There are lots of things that make up a thriving and profitable business. Having a good product or services, and a thrilling online presence is good, but it’s not enough. You must know effective ways of generating profit. To generate profit, you must have the mind for making keen decisions.
Keen decisions are a product of accessing the right data and understanding the nitty-gritty of what goes into running a profitable campaign – and that’s where digital marketing report comes into play.
A digital marketing report shows an overview of what’s going on in your campaign. It helps decision-makers get a full picture of what’s happening behind the scene in a glance.
Let’s face it; the internet is a gold mine. Anyone can access the best information and compare products and services from the comfort of their home. Before most customers hit the buy button on your landing page, they must have gone through your competitor’s landing page to compare prices and other metrics.
To stay on top of your game, you must understand how to drive massive traffic to your business, and perform the underground work that goes into building a profitable business.
To do this, you must know how digital marketing reporting is done, and its benefits – and a couple of digital marketing report templates would go a long way in this. Keep reading you will come to know some data visualization tool which can help you draw beautiful charts for your data which can help you to analyze the results in no time.
Here comes the big question – what’s a digital marketing report, and what are some good digital marketing report templates for you to get a feel for how it is?
In this blog, you’ll learn:
Well, here is all you need to know.
Before diving into what a digital marketing report is, and the benefit of having such, you would need to have a good grasp of what a marketing report is.
Marketing reporting is a system of pinpointing actionable steps to boost your performance in the marketplace. Ideally, a good marketing report should help you meet your goals. It also shows the value and helps you to measure progress. By gathering and analyzing relevant marketing metrics, you get to easily make more informed decisions in the future.
The question is, what should you be reporting, and how can you report effectively? Well, you will discover all that and more in this guide.
Moving on, a digital marketing report combines data across various digital marketing platforms. It pretty much shows the performance of your implemented marketing strategy over a given time.
One of the chief objectives of a digital marketing report is to identify what’s working and what’s not. A good digital marketing report consists of a summary, traffic metrics, conversion metrics, business impact metrics, and engagement metrics.
What’s more, digital marketing reports make it easy for advertisers or business owners to compare insights and data trends using automated analytics.
The above report image is from the What’s Change Report by PPCexpo. All in all, a digital marketing report helps you to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs). This way, you get to narrow down your campaign and get an overview of how everything is working.
As a marketer or someone who manages a business, you would need to keep a close eye on your performance. A daily performance report is not a good idea, but if you are not okay with that, you can opt for weekly or monthly marketing reports – do what works best for you.
The primary objective is to keep a close eye on your performance in the marketplace.
Here’s the thing, a monthly marketing report is enough time to gather data. This will, in turn, help you to make more informed decisions. As a general rule of thumb, you should develop a good marketing report that you can easily access without much fuss.
Here comes the next big question – why are digital marketing report templates important?
By now, you probably know that a marketing report is designed to help you optimize your marketing strategy. To optimize your marketing strategy, you’ve got to measure your results.
If you can effectively track key metrics daily, weekly, or monthly, you would easily pinpoint what’s working and what’s not. This way, you will not waste valuable time and resources on things that are not working.
Most advertisers wait till the end of a campaign before taking a look at their reports. Well, that’s not how it should be. You should have a routine, and also come up with specific times when you check your campaigns. This way, you can easily cut through the noise and focus on things that are working. PPCexpo PPC Reports having great templates to present your data in a wonderful way.
Therefore, if you are keen on building a viable marketing campaign, you should pay attention to your reports. It could be daily, weekly, or monthly reports – do what works for you.
If you are working with a large organization, a digital marketing report will help you present data to your superiors all in one piece.
Also, digital marketing reports help you to connect the pieces. This way, you would get a comprehensive view of everything – you get to know what’s working, and how it is working.
Moving on, digital marketing reports help you to dive right into the mind of your target audience. It’s a great avenue of gaining more understanding of your audience’s behavior.
With a comprehensive digital marketing report, you get to see your audience’s behavioral pattern. You would identify how your customers navigate through your company’s website and app. This will, in turn, help you with the products or services that are of great interest to them.
Furthermore, a digital marketing report helps you to know the devices your customers are using. Are they using desktops or mobile devices to interact on your website?
The spending habits of your customers are also reported on a digital marketing report. What product or service do they spend the most cash on and why?
