There is an old saying in the marketing industry: “I know that half of the advertising costs are wasted, but I don’t know which half is wasted.” Today’s marketers still face this problem. Marketing costs are high, it is difficult to divide customers accurately and efficiently, wasting a lot of workforces, money, and customer resources. In order to solve such problems, the concept of digital marketing or precision marketing has gradually emerged. Many companies are exploring how to rely on data analysis to achieve precision marketing and obtain valuable customers at a lower cost. To succeed in the digital marketing era, businesses of all sizes make full use of data value to drive their decision. That said, marketing reports are extremely important.

But how to make a digital marketing report that satisfies the enterprise’s needs? This post will give you a clear answer on the following topics:

• What is a marketing report?
• Why are marketing reports important?
• Types of marketing reports
• How to write a marketing report/dashboard?

What is a Marketing Report?

A marketing report is a set of data from different marketing channels and analyzes marketing activities’ performance. Marketing reports visualize marketing data and present the results in front of the marketing team, clients or managers. Thus, it is efficient to communicate the marketing goals and strategies and evaluate the effectiveness.

A similar idea is the marketing dashboard. It integrates all relevant marketing data indicators on one screen to understand the full picture of the company’s marketing activities at a glance.

The templates and examples used in this article are made by FineReport. FineReport has a free version for personal use. You can try various built-in report and dashboard templates for free!

Why are Marketing Reports Important?

In today’s digital landscape, businesses of all sizes must invest in marketing and promotional activities to distinguish themselves from competitors. However, implementing effective marketing reporting is crucial as it allows you to track performance and optimize various marketing processes. Here are some of the key advantages:

Consolidating Data Sources

As a marketing manager, you’re well aware of the challenges involved in gathering data and manually creating reports to assess performance. Modern marketing reporting, through professional business reporting tool, enables companies to streamline data from multiple sources. This centralized access to marketing information eliminates manual work and reduces the risk of human errors in reporting.

For example, one of the top reporting tools FineReport can directly connect to various types of databases and can be integrated with other business systems like ERP or CRM, which greatly simplifies the work of data integration and avoid possible mistakes regard of manual data collection.

Insights Into Audience Behavior

Marketing reports provide valuable insights into audience behavior and activities across various platforms like websites, apps, and social media accounts. For instance, you can discern whether your target customers prefer mobile or desktop interaction, their spending habits, preferred channels for purchase, and other insights. This information helps generate targeted and efficient marketing activities.

Tracking Campaign Performance

Another benefit of marketing reporting is the ability to track campaign performance. By utilizing digital marketing reports, you can evaluate the success of your strategies, identifying which activities yielded positive results and which ones fell short. This allows you to focus your efforts on driving success and optimize your performance, saving time and money.

By using FineReport’s Real Time Reporting function, it allows uninterrupted data access. Businesses can monitor their marketing performance at any given time by accessing continuously updated results.

Justifying Expenses And Budgeting

Like any other business function, marketing requires budgeting, which must be justified to the CEO or other executives. Modern reporting tools enable you to justify expenses and define budgets based on trends and historical data.

Global Marketing Strategies

For businesses operating across multiple countries or markets, professional reports prove particularly valuable. A global marketing strategy relies heavily on language, regional factors, and audience demographics. Modern marketing reports provide real-time visualization of these aspects, facilitating the generation of effective global strategies tailored to each market’s needs.

Achieving Business Goals

Ultimately, marketing reporting plays a pivotal role in achieving business goals. Investing in a marketing analysis tool allows you to make informed decisions based on real information rather than mere intuition, ensuring a healthy return on investment (ROI) for your business.

Marketing reports come in various types, depending on the data you need to monitor and analyze. Typically, reports are conducted annually, monthly, weekly, or daily. However, there are instances where an ad-hoc or key performance indicator (KPI) report is necessary for a specific purpose.

That being said, we will delve into the specifics of a marketing campaign report, provide a digital marketing report template, and explore marketing reporting and analysis using carefully designed dashboards.

Types of Marketing Reports

Here I list some common marketing reports & dashboards and the key metrics that can be structured.

Web Analytics Report

Web analytics reports are different from web reports. Web analytics report, also web analytics dashboard, gives you a clear overview of website performance. It is not only crucial for measuring the traffic but also for evaluating brand influence and marketing research.

Google Analytics provides some excellent pre-configured reports that can be used directly. However, at the same time, marketers can also combine the company’s internal data to customize exclusive notifications to obtain truly valuable insights.

Key Metrics: Pageviews(PV), Unique Visitor(UV), Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, Traffic Source, Pages Viewed Per Session

Marketing Performance Report

Evaluating marketing performance is an indispensable part of improving digital marketing strategy. Marketing professionals often use marketing performance reports to describe marketing efficiency and effectiveness and suggestions for improvement. The metrics can be comprehensive or selected based on the specific purpose.

