An effective digital marketing business must have a robust client reporting system. In essence, it serves as the foundation of your relationship with clients, offering a point of comparison, evidence of the success of your marketing efforts, and a possible source for securing new business.

Marketing companies frequently amass enormous data sets about their campaigns but must produce meaningful, simple-to-understand customer reports with all the numbers.

The fundamental responsibilities of an agency are to build client trust, provide outcomes that help the customer reach their goals, and explain the effort put into the marketing plan.

What Is the Definition of a Marketing Report?

It is a document that contains information from several platforms and displays the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Your marketing report aims to determine whether your existing marketing tactics are effective and suggest ways to improve them.

The report’s scope can change depending on the topic and the number of platforms you use to gather your data.

Why a Monthly Marketing Report is Necessary

Do not assume that your marketing is effective; monitor the data.

Businesses typically develop a valuable collection of assessments of profitability data that is updated periodically. This review structure should be followed in your marketing report.

Why every month? To cut a long story short, a monthly payment schedule for both parties is optimal.

Even though you must monitor a few measures weekly, you should always maintain sight of your goals for the month’s conclusion. Reaching your monthly goals can genuinely depend on the adjustments you make throughout the month as you analyze your data weekly.

If you produce reports more frequently, you’ll have more information to present and spend less time doing so. Thanks to monthly marketing reports, you have the time to create outcomes.

Executives are unlikely to pay attention to monitoring your department more regularly than that. Your reports will ultimately make you a more knowledgeable and nimble marketer.

Reasons Why You Need to Prepare Monthly Reports

1. Builds Client Relationships

The best digital marketing work in the world will only help your agency if you can explain to clients what you’re doing and how it’s working on getting the results you want. Generally speaking, you want to overcommunicate with clients to ensure they know everything you are working on, especially at the beginning of a partnership. Reports provide a possibility for scheduled communication that includes getting in touch with a client more profoundly and evaluating data.

Establishing expectations for sending regular reports should happen at the start of a client engagement. To ensure you’re looking at substantial enough data and setting a regular schedule for checking in, monthly timeframes frequently work effectively. Weekly reports, however, might be helpful for larger companies that see heavy traffic and regularly need to adjust their strategies. Quarterly reports can be the best option for smaller clients running low-volume campaigns.

• Reports should gradually change to reflect the concerns of each client. For instance, if you discover that your customer places a lot of emphasis on generating signups for an email newsletter, be sure to feature newsletter signups in your reports prominently. Customers will value receiving reports that go beyond just generic templates and are tailored to their marketing and business goals. Create unique templated reports for each client to streamline this customization. Each report will be more consistent as a result. Templates will alter over time as you add or remove marketing elements and answer new client needs.

2. Educates Clients

Many customers select an agency with little to no knowledge of web analytics; this is why they chose you. Confusion will arise if you let them figure out how to interpret the data independently. As a digital marketing business, one of your responsibilities is instructing clients on analyzing internet metrics. Teach them to interpret the data instead of assuming they know all the information you intend to include in a report. For instance, describe the differences between 

• Sessions and Users, 
• the importance of Bounce Rate, 
• and the connection between Web Conversions and Business Objectives.

This teaching process can be carried out verbally with clients through the written justifications you offer in their reports. If you tell them that email marketing has increased conversions, explain why that knowledge is essential. Describe how a specific email marketing piece generated a lot of website traffic and leads that contacted them, and show them the increase in traffic and the outcome.

As your client’s sophistication increases, your reports should continue to educate while becoming more detailed. For instance, you don’t need to add descriptions of Users and Sessions in your following report if you are confident that your client is aware of their differences.

As you explain analytics and how you modify campaigns based on those indicators, clients will appreciate feeling like they are a part of your process. So that your client understands the proper statistic to focus on, you may describe how you optimize AdWords campaigns to meet a goal cost per lead acquisition rather than concentrating solely on cost per click.

3. It Gives You Proper Credit

Paid search, display advertising, search engine optimization, social media management, and email marketing are just a few channels that may be included in the work promised to clients when they sign up for a digital marketing retainer. After beginning to work with your agency, your client may notice a rise in sales, but they may not be aware of whether or not those sales can be linked to your agency’s efforts—or even which agency efforts—specifically.

A report on digital marketing should analyze each channel’s performance, highlighting its traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. 

• For instance, if the data reveals that paid search accounted for 50% of the increase in sales, the customer will be able to assign value to that paid search campaign. Or the data could indicate that 100 newsletter subscriptions occurred during the week the company launched a social media campaign thanks to visitors from Facebook.

