their marketing reports. Some of the common tools for creating marketing reports are Excel, Google Sheets, Qilk, Power BI, and Google Data Studios.

The tool to use marketing reports totally depends on your reporting needs and budget. For many marketers, Google Data Studio is proven to be the best reporting tool for marketing reports. The best point about it is that it is free to use as many other Google platforms.

Excel and Google Sheets are the other two most common platforms used for creating marketing reports. Using excel and Google Sheet is considered to be a skill, if you don’t know how to use it you will have to manually enter data and that can take a lot of your time. Many marketers use and master it to create marketing reports.

As far as paid tools are concerned, most of them come with free trials to test run and create a marketing report. Some of these tools are cumul.io and smart sheet which allow you to have custom reporting and create a marketing dashboard to see how your various campaigns are performing. Their prices usually depend on per user per month basis.

Conclusion

Marketing reporting is a very important element to analyze your marketing efforts and business growth. It’s an important tool that helps you better understand your resource allocation and take better marketing decisions. It makes you understand how important and effective your marketing is and how you can improve it more to make informed decisions.

Written by Mike

Former data analyst and the head of Whatagraph blog team. A loving owner of two huskies, too.