9 Best Marketing Reporting Software and Tools for Agencies in 2024
The ability to generate clear, insightful, and accurate reports at scale is essential for any agency aiming to deliver value to its clients. The veterans in this job can tell you that reporting is much easier nowadays than 10 years ago. And one thing is certain — there’s no shortage of capable marketing reporting software. New solutions are fighting for their piece of the market, offering more advanced features and greater integration capabilities.
This article reviews the 9 best marketing reporting software and tools agencies can use to save time on reporting tasks and prove value. The tools we selected are designed to not only inform but also impress your clients.
Aug 22 2024 ● 10 min read
What is marketing reporting software?
Marketing reporting software allows you to measure, analyze, and present the results of your overall marketing efforts in relation to your client’s business KPIs. These tools collect data from various marketing sources, such as social media, paid advertising, email, marketing, and website analytics, and put them into a single report.
Marketing reporting tools allow agencies to maximize the effectiveness of their activities, justify investment, and demonstrate value to clients by:
- Presenting marketing data in a way that is easy to understand.
- Turning data into actionable insights to grow the client’s business.
- Measure the overall and individual impact of different marketing channels.
- Track which marketing sources have the highest conversion rate.
A large number of highly competitive marketing reporting tools and platforms make it difficult to choose the best fit for your agency. We’ll make it easier by listing eight key functionalities that each marketing agency reporting software should have.
What to look for when choosing a digital marketing reporting tool for your agency?
Choosing the right digital marketing reporting tool can be a long process, with many options to test and consider. To help you save time on that, we are giving you some factors to consider, as you choose the right solution for your marketing team.
1. Integrations with marketing data sources: The digital marketing reporting tool you choose needs to connect to all data sources you use. But not even all connectors are made the same. Some tools, like Looker Studio, for example, offer a huge number of third-party connectors. However, you should prioritize solutions with native or direct integrations, as these provide much better stability and speed with zero maintenance.
Also, since those connectors are developed in-house, the software vendor can readily respond to any support issues and even create new integrations at the user’s request.
2. Data management: Apart from integrations with relevant data sources, ensure the marketing reporting software solution can provide the required data granularity and ways to organize data for in-depth analysis. Also, consider whether the software has real-time data updates and allows historical data analysis. Another question you should ask is whether the data and report-building layers are separate and how intuitive it is to switch between one another. We know from experience that switching back and forth between the organization and reporting environment every time you need to verify a change takes a lot of time.
3. Drag-and-drop report builder: To avoid using generic Excel-style visuals, pick a client reporting solution that allows you to build stunning reports using widgets as building blocks. Whatagraph is a good example. You can edit and adjust each template to your specifications using nothing but mouse clicks. Whether it’s SEO or a social media report, a drag-and-drop report builder with customizable templates saves you much time.
4. Visual storytelling: Your clients are most likely business people, not marketers. Technical terms such as CPC, CPM, and CLTV may not mean much to them. To provide more value to your clients, choose an advertising agency reporting tool that allows you to tell the story in a way that is easy to understand. Really flexible reporting tools allow you to even customize the names of metrics so you can adapt them to the client’s internal naming.
I love Whatagraph because it allows me to give little descriptions of what each metric means on the dashboard, which is very handy if the client doesn’t understand those trigger terms like CPC
White label options: Even if you use one tool to collect and prepare data, and another tool for data visualization and reporting, you want your agency’s name and logo on client reports. Double-check what level of customization each tool provides. Some tools allow you to pick true colors for chart fields to outfit the whole report in your agency’s color scheme. The premium custom options include a custom domain for live online reports that can be your agency’s name.
Onboarding potential: Any successful agency-client relationship begins at the discovery call and continues throughout the onboarding phase. A versatile marketing agency reporting software can help you demonstrate how you connect scattered sources, organize data, and customize different templates. You can also introduce the clients to your agency’s automated reporting and monitoring processes, which increase transparency, build trust in your marketing strategy, and speak to your technological advancement as an agency.