Finally, it’s a good way to show other employees or team members how performance marketing works.
Here comes the next big question – what digital marketing metrics should you report.
The rule is not set in stone. Every professional has a style and a viable system of metrics that appear on a digital marketing report.
Whether you are a newbie or a veteran marketer, here is a structure and some metrics that should be presented in your digital marketing report.
All clients ask similar questions – how did the campaign go? Well, to get started, such metrics should be thoroughly showcased on the overall campaign results.
As a general rule of thumb, the overall campaign result should be showcased on the first few slides of the report. The template is pretty straightforward – give a summary of the campaign goals, and the results generated during a specific time frame.
Furthermore, you can use such an opportunity to reiterate the client’s objectives. And such objectives should be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Most times, the client knows the campaign you managed, and what it takes to drive such results. Therefore, there may be no need for an in-depth explanation of how you managed the campaign.
All you’ve got to do is to list the various actions taken using bullet points. If you are up for it, you can break it down by channels for more transparency. Channels such as social media, design, web, and SEO should be carefully stated.
Nowadays, results are generated using various channels – paid media, websites, and social media are some of the most major channels. It would be best if you let the client know the exact results that were generated from each channel.
To get started, you’ve got to include it at the beginning of the report. One way of doing that is by inserting a table with a breakdown of each channel and the exact result generated from the channel.
If you generated results using paid media like Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, then the results should be thoroughly reported in the digital marketing report. Major Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be found in the appendix.
Alternatively, the KPIs can be clearly stated in a separate report that is linked to the original report. All in all, one of your objectives should be to clearly show the results generated from paid media.
If you performed any actions involving search engine marketing or search engine optimization, then it would be best if you include it in your report. Clearly state the objectives, and show how the roles SEM/SEO played in accomplishing these objectives.
Moving on, here are things to consider while building a digital marketing report.
Now you are ready to create a digital marketing report, here are some key things to consider.
You should have a rough estimate of the number of people your marketing campaign would reach. What’s the number of your target audience? Data like this would help you pinpoint the right metrics to monitor.
If you are working for a large organization, you would realize that the budgets for the marketing department may vary from month to month. It’s largely due to the product cycle.
Therefore, to get things in place, you’ve got to keep a close eye on the campaign expenditure. It’s a great way of maintaining a dynamic campaign process.
The effectiveness of the campaign is the estimated amount of leads that could be generated by the campaign. One way of measuring the effectiveness of the campaign is by taking a close look at the number of people who participated in the campaign, or the number of people who received the message.
When the campaign is completed, the amount of revenue generated is the financial return of the campaign. To measure the campaign’s financial return, you’ve got to take a close look at the cost of acquisition of lead, and the cost of acquisition of a customer.
Visuals have more influence than most people realize. When it comes to digital marketing it’s vitally important to assess the changes in your metrics so that you measure progress from one period to the next. When you’re only looking at stats and numbers, this can be a trial and challenge. However, when you have a visual representation of the data to work with, the task is considerably stress-free. Gut instinct should never guide marketing strategy. When data drives your strategy, you make the most out of your marketing budget.
Visualizing digital marketing reports data into useful graphs lead to better-informed and more effective marketing strategy. Good digital marketing strategy stands rooted in goals you’ve set for your overall reports strategy. What are you trying to achieve with your campaigns? More search traffic? More time-on-page for your content? More online sales? These goals will govern your choices of what to include in your reports and when you visualize your reports everyone in your organization can see the changes both positive and negative in digital marketing metrics.
Next, you’ve got to take a look at the structure for building a digital marketing report template.
Here are key things that should be included in every digital marketing report.
This shows the various traffic channels for your business. Some metrics included here could be email campaigns, bounce rate, top referrers, % new session, and much more.
This section also helps you to identify the blog that drives the most traffic to a web page.
This section pretty much shows how the campaign is going. To get the most out of the conversion metrics, it would be best if it’s represented using graphs, charts, and projections. Visual representations help to ease your understanding of the data displayed.
Metrics to be showcased in this section could be revenue breakdown, channel breakdown, cost per conversion, paid vs. organic leads breakdown, and much more.
If you want to make a comparison with previous data, you can do that in this section.
All in all, the conversion metrics section helps you to track the progress of your campaign. It’s also a great way of measuring the effectiveness of your campaign.
