The Comprehensive Reference To Marketing Reporting For Digital Marketers, Including Tools, Templates, Dashboards, and Software
Marketing is the art of spreading information to attract new customers.
War is ninety percent information.
Napoleon Bonaparte, French Military and Political Leader
What is marketing reporting?
Marketing reporting is defined as the process of measuring the progress towards meeting goals. It helps you to understand what actions to take and how your marketing effort is creating value.
Benefits of Marketing Reports
Let us get a clear understanding of the benefits of reports building into our regular workflows. Although the worth of marketing is quite clear to us, other people consider marketing as a support function and the money spent on it as a cost. It’s is the place where you feel the need for marketing reporting.
Marketing reporting can help you prove the worth of marketing. For example, if you can show how your campaigns are generating leads, bringing revenues, and fulfilling the business goals. Then you can prove the value of your and your departments and their efforts.
However, marketing reports help you get a clear idea about how things are working and what needs to be improved, and where we should spend our budget and give our efforts. A marketing report can answer all these questions and help you make the best business decision.
Marketing reporting basics
After we understand why should we create marketing reports, the thing we should be concerned about is, what constitutes a marketing report? The report can be of any type and look anyway. The thing that matters to you in the report may not be equally important to another person. Hence a few sections of a marketing report are broken down and discussed below.
Summary
This section gives you an overall view and breaks down the major points like challenges, successes, and future goals.
Traffic metrics
This section reveals the source of traffic, which is divided by channel and device.
Engagement metrics
This section shows how much interest is a person to your site when they have visited it. Bounce rate, time spent on site, and frequency of visit are a few key points.
Business impact metrics
This is what proves the ultimate marketing success and includes things like the revenue, opportunities, and pipeline generated.
Which marketing metrics should you report to?
Although you may feel like reporting everything, it is not a good idea. Because doing so, you may overwhelm your clients and stakeholders who are interested in just a handful of metrics like; leads for sales, branded search, conversion, etc.
To identify which metrics should you use, you must first figure out the objective and goals of your business and which metrics can best determine the ROI.
Steps to build a marketing dashboard
Building a marketing reporting dashboard is necessary for every marketer. No matter what system you are using to track down your business data. A dashboard helps you get a quick view of the metrics; that you think are valuable to you and your stakeholders.
When you are building a dashboard, you must have a clear view of your goals and then determine the performance of your campaigns over time. Besides, you must focus on a single topic and avoid having too many metrics, which helps a viewer to scan and get a quick understanding of the dashboard. Including too many metrics can make it complicated for the user to understand.
The overall creation of a dashboard is straightforward. Also, it works the same way in all systems. All that you need to do is, determine your business objectives and targeted audience, and then decide the marketing KPIs that you want to add.
considerations while building marketing reports
When building marketing reports, even if the metrics are similar, the individual channel source report may be different. For example, if you are making an SEO report, it won’t involve any information on ads and quality scores. Whereas; a PPC report will include it. An SEO and content marketing report can be similar in some ways as you are looking for organic keywords leading to clicks and conversion. An SEO report may include content information. But a content marketing report may not include technical issues and individual keyword rankings.
Let’s take the example of SEO and PPC reports. A typical SEO report includes the below-mentioned information:
- Conversions
- Rank improvements
- Keyword performance
- Landing page performance
- Top performing content
- Increase in organic traffic
- Improvements made to content and overall optimizations
- Technical errors like 404 and missing H1 tags
- Backlinks created
- Inbound traffic
- Explanation of all the above points
A typical PPC report has similar goals where you want to show how your marketing efforts are driving more leads and traffic- the look of the metrics is slightly different
- Individual device performance
- Ad performance
- Overall PPC performance
- Quality score
- Keyword performance
- Cost per conversion
- Impression share
- Click-through rates
- Overall cost
- Average cost per click
- Average position
Despite the differences in both the reports, it still shows the lessons learned, your plans, and how you want to address any issue.
Marketing reporting software and tools
If you ask ten different marketers what their favorite marketing tools are, you are bound to hear ten different replies. Most individuals utilize spreadsheet-based tools like Google Data Studio, Excel, and Google Sheets, as well as BI applications like Tableau, Qlik, and PowerBI, to create reports.
The tool you choose will be largely determined by your budget and requirements. Google Data Studio is a wonderful free alternative to traditional paid reporting solutions for most businesses. This one’s main selling feature is that it’s completely free. While there is a learning curve, you can rapidly conquer it by using one of the many free Google tools or by trial and error.
Why do we need marketing reporting?
Increasing budgets
Increased complexity of marketing landscape
Why reports are Mandatory and how to get started.
Marketing reports can confirm your attempts and spots the successes of your work. They can spot the trends, as well as reach out even the smallest details and define how they add to your marketing ROI (return on investment). Marketing reporting assists you to build a frame of reference that revolves around data.
If you were to scrutiny a data-driven marketing approach with that of a few years ago, you’ll probably be amazed that things have been replaced. From tracking visits per page, bounce rates, and cost per click, today companies have grown to masticate tons of complicated data. Although for many, the goal is to endeavor customers. The actual possible data-driven marketing can also help meet another purpose. Think about attaining new customers or adding your marketing ROI, such as
If we were to select the top three objectives of data-driven marketing, we’d look for:
- Exposing the customer journey and where Purchasers locate at any point in time.
- Mapping and scaling marketing ROI.
- Coordinating the marketing and sales teams.
Point discussed in detail.
- The first aspiration is conceivably the most determining one. Tracking where exactly customers are while they are spending time during the visit of the website, is crucial to Presenting them what they need.
Are they using their mobile device to be reached? what is their spending capacity? When they are supposed to purchase?
.
- How about Calculating and giving the return on your marketing activities? Don’t worry, we can understand. It is the biggest objection for marketers out there.
What you need to do is to use the collected data and place it in your business context. It could be an entire marketing mix or a partial mix? could encompass a single platform or multiple channels?
Note: Acknowledge the variables before you deal with the calculations.
- The third point is understanding the alignment of goals and actions, in particular between the marketing and sales divisions.
Marketing and sales teams generally work too closely. Though, it is usual that data moves across the organization – without getting stuck in the depository, and the team can do required amendments to hit the company’s targets.
Major steps to get the relevant data for your reports
- Ask the prominent and relevant questions
- Acquiring the highest possible data quality
- Breaking down silos and Depository
- Interpreting your data to get the best impression
- Combine the real-time data
- Bringing it all together
A contemporary report reveals that very few companies have fully implemented data systems. As data volumes continue to increase, integrated marketing analytics is very much important to getting the maximum out of your datasets.
Types of marketing reports (by maturity)

Marketing Reporting Maturity
Traffic

Traffic report data studio
Summary
CPC/CTR

CPC and CTR report Google Analytics

CPC report Data Studio
Analytics conversions
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein, Physicist
- Ecommerce transactions: You sell something online and you have a direct conversion value. In this case it makes sense to skip this section and move to the ROI section.
- Lead capturing: Your goal is to get as many leads, form fills, event subscriptions, etc. as possible. The final outcome is a persons email address and/or details.
The measurement to look at in conversions-based marketing is CPA. CPA stands for cost per acquisition. Sometimes you might hear the term CPL, which stands for cost per lead. The formula for CPA or CPL is
Cost/Conversions

Multi channel marketing report
CRM Conversions
How many confirmed transactions (not cancelled) did each marketing channel or campaign generate?
How many qualified leads, opportunities and deals did my marketing channels and campaigns generate?

Multi channel CRM marketing report
ROI

ROI marketing reporting dashboard
Attribution

Last Click Journey

CRM Revenue Attribution 2