Learning curve and support: Ask about what kind of customer support, training, and resources come with the tool to assess how much time you need to start using it effectively. A might seem a good match but have a steep learning curve or include only ticket-based support—both of which are not very practical for a lean and fast-paced agency operation.
Scalability: Your marketing reporting platform must be able to scale as your agency grows. A tool might meet your immediate requirements but could become too slow or inadequate as your requirements expand — you start signing on bigger clients with a lot more marketing data, creating more reports, etc.
By automating our data collection and reporting, we have not only made our own operations more efficient, but above all improved our customers' access to information. They can now benefit in real time from deeper insights presented in a clear and user-friendly way. We can now together make faster and even better decisions!
Thanks to a large number of direct integrations, the intuitive Whatagraph report builder, and seamless report sharing, Market Solutions has managed to save from 3 to 7 hours on each report and successfully scale their operations to serve 150+ clients with a team of 15.
Top marketing reporting software and tools for agencies
Here is our list of the best marketing agency reporting software based on their distinctive features, pros and cons, and pricing.
1. Whatagraph
Whatagraph is an easy-to-use platform for monitoring and reporting on marketing performance. It has direct integrations with popular digital marketing data sources such as SEO and PPC tools, web analytics, email marketing tools, e-commerce and social media platforms, and CRM systems. With Whatagraph, you can replace multiple slow and complex tools with one easy-to-use client reporting platform.
You can organize data by the specific client reporting needs. Unify metric names, group countries in tiers, or blend key metrics with data from other channels.
Thanks to professionally built templates, you can easily create any custom report tailored to your client’s requirements and with the business KPIs of choice.
Instead of using different tools to collect, clean, and analyze data, Whatagraph integrates all your data into one fast and easy-to-use platform.
As a result:
- Data is easier to organize and analyze.
- Teams can track their performance on internal dashboards and overviews.
- You can automate the way you report to clients or stakeholders.
Marketing analytics processes become more efficient, and everyone — from clients to teammates — can finally understand marketing data and focus on strategy and execution with hours saved.
Key features:
- Native integrations to popular marketing sources
- Connect any data source using Custom API, Google Sheets, or BigQuery
- Organize connected data without coding
- Drag-and-drop visualization builder
- Cross-channel insights
- Overview (monitors the performance of all your clients or campaigns)
- Library of pre-made report templates
- Edit multiple reports in bulk
- Save anything as a template
- Custom branding and white-label features
- Automated report sharing
- No-code data transfers to BigQuery data warehouse
Pros:
- All-in-one marketing analytics solution
- Easy to use by anyone on your team
- Engaging visual reports
- Fast campaign performance and insights
- Results easy to interpret
- Excellent live chat customer support
We use Whatagraph for all our client’s reports. The ability to title metrics differently is important to us because we often report the same metrics to different clients and just need to call them differently because many clients have internal terminology that is very different from one another.
Cons:
- No freemium plan
- Just one data warehouse destination (BigQuery) is available so far
Pricing
Whatagraph offers three pricing plans based on the amount of “source credits” and access to customization and data organization capabilities. You can use source credits to connect data sources, send data from a source to a warehouse, and blend cross-channel data together.
Whatagraph ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.5 · 267 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.4 · 83 reviews
2. Looker Studio
Looker Studio (previously known as Google Data Studio) is one of the most versatile online marketing reporting tools. And on paper, it seems like an ideal choice. It’s free, it has integrations to hundreds of different sources, and it turns them into interactive reports.
Its biggest perk is probably excellent data integration with Google’s marketing platform. If you rely heavily on Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, or YouTube, you’ll find connecting data and creating reports super easy. You can then customize those reports and share them with clients.