To help your client understand the impact of the entire campaign, consider every source connected to your marketing efforts. Please spend some time interpreting the facts so your client can grasp them. In a report, for instance, it could be necessary to clarify that “google/CPC” refers to Google AdWords traffic.

4. Shows transparency.

You contribute to establishing transparency and good trust between your agency and the client by fully sharing online performance, including both the positive and negative aspects. Say, for illustration, that after two months of participation in a program for search engine optimization, organic traffic to a site has stayed the same. A candid agency will inform the client of this lack of development while summarizing the work completed and informing them that improving organic search results requires time.

Conversely, be bold in highlighting successful outcomes as well. 

• Talk about your efforts that produced fantastic results! 
• Show your customer the particular data if a social media campaign increased event registrations. 
• Show the facts if a PR placement on a significant news website generated leads and led to individuals contacting your client.
• Include a description of your strategy, results data, and a summary of how the results relate to your client’s corporate objectives.

The purpose of reporting is to promote further dialogue with clients. To prepare for your clients’ questions, you must stay on top of analytics data. He’ll want to know why a client’s sessions aren’t working. You can demonstrate to him that a drop in Sessions was caused by less money spent on a paid search campaign or less involvement on social media.

5. It keeps both parties accountable.

Your client reporting procedure is designed to maintain mutual accountability between your client and your company. Engage your clients early on, from setting marketing objectives to selecting the key performance indicators you will monitor. Start by asking yourself these inquiries.

• What are your marketing and business objectives?
• Who is the intended market for your business?
• Who are your ideal customers or clients?
• What kind of connection do you have with your viewers?
• What marketing metrics, if any, are you currently monitoring?
• What do you consider to be successful marketing?

It not only makes them feel included in the procedure, but it also starts a conversation regarding the client’s expectations. You will better understand your client’s expectations and adjust your job accordingly.

6. Raises your value.

Your clients are paying you for your work, as they do with many other firms, and they undoubtedly want some assurance that their investment was worthwhile. Client reporting might help with this.

Regularly updating your clients on the success of their digital marketing is one approach to demonstrate and ultimately increase your worth. You can give the client strong proof that they were wise to utilize some of their money to pay for your services if you employ a streamlined client reporting procedure, different milestones, and quantitative indicators to summarize your work.

In addition, it presents a fantastic chance for upselling. Getting measurable outcomes can open up optimization opportunities that you can use to upsell your clients on new marketing initiatives or the utilization of various social media tactics.

How to Create the Perfect Report for Your Client

If it needs to be clarified, client reports play a crucial role in your interactions with clients; therefore, you should make the most of them. However, before writing your monthly reports, you should define the key performance indicators you want to measure.

KPI examples

1. Marketing campaigns results metrics:

• Click-through-rate
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Conversion rate

2. SEO progress metrics:

• Organic traffic
• Bounce rate
• Keyword ranking
• Number of backlinks

3. Social media metrics:

• Likes
• Engagement
• Followers growth
• Website clicks

4. E-commerce metrics:

• Average order value
• Customer lifetime value
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Returning customer rate

Your business goals determine your marketing goals and the metrics that go along with them. Once you know your important business KPIs, you can align your business and marketing goals. For instance, you would want to track interaction, website clicks, social media ad data, etc., if your objective is to increase conversions to your website from social media.

Once you have a list of your objectives and KPIs, it’s essential to expedite the creation of reports as much as possible. For this, reporting dashboard software can be helpful.

You have a wide range of options for client reporting tools, including graphs from Google Data Studio, Excel spreadsheets, and reporting programs like AgencyAnalytics.

What Should a Monthly Marketing Report Include?

The following sections must be included in a monthly marketing report:

• A summary is the opening page of a project that provides an overview and clearly and succinctly highlights the critical KPIs. Your client should understand the marketing landscape for that particular month, and more information should be provided in the following areas.
• Describe the target market, the leading marketing channels, the project’s scope, and the growth potential actively pursued to address the fundamental marketing strategy. A quick summary of everything completed this month should be included.
• Conversion metrics include income, leads by channel (such as social media, offline sources, email marketing, referrals, etc.), CPC for paid channels (such as Facebook Ads, AdWords, etc.), and the distinction between free and paid leads.
• Traffic analytics by device and channel, which display the tracks that drive most of your website traffic and their effectiveness, can assist you in avoiding squandering time and resources on fruitless channel development—showing the bounce rate for desktop and mobile.
• An overview of your SEO efforts and how they affected your rankings.
• Blog traffic and lead data are shared monthly for optimum blog performance.
• PPC campaigns compare each channel’s metrics, such as CTR, CPC, impressions, ROI, and ad spending, which are typical for paid media. Your clients may use this area to guide them in allocating their advertising budget.
• The performance of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or any other active social media channel is displayed in the social overview. Focus on engagement metrics to understand your client’s success on each track.
• Goals and concepts for subsequent campaigns: Setting monthly goals and working to achieve them will guarantee the expansion of your brand. Remember to check in with them each month to see your progress.
• Financial predictions, covering the predicted expenses of upcoming objectives and the expected return on investment.