It’s a section where the generated leads are listed and categorized based on their various channels like Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Furthermore, the lead acquisition section helps you to pinpoint the channel that’s efficiently generating the most lead in your campaign.
During your campaign, you would probably opt for a marketing strategy, and there would be valid reasons behind your decision. The marketing strategy section provides an in-depth explanation of your choices.
It’s also a great place where people who don’t have a good grasp of some marketing terminologies can look things up.
In this section, you get to know several things ranging from the scope of the project to other things like the proposed channels for the project.
Over time, you would notice an improvement in the search engine ranking of your website. If this improvement is primarily due to a change to your SEO strategy, then it would fall under this section.
You can also compare your website ranking with previous data. This way, you get to make comparisons and settle with an informed opinion on the search ranking of your website.
You are likely to perform campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. The social media marketing section clearly shows what’s going on in the social media spaces. It also showcases the results generated from these channels.
You would probably run more campaigns in the future, and the strategies for running such campaigns should be clearly stated in this section. It’s more of a place where you discuss new projects, and how you intend on accomplishing these projects.
Here’s the thing; the world of digital marketing is evolving rapidly, but you can keep up with the pace by carefully following the latest trends.
In the forecasting section, you get to closely plan campaigns you would most likely run in the future.
Moving on, here are some digital marketing report templates for you.
Regardless of your level of expertise in the industry, here are some digital marketing report examples for you to follow.
If you are generating leads, and running adverts using pay-per-click platforms like Bing ads, Google ads, and Facebook ads, then the PPC digital marketing report template would help you to gather data from these platforms.
Following example images are taken from the reports generated by PPCexpo PPC Reports.
Common metrics you would find on this template include Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Avg. CPC, Conversion Ratio, and ROAS. It would be if the data on this report is visually represented.
In below mentioned template there are multiple metrics involved. By break down the results with respect to devices.
Below is another beautiful digital marketing report example by showing summary of Top 5 campaigns along with different trends.
As a Digital marketing professional, you hold yourself accountable for developing smart strategies and delivering optimized results. It’s critical to know you’re your digital marketing strategies performed over time and how you can do differently to improve them.
If you have been using digital marketing techniques for a long time, it’s very likely that you have run into limitations around date because a lot of campaign metric data need a lot of time and resources to check the performance of each metric.
You have developed your marketing reports, but reports itself are just numbers, you need get the insights from these reports. There are dozens of tools for data visualization that helps you to visualize your digital marketing reports. These range from simple to complex, from intuitive to obtuse. ChartExpo is one of the best tool from all the tools and you can visualize all your reports to get the insights from it in a single glance.
Let’s suppose you are an SEO professional and you are in search of how your website is performing, you have developed a report on website performance but from these numbers you are not getting the right insights. This is where ChartExpo helps you to visualize your report data.
Let’s suppose you got the following data.
Traffic | Visitor | Visitor status | Page | Count |
Organic traffic | New visitor | Stayed | Home page | 243815 |
Organic traffic | Repeated visitor | Stayed | Home page | 594509 |
Organic traffic | New visitor | Bounced | Home page | 291969 |
Organic traffic | Repeated visitor | Bounced | Home page | 1111279 |
Paid traffic | New visitor | Stayed | Page1 | 921989 |
Paid traffic | Repeated visitor | Stayed | Page1 | 975978 |
Paid traffic | New visitor | Bounced | Page1 | 413284 |
Paid traffic | Repeated visitor | Bounced | Page1 | 1128882 |
Organic traffic | New visitor | Stayed | Page2 | 508370 |
Organic traffic | Repeated visitor | Stayed | Page2 | 532560 |
Organic traffic | New visitor | Bounced | Page2 | 462413 |
Organic traffic | Repeated visitor | Bounced | Page2 | 516291 |
Paid traffic | New visitor | Stayed | Page3 | 783168 |
Paid traffic | Repeated visitor | Stayed | Page3 | 314616 |
Paid traffic | New visitor | Bounced | Page3 | 471163 |
Paid traffic | Repeated visitor | Bounced | Page3 | 1013932 |
You can install ChartExpo Add-on for Google Sheets and you can use it later for your data visualization.
Once it is installed you can now open the worksheet and click on the Extensions menu.
You’ll see the “ChartExpo — Best Data Visualization Tool” option in the dropdown menu.