However, things change a bit when you try to import data sources that are not part of Google’s ecosystem, such as Facebook Ads, Semrush, LinkedIn, or HubSpot. To connect this data, you need to purchase third-party connectors, which have proven multiple times not to be as reliable as Google’s native ones, leading to slow Looker Studio performance and instability.
Another downside is that Looker Studio reports lack real-time updates. Its core sources, which are mostly Google apps, refresh every 15 minutes, which might be an issue for you.
A bigger issue is that although it’s free to use with Google’s sources, Looker Studio can cost you more than you planned when you start connecting outside sources via third-party connectors and paying for each separately.
We’ve heard similar issues from many digital agencies that feel they have outgrown Looker Studio. This became especially evident when they wanted to scale their business by signing on more clients and connecting more marketing channels outside the Google universe.
Key features:
- Big collection of pre-built report templates
- More than 650 connectors built by third-parties
- A large variety of graphs and other visualization types
- Embed dashboards on any site using shortcode
Pros:
- Wide customization options
- Large number of connectors
- Free with most Google sources
- Interactive reports
Cons:
- Can get slow with more data sources
- Limited blending capabilities
- Report performance depends on the performance of individual data connectors
- No way to save custom visualizations
- Steep learning curve
Pricing
Looker Studio is free if you use data from the supported Google products. If you want to include data sources outside the Google platform, you need to pay a monthly subscription and purchase third-party connectors for those data sources. There’s also the paid version called Looker Studio Pro. This is a premium version that has additional features like team access, connection to Google Cloud projects, and better support. The price is tailored to every customer based on their specific needs.
Looker Studio ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.4 · 423 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.6 · 253 reviews
3. AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics is a marketing reporting tool that caters primarily to marketing agencies looking to automate their reporting process. You can connect your clients’ analytics or marketing platforms and create custom reports that help them make informed decisions. AgencyAnalytics includes several SEO auditing tools, such as a keyword rank tracker that can scan your client’s sites automatically and raise alerts in case of any issues with search engine optimization.
This marketing agency reporting tool has a user-friendly interface that allows non-technical team members to create custom reports for different scenarios. To an extent, you can also customize overall colors and chart fields for improved branding and communication.
On the downside, if you regularly need to organize data, you may have to look for another tool, as AgencyAnalytics offers very few data transformation functions. Actions like blending, aggregating data from multiple sources, or unifying names of metrics and dimensions to align with the client’s internal communication are not available with AgencyAnalytics.
Key features:
- White-label reporting
- Integrates with 80+ different data sources
- Cross-campaign data
Pros:
- Intuitive user interface
- Automated marketing reporting
- Responsive customer service
- Lightweight and straightforward platform
- Live reports
Cons:
- Limited widget customization
- Basic data transformation functions
- Steep learning curve
- No bulk report edit
- Reports older than 60 days get deleted
- No way to push data to other business intelligence, visualization, or analytics tools
- No support for data warehouses
- Not suitable for mid-market or large agencies and enterprises
Pricing:
AgencyAnalytics pricing has three pricing plans — Freelancer, Agency, and Enterprise. Your subscription cost is based on the number of Client Campaigns you run. More advanced features like custom branding, custom metrics, and report approvals are reserved for the higher tiers. However, the AgencyAnalytics pricing page leaves many questions unanswered. Are some of the features available as add-ons? Are there limits within each plan? What does a Client Campaign include? etc.
AgencyAnalytics ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.7 · 316 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.8 · 114 reviews
4. Klipfolio
Klipfolio is a marketing agency reporting software that comes out of the box with a huge library of report templates that you can connect to multiple data sources. With the ability to track your marketing data history, identify trends, and monitor performance metrics over time, Klipfolio easily found its way to our list.
As a bonus, Klipfolio allows more technically oriented agency users to gain deeper insights through complex formulas, data modeling, and machine learning functionalities.
