How to Generate Your Marketing Report? 5 Things You Must Include (And 4 to Omit)

Your marketing report is crucial to the success of your business. It provides deep insights into your business and answers some of the toughest questions. Some of these questions are as follows.

 
• How Successful Your Previous Marketing Campaign Was?
 
• How Can You Persuade Your Client to Approve More Budget?
 
• How Would You Justify This to Your Client?
 
• What to Do if You Are Not Getting the Expected Results?

Your marketing report provides you with key insights into the campaign. It gives you a clear picture of your business's performance and the measure you need to take to do to grow it. This information is equally valuable for the key stakeholders, including your marketing team.

This article will discuss what to include in your marketing report and what you shouldn't. By the end of this article, you will also learn how to save time through automation.

What Is a Marketing Report?

A marketing report displays data from different sources but is more than just a bundle of aimless data. Your marketing report would be relevant if it shows where you stand and helps you meet your business goals. It presents data using the desired KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to achieve this. The more closely your KPIs and OKRs track your performance, the more relevant your marketing report is.

Normally marketing reports provide insights into the following:

 
• Business Goals
• Different Ad and E-mail Campaigns
• Desired Results
• Marketing Strategy
• Promotion Campaigns
• Market Research and Analytics Data

As explained above, your marketing report should aim to provide you with the crucial data you need to make important business decisions and modify your strategy.

It includes sorting, filtering, and arranging data. We can easily eliminate 80% of the irrelevant data and use the most useful metrics to generate an effective report. It also proves that you only need a small amount of crucial data to make a decision.

Loads of data and unnecessary metrics will only create unnecessary confusion.

So, as a basic rule, you should determine the report's purpose first.

Generating a report becomes easier when you have a distinct purpose and well-defined objectives.

You can easily filter the information that will shape your marketing strategy. The lonely numbers are not going to help you. Every data set that you provide should have a specific purpose. Secondly, the report should compare two sets of numbers, so we can measure the performance and take necessary action to improve it.

5 Things You Must Include in Your Marketing Report

Let's dive into the five crucial things you should include in a marketing report to make it useful for your stakeholders.

1. SEO Data and Website Analytics

Your marketing success depends on your website traffic and the actions visitors take on your website. You can refer to your website analytics and SEO data to get these insights. The traffic numbers give you a clue about the size of your reach, whereas the actions they perform on your website tell you what you need to do to convert them.

You can further split the traffic numbers into the following three metrics.

A. Unique Visitors

These are the number of individuals visiting your site. For example, suppose someone visits your site four times for different purposes, and another person visits your website two times. In that case, it indicates that you received six website visits with two unique visitors.

B. Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic

The source of traffic is also an important metric as it tells you how paid and organic campaigns are performing individually. You can focus on those sources where ROI (return on investment) is more.

C. Blog Traffic

If you have a blog, you must know the number of subscribers, monthly readers, and visitors per day. Once you have all the website stats, you can add a little context to each data set.

Here are the benefits of using these metrics -

• Identify Traffic Patterns - These numbers would help you to study traffic patterns and how the pattern changes on a weekly and monthly basis.
• Identify Performing and Non-Performing Assets - These insights will help you identify the pages with the most visitors. Additionally, you'll also know which pages are consistently receiving traffic. You can easily achieve more success if you increase your efforts on these pages.

Carefully examine the underperforming pages and figure out what you need to change on these pages to make them perform better.

SEO Data Points

SEO stats provide you with deep insights into your website visitor behavior.

• Average Site Duration - This metric indicates engagement on your website. It also tells you if your site matches the intent of the visitors or not.
• Pay Per Click - This metric tells you whether paid advertising is effective for your website.
• Page Rankings - This is a crucial metric that tells you how visible your website is on SERPs (search engine result pages.)
• Attribution - This metric tells you the source of your traffic. It becomes crucial when you have a diverse range of traffic sources and would like to compare the campaigns you are running to bring traffic.

Google Analytics is the source where you can get all this information.

Pro Tip: If you use DashClicks, you will get access to the Analytics app, which brings a diverse range of analytics data from different sources and third-party software programs. Moreover, you can access all the relevant data on a single dashboard. It saves you a lot of effort and time since our white-level platform has several powerful automation apps to make life easier for the agency owners.

