At its core, marketing reporting is the process of measuring progress, showing value, and identifying actionable steps to improve marketing performance. The idea is to crunch the available numbers and analytics to help meet future marketing goals, whether that be earning more revenue, expanding service footholds, increasing the online audience, etc.
A digital marketing report can be broken down, generally, into the following structure:
Summary: The summary section is used to break down the key points in the report, including the successes, challenges and upcoming goals.
Traffic Metrics: This section is included in a report to highlight the top-of-the-funnel acquisition numbers, broken down by channels.
Engagement Metrics: This section will outline the onsite activity as well as how much time a particular buyer spends on your site, how long until they left, etc.
Conversion Metrics: This section is crucial in any report as it highlights the numbers that clients are really interested in. These numbers will tell a client the cost per lead or acquisition so they can determine if they want to keep investing.
Business Impact Metrics: Lastly, this section will outline the numbers that are related to future opportunities, the pipeline generated, and revenue.
Depending upon the types of campaigns that you are running, you will want your reports broken down for PPC, SEO, social media, content marketing, account-based marketing, revenue reports, and overall comparison reports.
Why is Digital Marketing Reporting Important?
Why do we go through the hassle of exploring the metrics generated through digital marketing? Why is it even important anyway? We’re glad you asked!
Let’s look at a few important reasons why including client reporting into your workflow is critical to any thriving business today:
Reports Detail Your Actual Efforts
You already understand that marketing is important in our world. That’s why you work in marketing. However, your clients don’t share that same passion as you – they just know it’s a necessary evil. Marketing reports show them that your efforts are paying off. They articulate how campaigns are fulfilling goals, generating sales-ready leads, and bringing in revenue. That’s all these clients care about at the end of the day: is their investment paying off? If not, they’re probably going to walk away.
Establishes a Benchmark Marketing reports provide you with a benchmark for how things are working right here, right now. You can look at a report and go: are we succeeding? Where are we falling short? Where do improvements need to be made? Which channels are working and which ones are not? All of these questions can be answered with marketing reports, which will act as a guide for you throughout all of your marketing efforts. Without these reports, the team will be flying blind, aimlessly creating messaging and content that is totally falling to the wayside. That’s why digital marketing reporting needs to become a core part of your day-to-day marketing operations and workflow.
Creates Year-Over-Year Review
At the end of the year, when you’re sitting there reflecting on your business and how far it has come, you will want to see the bigger picture of what you have accomplished. The goal should always be continuous growth for your company, which means every digital marketing report should be compiled to answer questions such as: Which months were your slowest? Which days of the week? Did you do better around the holidays? These big picture trends should be observed and highly noted for the coming year so you know where and when to invest more.
Makes it Easier for Segmented Teams
Digital marketing is a complex feat today. It involves photography and videography, copywriting, hashtag research, audience research, keywords, and the list goes on. At big digital marketing firms these are all broken down into different departments, which means there needs to be constant cross-communication. Analytics reports will help teams identify which component needs to be invested in more for an upcoming campaign. Perhaps photos are doing better than videos in your market. Only a digital marketing report will help you identify the changes that need to be made by the necessary departments in real-time.
Real-Time Information
That brings us to our last and final point, the value of having real-time data at your fingertips. When you engage in marketing reporting, you are forcing yourself to go over the numbers every single month. With this information, you can make real-time changes and adjustments to campaigns to ensure they are more effective the coming month. Why wait until the time of the year to review the necessary information when regular reporting can get it done for you? It’s up to you the kind of cadence you want for reporting the analytics – some people even elect for weekly or bi-weekly updates. If you get into the habit of understanding the importance of digital marketing reporting, you won’t find compiling the reports to be so monotonous anymore.
At this point, you should have a clear picture as to why and how digital marketing reporting is crucial for the success of any business. But it doesn’t stop here, there are various other aspects that influence a client’s report. Check out our E-book: Digital Marketing Reporting Explained to dive a little deeper into digital marketing reporting and see where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.
