8 Things You Must Include in Your Monthly Marketing Report [+ 5 Templates]

Continue reading to find out how to write a monthly report and find 5 report templates at the end.

What is a Monthly Marketing Report?

It is a document that helps marketers present the results of their marketing campaigns and strategies to their teams, bosses, and clients. This way, they inform everyone in their agency about how marketing is performing.

Monthly marketing reporting allows founders, CEOs, and directors to see if their marketing efforts are paying off. It is also an effective way to present important information to help them make smart decisions. Without this report, your bosses won’t be able to understand the shortcomings or successes of the past month.

With this type of report, you can involve everyone on your team in the marketing process, including departments other than yours. It’s a brilliant way to ensure that marketing and sales work together to achieve common goals.

Sharing a monthly marketing report with your clients allows them to see clear and concise data that will help them understand what you’ve done in the past month and prove your worth.

Why Monthly?

There are different types of marketing report intervals - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing reports. While each of them provides valuable information about your marketing plan, in most cases, the monthly report works best for everyone – marketers, bosses, and clients. However, weekly marketing reports may work just as well.

Tracking your end-of-month goals and the adjustments you make throughout the month can help you realize if you’ve accomplished your monthly goals.

Reporting too frequently with not enough information will only waste your valuable time that could be used much more productively. On the other hand, reporting on a monthly basis gives you enough time to show meaningful results in a short enough time frame to be able to make changes based on your performance.

What’s more, most executives don’t track marketing departments more often than once a month. The bottom line is that writing monthly performance reports will help you be a more agile marketer.

How to Create a Monthly Marketing Report?

To create a perfect monthly report, you’ve got 3 options. 

• Start from a blank page
• Use a reporting tool
• Use a report a template

Let’s discuss these options in detail. To create a monthly report, you’ll need a tool to pull relevant data. Whatagraph allows you to pull data from different sources to get a full picture of your digital marketing efforts. 

Manually From Scratch

The most obvious way to create a report is to do it manually utilizing Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.

However, creating reports manually has way too many cons, making it far from ideal for marketing agencies:

• It's time-consuming

The monthly report must cover all of the run experiments, their results, overall marketing strategy’s performance and campaigns. Since huge volumes of data is needed to analyze marketing efforts, handwriting monthly reports will take hours… MANY HOURS!  

• May require additional resources

Since manually creating reports takes a long time, some marketing agencies may require additional personnel. In fact, you may need to hire an additional person just to handle reports.

• It is prone to human errors

Manual reporting will always have a high risk of data inaccuracies, misplaced and mishandled data. It’s due to a human factor - our brains can only maintain true focus for about 45 minutes before it loses steam. 

To prevent all of the human errors, consider other two options for creating monthly reports.

Using a Template in Whatagraph


Probably the easiest way to create a report is to use a pre-made template offered by a reporting  tool. 

Whatagraph, for example, offers more than 95 templates for marketers and marketing agencies to use. 

How does it work?

To create a monthly report with Whatagraph, follow these steps:

1. Create a Whatagraph account and get an account manager to get you ready in no time. They will also offer top tips & tricks and best practices for your reporting needs.

2. Go to the template library. Choose a monthly reporting template.

3. Connect your data sources. You can connect any (or all) of the 40+ data sources Whatagraph integrates with.

4. Automate the report to be sent out every month.

Manually in Whatagraph

You also have the ability to create a report from scratch/a blank page. 

This is what it looks like in Whatagraph:

It is different from creating a report with a template. More specifically, you can use a drag and drop feature to move widgets with needed formulas and metrics such as your conversion rate.

The Importance of Marketing Reports

Today, investing in marketing is vital for the success of every business in any industry. This will help them stand out from the competition, which is not easy in the modern digital environment. With this in mind, here are the reasons why marketing reports are important:

• They allow businesses to collect data from numerous sources and access valuable marketing data from a single point of access.
• They are entirely automation-friendly, allowing marketers to save many working hours with automated reporting.
• They showcase visitors’ behavior and exact activity on a website, social media account, app, etc.
• They help you better understand your marketing strategies, what is working and what is not, and give you a chance to improve them further or correct the ones that didn’t quite work.
• They are extremely beneficial for marketers, SEOs, and clients, helping them to reach their business goals.

Creating such reports for all your marketing channels every month will save you valuable time and improve accuracy across the board for both your agency, department and clients.

What to Include in Your Monthly Marketing Report?

You don’t want your bosses or clients to read 20 pages of data every month, and neither do they. For that reason, here are the items you should include in your monthly marketing reports:

1. Find Out If There’s an Existing Marketing Report Template

Using an existing template will make this job much easier for you and drastically reduce the time spent creating these monthly reports. Check out an existing template your department has already used and use it as the basis of your report.

You will still have a chance to expand and customize it as you desire. PS. you may also want to try reporting dashboards if you always want to provide clients with live results.

2. Create the Headers

Even though this may sound simple, it’s really helpful. Creating the headers can help you organize the sections of key metrics you want your new marketing report to have. This allows you to see the type of marketing efforts your monthly report needs.

3. Do Not Forget to Include Performance Trends

Month over month performance trends are important as they help you stand out from the competition. Instead of explaining all individual metrics and data to your team, clients can see from the report if your marketing campaigns are successful. Moreover, you can see if there is anything you can do to improve results, and how your company’s marketing activities compare to industry standards.