2. Campaign Goals

As discussed earlier, marketing is responsible for ensuring the success of your business. Therefore, it becomes crucial to set and measure campaign goals. These goals provide a perspective to your marketing team, so they can figure out the actual numbers to compare different metrics.

To achieve this, you should have a good understanding of your goals. A good marketer easily understands how different campaign elements can fit into a bigger picture to make it meaningful.

Goal setting may include the following items -

• Monthly Revenue Targets (Or Annual Budget)
• Traffic Targets (Split Data by Sources of Traffic)
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) Score
• Inbound Leads With Their Sources
• The Conversion Rate on the Website (Given the Entire Marketing Funnel)

Together, the above data and metrics provide a specific reference frame through which you cannot only tweak your marketing strategy but also know what your teams are doing and how they're doing it.

3. Prospects, Leads, and Customers

We have discussed a lot of metrics above, but it is only useful once it translates into money in any business.

So, we further split our traffic into engaged contacts, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and new sales qualified leads (SQLs).

A. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - These are those prospects with a high level of engagement and who are ready to speak with salespeople. Sometimes, you have to nurture marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads through several meetings, touchpoints, and imparting product education.

B. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - It is a metric that tells you the cost of adding a new customer.

C. Cost Per Action (CPA) - You expect your prospects to perform various actions, such as signing up for a trial, form submission, and downloading an eBook or gated content.

D. Attribution - It tells you everything about leads and their sources. This metric also helps you know where the quality leads are coming from, so you can focus more on those sources and eliminate the rest.

There are various ways to identify MQLs and SQLs, some of which are as follows.

• Tracking Engagement
• Visitor Tracking on the Website
• Forms SubmissionsE
• Event Signups
• Webinar Attendees
• Free-Trial or Newsletter Signups

4. Data Interpretation

Lonely numbers are useless. You need to add some context and support your data through stories to make the data more relevant and useful. Wrong data interpretation might lead to incorrect assumptions, and you should avoid that at all costs.

For example, a traffic dip can happen for many reasons, such as a long vacation, public holidays, or website issues.

The right interpretation of data is also crucial for your peers, executives, and your bossā€”it provides clear explanations of why there are fluctuations.

5. Social Media Stats

Suppose social media is an integral part of your marketing efforts. In that case, you should always include social media metrics in your reports that track your performance against brand awareness goals and conversions from social media campaigns.

Businesses heavily use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for conversion and brand awareness. So, you can use their analytics for the purpose. Social media platforms provide you with lots of insights and analytics so that you can measure your campaigns' effectiveness. These insights include likes, shares, retweets, impressions, number of followers, and engagement. With the help of this data, you can also find relevant information about audience demographics, ad performance, and virality.

Things Not to Include in Marketing Report

Ā You should not include the following things in your marketing report.

1. Jargon

Avoid jargon and the terminology used by the people in your industry at all costs. It can be confusing for everyone.

2. Irrelevant Metrics

Avoid all sorts of metrics that are unrelated to your core values or business goals. For example, Google Analytics provides you with vast SEO data that contains a lot of information on search engine rankings, their variations with keywords, bounce rate, etc., and most of it is useless.

3. Graphics or Charts That Contain Non-contextual Information

To make their report attractive, marketers sometimes load it with unnecessary graphs and charts containing much non-contextual information. Without an appropriate context, your audience may not interpret the information included in the graphics. It needs to be clarified.

4. Irrelevant Data

Marketers use platform-specific analytics and analytics from several third-party tools. It might contain excessive data. According to the experts, 80% of the data provided by the analytics tools is irrelevant. It can be confusing for a naive person and even experienced decision-makers. So, avoid it.

Final Words

Report generation is a tedious task. You can use the tips in this article to compile a professional marketing report useful for decision-makers. Yet, manually generating reports can be time-consuming, wasteful, and tiring. DashClicks' InstaReports is a powerful automation tool that simplifies the report generation process. Agencies find this tool highly useful. With this reporting tool, you can generate professional marketing reports in seconds. The tool fetches information from numerous third-party software and DashClicks' Analytics app.