Beyond the numbers: Marketing reports that tell a story

7 min read

There are hundreds of different reports that marketers can run. Each of these will provide you with statistics and metrics that show you exactly how your campaigns are performing. 

Although marketing reports are incredibly useful, deciding which form of reporting is best for your business can be tricky. To help you, we’ve put together a number of popular marketing report examples. By sampling these reporting techniques, you can get more comfortable with the data you’ve been tracking and get to the bottom of exactly how you’d like to present it to people.

However, before we look at these marketing report examples in detail, let’s first go back to basics and outline what a marketing report is, why it’s so important, and what metrics it should include.

What is a marketing report?

As a marketing manager, you need access to marketing metrics and key performance indicators that help track campaign performance. A marketing report compiles this data and provides a clear view of your marketing strategy and its effectiveness.

The scope of a digital marketing report can vary depending on your marketing channels, but the primary goal remains the same: evaluating performance against predetermined key performance indicators. Using marketing reporting tools like Google Analytics, you can gather relevant metrics from different platforms and use them to make data-driven decisions.

A well-structured marketing dashboard allows a marketing team to analyse marketing data in real time and adjust strategies accordingly. Many businesses create weekly marketing reports or monthly marketing reports to track progress and optimise future marketing efforts.

Why are marketing reports important?

A marketing report is essential for tracking the success of advertising campaigns and guiding business growth. These reports provide actionable insights into how well your marketing channels are performing, where you are gaining organic traffic, and whether your paid ads are generating leads effectively.

By using marketing reporting templates, you can streamline your reporting process and ensure consistency in tracking campaign performance. Whether you need a general marketing report, an SEO marketing report, or an eCommerce marketing report, having structured report templates ensures that your team focuses on relevant data and makes informed decisions.

What metrics should be in a marketing report?

As its name suggests, a general marketing report provides you with an overview of all your marketing activities, including content marketing, search engine optimisation, email marketing, and more.

A general marketing report condenses all the key metrics from these campaigns into one place. However, a general marketing report only provides an overview of how these marketing activities have performed. It does not usually delve into detail to avoid becoming cumbersome and difficult to read.

As it provides a top-level review of your marketing activities, a general marketing report should include all of the following metrics:

• Campaign performance
• Channel performance by traffic source (website traffic, keyword rankings, page rankings, backlink numbers, organic traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic)
• Conversion rate
• Goal completions
• Bounce rate

If you’d like to receive a much more detailed review of how your efforts have performed on a particular channel, then try some of the marketing report examples we’ve listed below.

SEO marketing report

An SEO marketing report details exactly how your search engine optimisation efforts are performing. As SEO is generally considered to be a long-term digital marketing strategy, these reports are particularly useful for highlighting monthly improvements in rankings, traffic, and keyword performance.

KPIs you should include in your SEO report include:

• Organic sessions
• Organic conversions
• Organic landing pages
• Organic visit duration
• Keyword rankings
• Page rankings
• Traffic by country
• Backlink numbers

PPC marketing report

PPC marketing reports must be used to track return on investment. However, although ROI is undoubtedly an important metric to track, a PPC marketing report must also include the following metrics:

• Number of leads
• Revenue
• Clicks and costs
• Conversions
• Ad performance

When collating a PPC marketing report, it’s best to organise your data on a channel-by-channel basis.

Social media marketing report

Social media marketing contains two separate strands: paid social media marketing (such as Facebook Ads) and organic social media marketing (such as content marketing).

Email marketing report

Email marketing provides you with a direct line to each customer’s inbox. However, you can’t just send emails and assume that your customers will receive them, open them, and take action. Instead, you must actively track how your campaigns are performing and how changes in content ultimately affect your bottom line.

With this in mind, KPIs you should include in your email marketing report are:

• Number of emails sent
• Unique open rate
• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• New subscribers
• Unsubscribers

Fundamentally, an email marketing report should show you how many people opened your email and converted as a result. It is also worth comparing in your report how these KPIs differ with different send times. This enables you to identify the ideal day and time to send your communications to your audience.

Popular marketing report examples

Although many marketers like to report on a channel-by-channel basis, this approach may not be the right one for your business. If you’re tracking different metrics and KPIs, then one of the following marketing report examples may be better for you.

1. Multi-touch revenue marketing report

As a marketer, it’s vital that you can directly tie the campaigns you’re running to the revenue you’re generating. Thankfully, multi-touch revenue attribution makes this possible. This is because this reporting method can tie closed revenue to every marketing interaction, from the first page view to the final nurturing email.

With a multi-touch revenue marketing report, you can ensure that your department gets the credit it deserves. Plus, you can also make sure that your team makes smarter marketing investments that provide genuine value to the business.

Once you’ve analysed your multi-touch revenue marketing report, you can figure out which strategies are working and then double down on them. To do this, you should look at the revenue results of each channel and identify where you had the most success. For example, if you discover that your Facebook campaigns are driving three times more revenue than your Twitter campaigns with a 50/50 revenue split, it would make sense to invest more heavily in Facebook in the future.

2. New contacts by persona marketing report

Expert marketers must be well-versed in their buyer personas. Simply building and understanding these personas isn’t enough.

As a marketer, it’s important that you track how many new contacts you’re actually adding to your database based on each persona. By tracking and reporting on this data on a monthly basis, you can determine how accurate your buyer personas are and how successful your marketing campaigns are when it comes to targeting and reaching them.

By looking into who is responding to certain topics and activities on certain channels, you can improve your resource allocation. This way, you can grow different segments of your business. Plus, by pulling this report on a monthly basis, you may even be able to shed light on an imbalance in the resources that you have dedicated to certain personas.

3. Lifecycle stage funnel marketing report

Alternatively, with a lifecycle stage funnel marketing report, you can segment your contact database to look at prospects and customers by lifecycle stage. This will give you a sense of how many leads, subscribers, customers, and opportunities you have attracted within a certain timeframe.

By running this report, you can gain an understanding of where your focus should be. For example, your data may show that your business needs to generate a greater number of leads, or it may show that you need to focus on closing your current leads. This report will also help you to identify those channels that provide high-quality leads and thus ease the decision on how much budget to allocate to which channel. In addition, this kind of report will also give you a deeper understanding of the quality of your contact database and how your leads are progressing through the buying process.

For example, your report may show you that your business and your marketing campaigns are generating a vast number of leads, but that you’re struggling to turn these initial leads into leads that are marketing qualified. If this is the case, you need to update and optimise your nurturing program to drive efficiencies.

How can Apteco help?

By starting with the above marketing examples, you can improve your understanding of your marketing activities and their impact. As you get more comfortable and confident using the data you have at your disposal, you can then expand your reporting and receive even deeper insights.

Here at Apteco, we provide software that can help take your marketing reporting to the next level. With the help of Apteco Orbit®, you can effortlessly explore your data using formidable analytics power. 

Create marketing dashboards that contain key insights with the ability to filter, build lists, and drill down interactively from visualisations. Plus, you can also upload your logo and select or create colour themes. As a result, you’ll find it simple to design beautiful and branded dashboards that can be used to share insights across your organisation. Visualisations in Apteco Orbit® are always updated automatically and reflect the latest data refresh, so your teams can always work with up-to-date information.

If you’d like to discover more about how Apteco Orbit® can help your marketing team with its marketing analytics and reporting, book a demo with the team today. We’d love to show you exactly how our powerful software can help you convert data into actionable insights.