Digital Marketing Reporting Best Practices

Set your marketing objectives.

Defining your marketing goals is the first and most crucial stage. As it will help you keep your analysis focused and organized, this will lay the groundwork for all subsequent work. Your marketing objectives should support and contribute to the overall business objectives. Setting long- and short-term goals and basing your strategy on them is a valuable practice in this regard.

Prioritizing and arranging your marketing data should come first.

As a marketer, you employ various tools to access a wealth of data. Raw data needs to be categorized and cleansed to provide the necessary insights. Identifying and preparing all the relevant data that will be included in your marketing intelligence report should be the second step before using an online reporting solution to create it. A simple filtering method is to consider the facts that will be more useful for achieving your company objectives.

Build your metrics.

Creating, structuring, and implementing metrics that tell an engaging and instructional data story is essential in the digital age. The metrics you choose for your marketing reports should align with the report’s subject and objective. For instance, low-level indicators like CPC or CTR won’t be included in the strategic report focusing on consumer costs. You must choose which tale to tell and to whom—coworkers, your manager, or the vice president. Next, we’ll talk more about that.

Define your target market.

You’ll need to report on your marketing activities to several stakeholders. Because of this, it’s crucial to consider your audience while selecting the metrics that would best serve your end aim. Your sales department will require a different report than your CEO or a client. Your reporting process will be more effective and accurate if you create special reports for each stakeholder because you won’t combine metrics that could lead to false conclusions.

Utilize dynamic visuals.

Once you have outlined your objectives, key performance indicators, and target audience, it’s time to start thinking about the format of your report. We must rely on interactive visualizations to make the data easier to interpret, as you can see from our samples. It is possible to create accounts in the form of interactive dashboards with interactive images that can be filtered and investigated for more in-depth findings using data analysis tools like datapine.

Advantages of real-time tracking.

Marketing may gain more from real-time data in the reporting process than any other department. Real-time tracking allows you to keep an eye on the effectiveness of your initiatives and recognize problems as they arise. In this manner, you’ll be able to manage your resources wisely based on factual information.

Create wise alerts.

It might be time-consuming and distracting to review reports to see the most recent data changes as they occur manually. Because of this, you are relying on intelligent data alerts is another excellent approach. These notifications inform you when an abnormality or a predetermined action is finished. You can only review your reports every two seconds in a different manner.

Not hiding your poor performance.

This may seem a prominent topic, but it is so crucial that it must be included. Bad results are just as significant as excellent results when deriving insights that can be put into practice from your data. Since you need to know what is wrong to improve, how else can you? Because they will only strengthen your company, poor performance data shouldn’t ever be excluded from marketing reports.

Use specialized software.

Numerous studies have been done on your marketing data; the issue is generally where to begin. Are there any detailed reports that could help me feel more at ease with this vast amount of compiled data? You should use marketing business intelligence (BI) tools to evaluate your data and quickly create expert reports.

Keep an eye on your info.

The worst approach, and unfortunately a typical one, is waiting until the conclusion of the campaign to evaluate how it did. Launching a campaign with attainable goals is only worthwhile if you regularly check in to see if you’re on track. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it [in online marketing],” according to a Forbes article. It saves time and money to discover a problem on day seven instead of day forty-seven.

CONCLUSION

Quality reporting must be prioritized above all else by digital marketing organizations. Without accurate reporting, your clients won’t value your labor very much. Building customer trust through routine report creation and review will promote lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

Ruskin Consulting is devoted to giving our clients updates on their accounts. We submit marketing reports to them monthly and religiously. The marketing reports update the current standing of their accounts as we work on them and give them details on which and where we are and what they might expect for the upcoming month. We use AgencyAnalytics to lay down all data clearly and transparently. At Ruskin Consulting, we value our clients and ensure that we deliver exemplary results through reporting. If you want to know more about our services, please visit our website or call us to schedule a consultation.