4. Statistics

Make sure you include lots of informative data by including the following statistics:

Blog posts published – keep track of the content you create and publish each month, such as blog posts and their metrics. This will help you determine if your content marketing and search engine performance are headed in the right direction. Thanks to this valuable data, you can decide if you need to increase or decrease the number of articles published and the length of the articles to improve your rankings.

Email sends, and statistics – monitoring and reporting these statistics will allow you to optimize your email marketing campaign. If you need to send more or less frequent emails, you will see the impact on email marketing of the changes you have made in the past month. Don’t forget to include statistics such as bounce rate, unsubscribes, open rate, conversions, and click-through rate.

Website visitors – including the number of website visitors, how they found your website, and how many of them have become leads can be of great help if your marketing campaign is focused on increasing website traffic.

Marketing qualified leads – including these statistics will help rate your website performance and the marketing performance that increases your traffic. Adding leads over time and other informative details are recommended.

Sales qualified leads – monitoring and reporting your sales qualified leads will ensure your marketing strategy is aimed at the right target audience. Including details on your leads vs goals can be of great help.

Marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads to sales – the rate of leads generated that convert to sales will partially determine the success of your sales team. Thanks to these statistics, you can figure out whether your sales department needs to change its strategy.

Customer loyalty – details on the long-term value of your marketing efforts should also be added to your monthly report. An effective way to present this feedback is through reporting customer loyalty. Remember to include the following data: retention rate, lifetime value, revenue per customer, net promoter score, and profit margin.

5. Goals and KPIs

Marketers and sales should work harmoniously for mutual success. For that purpose, you need to report your brand-building activities so that sales are familiar with your goal, ensuring your team is always improving.

This will also help your bosses know your future strategies to accomplish your goal. It’s good for them to know how to evaluate your marketing success. They should be able to determine which key performance indicators or KPIs you will use to evaluate your report.

Ensure your goals and KPIs for their evaluation are clearly defined and included in your monthly marketing report. It’s also good to pre-define your core and secondary KPIs in the report.

Sam Browne, CEO and Founder of HARO SEO says that they typically incorporate leads by source, top landing pages, paid vs organic leads, and marketing reaches into our monthly marketing report because it helps their clients assess the ROI of their marketing purchases.

6. Visual Examples

Adding visual examples in your reports will make the whole content easier to understand. For example, upload ad examples and add a comment widget, including reports for social media marketing, PPC (paid search), video, and display campaigns.

7. Notes for Major Changes

Adding notes to explain significant positive or negative changes in metrics from time to time is helpful for both you and those receiving the report. They make it easier for you to refer to a past report or explain the data and numbers to others. This will prevent you from receiving plenty of questions after sending a report.

Doing your job effectively is impossible without digging into the numbers to understand these changes. If you determine that the change was positive, you have a chance to change your marketing campaign to keep on seeing that positive trend. On the other hand, noticing a negative trend means a chance to fix it.

8. A Wrap-Up

At the end of your monthly marketing report, include a comment box to list your monthly achievements, tests performed with results, main points and conclusions, your plan for the next month, and the total return on investment from the marketing budget.

Jack Salmon, a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Circulate Digital, wraps up:

• The exact KPIs that determine the success of our campaigns
• Cross-channel marketing metrics
• A list of work we have been working on
• What we have planned next
• An executive summary and performance explanations

5 Marketing Report Templates

1. Marketing Report Template

Our monthly marketing report template is an excellent way to start your automated monthly reporting. It has all you may need:

• The most important metrics and KPIs, such as cost per acquisition, customer retention rate, engagement rate, etc., are ready to be examined and analysed;
• The goal tracking widget allows marketing agencies to assess their progress and measure performance;
• Customization feature. With Whatagraph, you don't have to settle for features offered by default. Change the domain name, colours, fonts and anything you want to match the requirements of the environment you’ll be presenting the report to (clients, team members, etc.)

2. Google Ads Report Template

If you want to create a more specific monthly report, such as Google Ads, you can easily grab our template and be satisfied with what it has to offer.

Our Google Ads report template tracks all your KPIs for Google ads across different accounts: conversions, clicks, impressions, CPC, ROAS and more. No matter how many accounts you manage, they can all be visualized in this monthly report template

3. Social Media Report Template

Our social media report template is a pre-made document that puts all your social media KPIs and performance metrics in one place. For example, combine Facebook ads with LinkedIn ads reports and add any social media metrics you want.

Moreover, it creates a cross-channel report by pulling data from platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. It also 

Show your most important social media metrics in a single report. No matter which platforms or KPIs you need, you can find them in this template.

4. SEO Report Template

Examine your client's website performance KPIs, keywords, SERP positions, and other key SEO metrics using our SEO report template.

You can provide detailed data to your clients with just a few clicks. Track and display organic traffic, referral traffic, clicks, impressions, CTR, link-building analytics, and more for your client's website. Discover how your efforts are performing and progressing, and then optimize based on data. Think about the data you usually collect from Google Analytics - but displayed in the form of graphs and bar charts.

5. Sales report template 

All of your critical sales data in one place. Connect the data from your CRMs, call center, email, and other data sources for a consolidated sales report.

Highlight your key sales metrics and concentrate solely on important KPIs to you and your team members. You can get right to the point with Whatagraph's sales report template.

Conclusion

Creating a monthly digital marketing report and sharing it with your team, bosses, or clients will help everyone understand your marketing strategies and goals while making your job easier.

Sending such valuable data on a monthly basis will help your bosses make data-driven decisions, and help your clients and team be on board with your decisions, goals, and plans while making you an agile marketer.

Ready to get started with creating amazing marketing reports? Sign up for a free trial of Whatagraph!