Key Metrics: Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Engagement, Revenue, Customer Retention Rate

Online Advertising Performance

How do companies know if their online marketing efforts have brought profits, or are they just wasting budget? They need to evaluate the performance of the advertising campaign. The purpose of advertising is not merely to complete the planned delivery, and the ultimate goal is to improve brand awareness and promote sales conversion.

A company may use Google Ads, Facebook, Linkedin, and other platforms to place and track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. However, generally speaking, it is best to get through the data of multiple platforms and finally summarize the results on one sheet, which is more conducive to comparing and evaluating the effectiveness of the sorted advertisement.

Key Metrics: Impressions, click-through rate, CPM, CPC, CPA, conversions, ROI

Marketing KPI Report

This report example gives a comprehensive overview of the most important marketing indicators in a single glance. KPIs in marketing are measurable values related to specific goals of marketing activities. Therefore, it is key to check the achievability of goals and the measurability of results when formulating marketing KPIs. We can summarize the key metrics mentioned in the marketing KPI report into two sides: costs and revenue. 

Key Metrics: Market Share, Sales Growths, Number of Leads, Conversions, New Customers, Cost per Conversion, Cost per Lead, Cost per Customer

Marketing Report for CEO

A Marketing Report for the CEO is a comprehensive document that provides an overview of the marketing performance and strategies of a company. It is specifically designed to present key metrics and insights to the CEO, enabling them to make informed decisions and assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

Key Metrics: Return on Investment (ROI), Conversion Rates, Market Share, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

How to Create Digital Marketing Reports?

A cohesive marketing report can provide you with all the data you need to make decisions and adopt improvements. Before you start compiling marketing information and creating reports, wait three seconds and ask yourself: What is the purpose of this report? What is the message we most want to deliver? How can we convey the message we want to share?

A marketing report that loses its target is just a tedious set of numbers without meaning. Therefore, you need to set up a clear goal before you start. It’s worth thinking about who is your target audience? And what do they want to know?

According to the goals, you can develop analysis on multiple topics, such as traffic, competing products, channel effects, user operations, etc.

For website managers, what they want to know most is that website traffic comes from various channels, how the final results of different media vary. If the funnel from traffic to customers is clouded in marketing reports, it will result in inaccurate market channel investment and a waste of customer resources.

When marketers face a rapidly increasing number of users, marketers need to differentiate their customers effectively. However, this only relies on the work experience of the marketer/operator to meet the actual development needs and may cause loss of customer resources and the company and waste of human resources.

Step 1 Define Data Sources

No matter how the final effect of the marketing report is presented, the primary data is a crucial first step. A data source is a device or medium that provides some required data. Before making a report, you first need to define the data source. In actual work, the typical situation is that the data is stored in the database and is constantly updated. Therefore, if you use database data to make reports, the content of the reports will be updated as the database is updated.

We take the professional report software FineReport as an example to learn how to connect data.

There are two data connection methods in FineReport: establishing a data connection through the designer and establishing a data connection through the platform. Open the designer, define the database to be connected in Server> Define Data Connection, you can specify the required data connection, and customize the query statement to create a data set to make a report. As shown below:

Step 2 Collect Data

It is not enough to just determine the data source. The data is updated in real-time, so the information needs to be collected quickly in an efficient way. It is often required to provide business report users with features to support actions such as adding, modifying, and deleting the database due to the irregularity and incompleteness of data. We can create such forms called data entry in FineReport.

FineReport’s reporting function is very flexible, and it has powerful processing capabilities for data and report structure. It can quickly build a multi-source report. That is, the data in a report can point to multiple different databases or data tables. To ensure that the data submission meets the rules, FineReport also has a built-in comprehensive data verification function, which can make judgments on the validity and legality of the data and feedback the verification information to the user.

For some users’ habit of editing data in Excel, FineReport also supports the online import of Excel marketing reports, which is greatly convenient for the business personnel.

Step 3 Design a Report

When our data is ready, we can start to make the reports we need. Now, most of the reporting software is developing towards the trend of low code. Namely, developers can carry out various styles of report design can be easily through simple code. The purpose of this is to lower the cost of people who are familiar with Excel operations. 

One of the significant advantages of FineReport is to improve the development efficiency of report personnel. The core feature of report page design, parameter query design, reporting settings, multi-layer drilling, etc., all realize visual development, and in this process, only some simple codes are required. The development of the report can be completed mainly with drag and drop.

Conclusion

Marketing reports allow you quickly and easily stay on top of your marketing performance across all your marketing channels and tells you where your digital marketing efforts are a success and where they might need to be optimized. According to your goal, you can make the digital marketing reports more detailed in analyzing website traffic, cost, and revenue, brand influence, etc. 

However, digital marketing data is enormous and endless. To maximize the benefits of marketing reports, you need to make sure the reports can reveal the latest information. 

As a professional reporting tool, FineReport can be your best partner to stand out in the digital marketing era.

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.