Congratulations if you’ve managed to install ChartExpo into your Google Sheets without any hitch.
Now click the Create New Chart button to access all the charts in ChartExpo.
All the list of charts available in ChartExpo will be available in the right window.
After clicking on the first chart “Sankey chart” you can put the data in sheet and create the chart from your sheet data. To do this select your sheet name, metrics and dimensions and then click on the Create Chart
After clicking on the create chart you will get the visualization ready, you can change different properties of the charts and get the final image as shown below.
From this chart you can easily check the performance of your website, each node of the chart tells you about different metrics of your website and give you an idea about how each metric of your website is performing. From these insights you can optimize your website to increase your higher ROI.
Let’s suppose you are an online business and you run a campaign to increase your product sales and you know knowing the performance of your devices is important to check the performance of your campaigns and clicks are the best indictor to check the performance of your campaigns from where you optimize your campaign effectively. Let’s suppose you got the following data from your device performance report.
Devices | Clicks |
Desktop | 60 |
Mobile | 33 |
Tablet | 30 |
Smart TV | 15 |
By using ChartExpo you can get the following visualization.
From this visualization you can easily check the performance of your campaign and you can see that your campaign is getting more click on desktop and after that you got the good amount of clicks on mobile, these insights can help you optimize your targeting and you can change your device targeting accordingly where you are getting number of clicks so that you can get higher conversions.
Let’s suppose you are an online store owner and have three different products that include TV, smart phones and computers and after a year you want to check how you have sales by products by using different digital marketing techniques. The best way to analyze this report is using data visualization, let’s suppose you got the following data.
Product | Month | Sales |
TV | Jan | 80 |
TV | Feb | 65 |
TV | Mar | 75 |
TV | Apr | 80 |
TV | May | 90 |
TV | Jun | 85 |
TV | Jul | 65 |
TV | Aug | 70 |
TV | Sep | 80 |
TV | Oct | 93 |
TV | Nov | 99 |
TV | Dec | 80 |
Smart Phones | Jan | 100 |
Smart Phones | Feb | 60 |
Smart Phones | Mar | 95 |
Smart Phones | Apr | 75 |
Smart Phones | May | 100 |
Smart Phones | Jun | 60 |
Smart Phones | Jul | 95 |
Smart Phones | Aug | 75 |
Smart Phones | Sep | 109 |
Smart Phones | Oct | 80 |
Smart Phones | Nov | 109 |
Smart Phones | Dec | 75 |
Computers | Jan | 50 |
Computers | Feb | 55 |
Computers | Mar | 51 |
Computers | Apr | 40 |
Computers | May | 45 |
Computers | Jun | 30 |
Computers | Jul | 39 |
Computers | Aug | 45 |
Computers | Sep | 56 |
Computers | Oct | 39 |
Computers | Nov | 48 |
Computers | Dec | 44 |
With the help of ChartExpo you have got the following visualization.
From this chart you can easily check the performance of your product sales , you can check that in Jan TV are most sales product by computers are less and in march you have got the good number of sales for smart phones, this visualization can easily help you understand your sales report in a first look.
Digital marketing reports offer an overview of your campaign performance across various digital channels like product ads, SEO, paid search, and social media channels.
One of the best things to do is to take everything you’ve learned from the campaign and implement them in the next campaign session. Knowing what worked and what did not work is the easy part – you should take it a step further by understanding why the campaign was a success.
This way, you would get a good grasp of the working mechanism behind every successful campaign.
There are various formats to a good marketing report. A good marketing report should give a detailed overview of relevant metrics and data. This way, you get to make more informed decisions moving forward.
Every marketer desires some good results. To generate good results, your numbers must be good – but that’s not enough. One way of showing that your numbers are good is by effectively reporting what’s done in the marketplace.
If the numbers are adequately reported, then your superiors would be happy with you. Yes, every superior lust for good results. And good results not only showcase your skills as a marketer but also boost the overall bottom line of the company.
Good reporting helps you to make informed decisions. How? By providing digestible data that can be created in no time.
Whether you are a newbie or someone who is merely looking for digital marketing report examples, you can read through the digital marketing report templates on this guide to get a good grasp on how to create yours.
Now you have a good grasp of the various digital marketing report templates, what metrics will be represented on your report?
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