This marketing reporting software also allows users to get their hands “dirty” to explore metrics themselves and create reports from scratch. You can connect scattered data sources into a centralized hub, which other team members can use to access shared, updated information necessary for decision-making. This data sharing among team members is made easier thanks to multiple-user accounts in which you can organize users into groups and assign them specific permissions.
Klipfolio also offers a complementary analytics tool called Powermetrics, which is designed for large agencies. This tool can help you segment and visualize client data effortlessly using different filters and visualization types.
However, before you consider Klipfolio as your solution to digital client reporting, remember that the pricing plan you choose affects both the data refresh rate and historical data limits.
The same applies to the number of reports you can have at any given time — it is tied to your package. While simpler Klips are easy to create, building anything more customized might take you a lot of time, especially since only a handful of pre-made templates are available.
Klipfolio is made with wide application in mind, sometimes resulting in a lack of data granularity and the inability to perform in-depth analysis. Another common customer complaint is that Klipfolio does not provide real-time data in reports, as it claims to do. Also, the platform tends to slow down, even if processing small datasets.
Key features:
- Customized report builder
- Report sharing and collaboration
- Predictive modeling
- Live connection to external data
- Data presentation and storage
- Interactive visualizations on mobile
- My SQL server
Pros:
- Easy to create complex reports using drag-and-drop
- No-code integrations
- Good user support and documentation
- Large choice of templates
- Custom metrics and calculated fields
- Pixel-level control of visualizations made thanks to CSS, HTML, and JavaScript support
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Limitations in uploaded file size
- Klips can be confusing for people with no coding skills
- Every Klip is configured in a separate environment
- The number of reports depends on the pricing plan
Pricing
Klipfolio has three pricing plans based primarily on the number of reports you can create—15, 30, or 60 reports. Another pricing factor is the data refresh rate, which goes from 1 hour to up to 1 minute for the Team+ plan. Any plan is upgradable with more reports and other perks for an additional fee, such as priority support, large data sets, and faster refresh rates.
Klipfolio ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.5 · 252 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.7 · 193 reviews
5. DashThis
DashThis is an online marketing reporting software that allows agencies to create functional, flexible, and effective reports for their clients. The software integrates with over 35 marketing channels, including the most popular ones like Google Analytics, Semrush, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and more.
Apart from these integrations, you can connect any custom data via Google Sheets or import data using the platform’s CSV tool. Still, some customers report inconsistent data quality while pushing data through flat-file integration. A Custom API would be a much better solution, but DashThis hasn’t developed that feature yet.
The pre-made DashThis reports are flexible and support cross-channel analytics with metrics from multiple platforms. Users can also clone widgets or report templates and easily replicate a report for another client.
With severely limited data transformation features, DashThis is more oriented to smaller marketing agencies that don’t serve clients with complex data needs. The lack of cross-channel overview and bulk report editing only confirms its position as a reporting tool for smaller agencies. Scaling your agency with DashThis would be difficult as it has few time-saving features that would help you allocate time to onboarding new clients.
Key features:
- 35+ digital marketing tool integrations
- Unlimited users in a single account
- Pre-made report templates and widgets
- Simple report sharing
Pros:
- White-label reports
- Wide choice of data visualizations
Cons:
- Limited data granularity
- Lacks enterprise-level or large agency functionalities
- No data transformation
- You may run into API call limits when working with large volumes of data
- No live chat
Pricing:
DashThis pricing is based on the number of reports you can create. There are several pricing plans available starting from 3, 10, 25, and 50 to as many reports as you need.
When you decide how many reports you need, you can choose your subscription. Any plan that includes 10 reports or more gives you access to white-label options.
You can switch to a new plan even if you prepaid for a year and will be charged the remaining balance.
DashThis ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.8 · 78 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.4 · 25 reviews
6. Databox
Databox is a marketing reporting software solution that helps marketing teams track business performance across multiple channels and marketing campaigns. Its biggest advantage over competitors is integrations with a large number of marketing data sources including SQL databases. You can modify the data using a simple drag-and-drop feature, which makes it popular among non-experts. Databox lets you easily visualize weekly and monthly KPIs for decision-makers across departments: sales, marketing, e-commerce, customer service, etc.
The Databox interface is highly intuitive, which makes it easy for everyone to create custom reports with data from over 100 integrations. There's also a unique feature called “Looped Dashboards,” which allows you to connect dashboards and create a master report.
But before you grab a phone and schedule a meeting with the Databox sales team, you should also know the downsides.
The refresh time depends on your pricing plan, which can range between once a day and 1 hour. Some customers have also complained about the quality of data source connectors. In some cases, when the connector breaks off, the historical data from the source is also lost.
While it allows you to unify metrics and dimensions names, Databox doesn’t support data blending and aggregation. Both of these features are often requested by large agencies and enterprise marketing teams.
The lack of data warehouse support and the ability to export data in spreadsheets for further analysis clearly position Databox as a marketing reporting software for small businesses and marketing agencies serving small businesses.
Key features:
- Intuitive workflow and visual reporting
- Unified view across devices
- Goal setting and performance tracking
Pros:
- User-friendly drag-and-drop builder interface
- 70+ direct and 2000+ third-party integrations
- No coding required
- Multiple display options, including desktop, mobile TV, and Apple Watch
- Automated notifications
Cons:
- Some integrations are difficult to optimize
- Limited report customization and control over data
- Some types of data can be tracked only 2 months back
- No data blending & aggregation
- Live chat support works well only on the highest plan
- Data refresh rate depends on the plan
Pricing
Databox pricing has four levels: 1) Plan, 2) Data Source Connections, 3) Add-Ons, and 4) Services.The subscription cost is based on your plan + the number of data source connections in your account + add-ons and recurring services. The first three data source connections are free on all plans. Beyond that, you need to pay for each new connection.
Databox ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.4 · 188 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.6 · 202 reviews
7. ReportGarden
ReportGarden is a marketing reporting tool that helps marketing agencies and their clients monitor online marketing campaigns. The software is positioned as an all-in-one solution for building reports that consolidate KPIs across different channels, including PPC, social media, SEO, email marketing, and others.
Marketers can easily create tailored reports with real-time data on traffic sources, conversion rates, and other metrics essential to the campaign's performance. Using automated report scheduling, you can save time on reporting and ensure every client and stakeholder receives their report on time.
However, the tool has a couple of significant downsides that keep it from joining the big players.
The first drawback is the lack of a custom API for connecting data. That wouldn’t be such an issue if ReportGarden could add a data warehouse as a source — but it can’t.
This limits the software’s ability to connect custom data sources at scale.
Another area where ReportGarden still needs work is data transformation. Apart from calculated metrics, there are no other ways to organize data before visualizing it.
This might not be an issue for less demanding users. However, for large organizations and agencies, the ability to unify, rename, and translate data outputs at scale, aggregate data to create tiers or totals, and blend cross-channel data into one source is a regular requirement.
Key features:
- 50+ integrations for data sources
- Report builder and automation
- Custom branding
- Client Portal
- Budget tracking
Pros:
- Clients can check their reports 24/7 using the Client Portal
- Report templates
- Cross-platform reporting
- White-label options
Cons:
- Lacks in-depth data analytics
- No data warehouse integration
- Very basic data transformation
- No way to edit reports in bulk
Pricing:
ReportGarden has four pricing plans based on the number of sources and users. However, the ReportGarden pricing page has a comparison table showing that the number of integrations increases with the plan, with only the custom plan having access to all integrations. With Whatagraph, all integrations are available from the basic pricing plan onwards.
ReportGarden ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.5 · 27 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.5 · 73 reviews
8. Improvado
Improvado is one of the best marketing reporting platform solutions designed for enterprise-size companies and large marketing agencies. Positioned as an end-to-end solution that combines marketing intelligence and automated reporting, Improvado helps marketers at every stage of the reporting cycle, from collecting data to transformation and insight discovery.
Thanks to more than 500 pre-built data connectors to CRMs, social media platforms, and e-commerce tools, this reporting platform can collect data from a wide range of sources, helping companies get a unified view of their marketing efforts. The next step is intelligent data transformation, where data is cleaned and prepared before being pushed to any destination of choice.
Improvado uses Looker Studio, Tableau, and other BI or visualization tools to create reports
Since Improvado doesn’t have a native visualization layer, it offers integrations with Looker Studio, Power BI, Tableau, Grafana, Domo, and many other data visualization, business intelligence, and analytics platforms.
Another feature that streamlines analytics processes is Improvado’s AI Agent. This search-based analytics tool connects to your database and allows you to ask performance questions via an intuitive UI. The Agent analyzes your data and notifies you of any anomalies or opportunities. There’s also an option to send out weekly or monthly reports to help you track different aspects of your marketing campaigns.
Key features:
- Collects data from online and offline sources
- Data integration
- Data transformation
- Business data QA
- AI-powered instant intelligence
- Data warehouse support
Pros:
- A large number of integrations
- Multiple customization options
- AI-powered data transformation
- Can process large volumes of data to the size of petabytes
- Flexible pricing
Cons:
- Designed for enterprise users, might be too late for small businesses
- No native visualization and reporting — you need to integrate another tool
- Initial setup takes some time
- Steep learning curve
Pricing:
Improvado has a custom pricing model tailored to the needs of each team or marketing agency. Users pay only for the features they actually use, and the cost of individual features and data limits is discussed on a demo call.
Improvado ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.5 · 69 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.5 · 22 reviews
9. Tableau
Tableau is a reporting tool that comes at a fairly reasonable price. Although it has a steep learning curve, once you master it, you can easily create graphs and charts and customize them according to your agency's needs.
For many SaaS businesses, Tableau is a household name for a business report. However, it’s not a rare case that digital agencies also use it due to its versatile analytics features and a large number of integrations from various data sources such as Salesforce and Google Analytics. You can easily import data from all your client’s sources and generate a detailed report of their performance.
Key features:
- Embedded analytics
- Geospatial analysis
- Ready-to-use Accelerator reports
- Data grouping bins
- Predictive modeling
- Tableau Catalog
- Data stories
- Metadata API
Pros:
- Visualization version control
- Huge library of templates
- Interactive fiscal calendar
- Marketing data management
- Custom SQL queries
- AI and machine learning functionalities
Cons:
- Setting up data automation requires some Python programming
- The cloud version lacks some visualization and formatting settings that are available on the desktop version
- Limited programming options for predictive functions
- Steep learning curve
Pricing
Tableau has three pricing plans, Viewer, Explorer, and Creator, based on the data exploration abilities and data management functions.
Tableau ratings and reviews
- G2: Rating: 4.4 · 2,085 reviews
- Capterra: Rating: 4.5 · 2,285 reviews
Your new marketing reporting software is waiting!
Choosing the right marketing reporting software can significantly streamline the reporting process in your agency. Each tool on our list has been selected for its unique features and capabilities and proven track record in helping marketers demonstrate value to their clients.
Whatagraph is one of those tools that removes many steps between the client’s data sources and actionable reports.
Apart from multiple time-saving and scalable features built primarily for agencies, Whatagraph is a marketing reporting platform that covers the entire data journey — from connecting scattered sources to creating beautiful reports.
Sign up for a free trial today and save time reporting to your clients!
Published on Aug 22 2024
WRITTEN BY
Nikola GemesNikola is a content marketer at Whatagraph with extensive writing experience in SaaS and tech niches. With a background in content management apps and composable architectures, it's his job to educate readers about the latest developments in the world of marketing data, data warehousing, headless architectures, and federated content platforms.